R is for Riddley Walker
When you stand in ruins of St. Augustine’s Abbey or amongst the tumbled stones of the Cathedral herb garden, site of the medieval monk’s dormitory, you stand in the epicentre of a post-apocalyptic Kent. You are in ‘Cambry’, the setting for Russell Hoban’s futuristic cult novel Riddley Walker (1980).
In the novel, a nuclear holocaust has devastated ‘Inland’ (East Kent). Humanity has reverted to an existence that resembles the Iron Age in its technology and culture: life is bleak and perilous. Against this backdrop, the eponymous hero tells his story in a phonetic Kentish tongue. Words and place names have been corrupted over time, but we can recognise the roads and track ways that Riddley treads. Cambry (Canterbury) is reduced to rubble and surrounded by barren wasteland; running around the city is a great Power Ring within which the very air hums and shimmers.
Rising sea levels have led to flooding, swelling the ‘Rivver Sour’ (Great Stour), and ‘The Ram’ (Isle of Thanet) is a true island again. We can recognise the outlying Dead Towns in their various states of ruin: ‘Horny Boy’ (Herne Bay), ‘Bernt Arse’ (Ashford), ‘Fork Stoan’ (Folkestone), ‘Do It Over’ (Dover), and ‘Sams Itch’ (Sandwich). Beyond these towns, ‘forms’ (agricultural smallholdings) and ‘fents’ (defensive settlements inhabited by scavengers and hunter-gatherers) stake out patches of land. Foragers scratch a living in the scrub or work as scrappers, uncovering the buried machinery of a destroyed civilization. Riddley’s father dies at this work, crushed beneath ‘a girt big rottin iron thing’ at the aptly named ‘Widders Dump’ (Withersdane, near Wye).
Blame for the terrible ‘chanjis’ that have taken place is levelled at a distant figure known as Eusa. In the mythology of the novel, Eusa represents civilised man who has been tempted by Mr Clevver (the devil) to create the tools of his own destruction. Eusa is a corruption of Eustace: an amalgam of St Eustace, depicted in a mural in Canterbury cathedral, and ‘Eustace the Monk’, a French-born mercenary who met a grisly end at the Battle of Sandwich in 1217. Aspects of both Eustace legends are woven into the Eusa stories of Riddley’s world, where Eusa’s head represents technology, esoteric knowledge and the fall of man.
Riddley Walker speaks of the dangers of nuclear power and Cold War fears of total annihilation. It still speaks to a world facing catastrophic environmental change as the result of ‘civilised’ society’s greed and geopolitical insecurities. In an Afterword to the novel, Russell Hoban describes his initial vision for the book: standing before the Legend of Eustace mural in Canterbury cathedral, on his first visit to the city, he suddenly pictured ‘a desolate England thousands of years after the destruction of civilisation in a nuclear war’. Visitors today are fortunate to be able to visit the same image, just as others have done for centuries before. Hoban’s Canterbury-inspired vision produced an important and hugely entertaining portrait of a world we must strive to prevent.
Sonia Overall is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University. Sonia writes fiction and poetry and explores experimental creative forms. She is an avid psychogeographer.
Visit Sonia’s creative mapping project featuring Riddley Walker’s Cambry.
The University will also be hosting a two-day conference on Canterbury and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites around the world on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May at Old Sessions House, Longport.
