Look far, into the future far;
the Earth is covered with a nuclear scar;
most of culture and civilization has been lost in the breeze;

Man struggles, day to day, to not starve or freeze.
Almost all knowledge is lost;
left is bits and scraps, covered with dust and frost;
Dark and dreary, sick and weary,
Man strives to piece together all that was lost.

A few rhymes, an equation or two;
noble ideas almost empty of meaning;
What was fiction, and was true?
Man yearns to know, but toward oblivion is leaning.

Dark, dark, muddy, and bleak,
talking, conversing, chatting, but hardly able to speak;
toward the greatness of the pre-horror past,
Man moves from day to day, hoping 'til dawn to last.

A boy seeks to become a man,
into the maelstrom of politics he stumbles;
minute to minute, he does the best he can,
Man shouts at the wind but can't be heard as the thunder rumbles.

Who is the boy trying not to starve or be ignorant?
Who is the boy seeking greatness, or a another day to live?
Man has gone from baby to child to adult, fallen back to infant;
Riddley Walker wonders what humanity wants him to give.

Riddley Walker gives us the darkest, bleakest vision of our future I have read. It is a post-Apocalyptic tale that describes a human society transformed and degraded almost beyond recognition, with everything incredibly distorted. The language of the characters, that some avid followers of the book have called "Riddleyspeak," is almost no longer English, and is more of a challenge, for me, than reading Shakespeare in its original form. The people is this bleak, rainy, gray future know bits and pieces of their history (i.e., us), but often connect the dots all wrong and their very limited knowledge leaves them worse off than if they knew nothing.

The story in Riddley Walker is basically a slice-of-life piece, almost like an anthropological documentary, that completely and utterly captures the difficult life these people live. There are friendships, power struggles, feuds, and, above all, a quest to understand, for they have lost so much, that they do not even know what they once had.

Will we be wise enough to avoid this awful, scrambling, stay-alive-to-breathe-one-more-breath, existence? Read this book only if you can stand looking into tomorrow and seeing a nightmare. But, if you read it, you will be amazed at the extent to which Man will go to find or reclaim greatness, and the endurance of his hope and of his persistence.

If you want something a bit less bleak, read Edgar Pangborn's masterpiece, Davy.

This opinion is part of the Lean-n-mean Five.

Recommended: Yes