Russell Hoban has made the unthinkable familiar ground. Riddley Walker concerns itself with a young hero, newly initiated as a soothsayer or "connection man" of his tribe, who dimly senses the greatness of past civilization, fears the spreading mania for tinkering pointlessly with explosive, mysterious compounds of charcoal, saltpeter and sulphur, and feels the tension of his times as tribes or "crowds" shift from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one….

Hoban has used his considerable art to insure that we find his image of the future a cause for thought rather than incredulity. The logic of his world is such that, sad as it is, there is a pleasure in the invention of it, a wish to peep at different aspects never shown….

The force and beauty and awfulness of Hoban's creation is shattering. His cleverness in fabricating Riddley Walker's poor broken language as if believably descended...