Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Written entirely in a post-apocalyptic, reverted vernacular Riddley Walker proves to be a slow read for a book of just over 200 pages, but such close reading of the text, slowed down as you are by the bizaare slang and allusions peppered throughout, only heightens the impact of the novel. A cliche, but true: you get lost in this book.

Here's a taster of Riddley Speak for the uninitated - the first line:

"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen."

Obvious first impressions will remind you of A Clockwork Orange, but the language of Riddley Walker is not that of a refined and stylised language, but rather a language of loss and forgotten civilisation. A catastrophe in the past, most probably a nuclear war, has left the world thinly populated and in a state of almost stone age ignorance. Superstition is rife and whatever society there is left interprets their surrounding via the creation/destruction myth of 'Eusa'. This quasi religious legend forms the backbone of a kind of local government, who maintain power and influence by travelling between villages and performing 'Eusa shows'. These shows take the form of a call and response puppet show, where various episodes from Eusa's story is performed and interpreted to fit in with local event, thus allowing the 'Prime Minister' (pry mincer) to spin his events to suit his purpose.

This is the background in which Riddley's tale unfolds, and as I already mentioned, you do get lost in the dirty magnificence of the book. Folk tales, religious philosophising, dirty jokes and a bizaare geography all collide to create a very real world and a rather frightening one at that. Its easy to see the laughable, almso qauint side of distopian fiction, at the bad mindedness and pessimism of the endevour to create a world gone bad. But I could see Riddley Walker happening - humanity would likely survive in some form or other after a major calamity and mankind would need rules and stories to make sense of the world, just as it does today.

Looking at it realistically one must come to the conclusion that Riddley is obviously deluded, that his visions and his personification of Punch are just the imagination of a simple, restricted mind. However, Hoban never lets you take such an objective view of his protagonist - as you read the novel you are overwhelmingly part of Riddley. As such his 'connexions' and 'tels', his inspired Punch rants - seemingly unearthed from a cultural unconsciousness - are real, almost magic or spiritual. Hoban is showing us how a religion is formed in an ignorant world where any answer is better than the unknown. An inspired passage in the middle of the book has the Goodparley character explaining how the unknown word "Saviour" actually refers to salt, as salt is "savery". Such strained associations seem perfectly reasonable in Riddley Walker, where great mythic importance is given to innocuous events or items, simply because some kind of connection can be made between them.

Riddley Walker is a wonderful book, still fresh and vivid, exciting and inspired. Hoban's afterwords and explanation of the genesis of the story (The Legend of St Eustace in Canterbury Cathedral) and his formation of Riddley Speak (the book took 5 years to write, and Hoban claims to have forgotten how to spell after finishing it) are fascinating - try and get hold of the anniversary or expanded editions to read these sections. This is my 3rd Russell Hoban book - I highly recommend the equally lonely, searching Fremder for nother excellent read - but Riddley Walker blows most books out of the water for imagination and audacity.

Bonnie & Clyde (1967)

Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde takes off from the first frame, taking the viewer with it, and doesn't come back down until the the last scene when we come crashing back to Earth, just like the rag doll corpses of our heroes.

This film shows us so much. Thinking back on it now I am astounded at how perfect it was in telling its story without actually telling us anything. An example? The opening scene: Bonnie, naked, pouting in front of a mirror, writhing on her bed and banging the head board with her fist. Immediately we know she is yearning for more, a way out of her dead-end life, her dead end town, her sexual frustration. A lesser film would need an explanatory conversation, a voice-over even: "I was sick of this life and boy did I need a good lay".

Then Clyde walks by, sharp in a tailored suit and fedora. Does this film need a 'cute-meet' as Billy Wilder would say? No, a glimpse of Bonnie through a window suffices for the story to begin.

They rob a grocery store and take off into the country. Upon parking (no pun intended) Bonnie pounces on Clyde but is cast aside. You see Clyde can't get it up - its never explained why this is so, and it certainly doesn't look like a conscious effort on his behalf. Its like their exploits in general: the bank jobs keep adding to their excitement, their driving gets faster, more erratic, their murders more frequent, but there is never a big payoff - where is this all leading to? You feel that if they actually got round to finally having sex then the killing spree might end. But there isn't any climax to this film, just a short sharp let down, the deafening roar of machine gun fire ripping us out of our reverie.

Too many articles focus on how Bonnie & Clyde changed American cinema, a history lesson through celluloid. You could sit through this film and really study its impact on the industry and write a thesis about how the 60s and the bloodletting in Vietnam at the time were as much a part of the film as the dustbowl. But that would be to miss out on what is such a vital film, such entertainment.

