One of the 20th century’s vast number of unjustly neglected novelists, Russell
Hoban, died yesterday at age 86—a development he foresaw with his customary
wit as “a good career move.”
As The Guardian reports
in an excellent if too-brief obit, Hoban told an interviewer in 2002 that his death
would spur new reader attention.
“People will say, ‘yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s
look at him again,’” he said.
Hoban is best known for his post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker, for
which he invented a credible new English dialect. Anthony Burgess, who performed
a similar feat in A Clockwork Orange, described Hoban’s book as
“what literature is meant to be.”
The novel imagines life in Kent, England, 2,000 years after a nuclear war has destroyed
world civilization. Riddley Walker lives in a sub-medieval society of bows-and-arrows,
where wild dogs prey on people, and puppet shows have replaced religious services
—previous church traditions have been lost.
Riddley Walker was published in 1980 to great fanfare, and now is considered
a classic by literary and sci-fi critics alike. You can find an appreciation of
Riddley Walker at NPR by the emerging
American novelist John Wray, who writes the “voice of the novel, remarkable
as it is, is only the most obvious of the narrative’s many charms.”
And Riddley Walker is only the most obvious of Hoban’s achievements.
He was also a distinguished children’s author and illustrator, creator of
the series about Francis the badger. His children’s novel The Mouse and His
Child is considered a modern classic, according to The Guardian.
Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, but spent most of his adult life in England. He
served in Italy during WW II, earning a Bronze Star “for bravery in action.”
Back in the U.S. he found work as a freelance illustrator working with Time, Sports
Illustrated, and other magazines.
His first children’s book, What Does It Do and How Does It Work,
came out in 1959. He wrote and/or illustrated many children’s books over the
course of his life. His 16 adult novels include Pilgerman, The Medusa Factory,
and Turtle Diary, which was made into a 1985 movie with a screenplay by
Harold Pinter.
“If I am kept away from writing I become physically unwell,” Hoban told
The Guardian in 2002. “It is art and the creation of art that sustains
me. Things like Conrad’s Nostromo or Schubert’s Winterreise
or Haydn’s Creation or paintings by Daumier make me feel it is a
good thing to be part of the human race.”
Bill Swainson, Hoban’s publisher at Bloomsbury, praised the author’s
“wonderful imagination.”
“In his last,
Angelica Lost and Found,
a hippogriff escapes from a painting and lands in San Francisco outside the window
of a Jewish gallery owner who has just dumped her lover,” Swainson said.
“Russell always wrote with with such a light touch—he always had fun, and
made you think that there’s not a sentence wasted.”
That’s why now is a good time to make Hoban’s prophecy come true, and
use the occasion of his death to discover his work, both the children’s books
and the adult novels.
—From
Open Page (14 December 2011)
fell in love with reading in the first grade because he wanted to learn about
dinosaurs, little suspecting he would become one himself. After many years as a
print journalist, including two decades as the book review editor and senior
entertainment columnist for the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale,
Fla., he was summarily tossed overboard when original arts reporting was suddenly
deemed a superfluous luxury.
Today, when he’s not gnashing his teeth over the rise of digital technology,
he works as a freelance journalist and ghost writer in South Florida. He’s
about to start on his fourth pseudonymous book in three years, none of which you
are likely to have heard of. In his spare time he thanks God he’s not yet
a greeter at Wal-Mart.
Open Page blog