You can immerse yourself in the beauty of it, at the nostalgia of the back projection in the cars, at the golden hues of Burnett Guffrey's cinematography, at the chemistry between the two leads - Warren Beatty's goofy smiles, Faye Dunaways childish, glowering moods - the attention to detail (see those corn crops they're running through when Bonnie goes missing? They're poor crops - it's the depression after all), at the whip-crack humour and bawdiness of it all.

Of course there is so much artistic licence in the film - this isn't reality. Bonnie & Clyde apparently met at a friend's house, far less romantic than a glimpse on the street; according to most accounts Bonnie never got into the thick of a fire fight during the life-span of the gang; and the character of Hamer was never captured and humiliated by the gang before he finally managed to gun them down. All this is interesting trivia but pointless criticism. Bonnie & Clyde isn't reality, even though its intensity and passion make us feel that it can only be real life we are watching. Bonnie & Clyde isn't reality- it is pure cinema.

Ikiru (1952)

 
Some back story:

For a while S & I have been working our way through the 'they shoot pictures, dont they' top 100, partly out of interest, mostly out of a sense of ego-fuelled duty (can you call yourself a cineaste if you haven't seen Le Règle du Jeu? Unlikely. Now we have - and it was overated). We knew we wouldn't like all of the films we watched, after all it's a ranking of opinions, but we hoped to really fall for the majority of those on the list. There were revelations (M - amazing; L'atalante - subtle and brilliant), disagreements (The Searchers - didn't find S; The Magnificent Ambersons - not so magnificent for S) and disappointments (Les enfants du paradis? Rio Bravo? and I was really looking forward to Rio Bravo). Then there was Kurosawa, and I still can't decide on how I feel about his films...

Ikiru was the second film after Kurosawa's European breakthrough Rashomon, and it's the 5th Kurosawa films I've seen so far (Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha and Ran being the others). It tells the story of a civil servant, Watanabe, who is nearing retirement. At the beginning of the film Watanabe is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. He has devoted his life to his monotous work, refusing to remarry after his wife died and instead raises his son from a distance whilst continuing to plug away at work, never standing out, and earning the nickname 'The Mummy'. The film tells the story of how he comes to terms with his nearing death and his desire to finally make a difference to someone.

The film is well shot with some great crowd scenes when Watanabe is taken on a night out with his "own personal Mephistopholes". The final scene of Watanabe singing in the snow is, regardless of its renown, beautiful. The majority of the film takes place in interiors: homes, bars, offices. You geta real feel of claustrophobia throughout the feel, as if Watanabe's enaring fate is closing in with the walls and piles of office papers. Yet I couldn't quite accept this film and never felt as if Kurosawa showed us anything.

What do you learn about Watanabe? That he should have remarried, that he is a figure of fun at work, that his son resents him. Do we learn anything about why he took this route in life? Well, no. Other than a sense of 'duty' to his son and a desire not to appear needy or special, Watanabe only ever seems to stare forlonly to the left of the camera whenever he is confronted with an unsettling truth. Boy do you get sick of that face...

The film would be a good half an hour shorter if we weren't forced to sit and stare at that face every 10 minutes. And this is were my frustration with Kurosawa can be summed up - where is the subtlety? Where is the ephiphany? I always expect him to be better than Ozu due to his reputation and his subject range, but in terms of an effecting drama about old age and mortality Tokyo Story blows Ikiru out of the water.

Watanabe decides to push through the children's playground proposal - fair enough. But you could see it coming a mile off. The film really lacked any real character progression - Watanabe's world was shattered by his diagnosis, he felt sorry for himself for the vast majority of the film, he got took on a picaresque tour of the city and spent a lot of time with a young women from the office - did he learn anything from them? I never felt that he did. The decision to back the playground wasn't influenced by any of his recent experiences, it was just the first paper on top of the pile.

I liked this film, but it failed to deliver on its promise. I like Kuroswa, but he fails to deliver on his promise.  This is why I can't place him: his films promise everything, but ultimately show us very little.

Welcome

Welcome to Screen Pages, a blog devoted to film and literature.

I watch a lot of films and I'd always like to read more books. I hope to collate all of my thoughts and opinions on film and literature in this blog, so that I can remember exactly why I dislike John Updike, or exactly what film noirs I've seen so that the niggling sense of deja vu I get every time Robert Ryan smirks that smirk or Gloria Grahame gets fresh I can remind myself that it is because I have already seen the film; not because they are all merging into one formulaic, shadow-filled 90 minutes.

So without further ado...