It’s only 220 pages long but I don’t half feel like I just read something. It seems to have taken me forever to get through this book but how difficult it is to read is part of the experience.

The book is set many many years into the future in a society that has survived what seems to have been a nuclear holocaust and looks back on the world from before the holocaust with wonder, it was a world that had boats in the air and crossed ‘gallack seas’. Riddley Walker is the narrator, a twelve year old who has just become a man, it’s a coming of age type of story in some ways but it’s all a lot deeper than I’d have thought.

The language of this future time is an evolution of English and the words are the real star of the story. A quote of a few sentences doesn’t get over how startlingly difficult it is to read at first, and despite reviews I’ve read that say it gets easier to read after a few pages I didn’t really get the hang of Riddley’s language until far into the book and even then my reading speed was probably about a fifth of my usual speed. The way you take the book in word by word is an experience though. There are an awful lot of double meanings, there are words that look like neologisms but after a while you relate them back to their current forms, and there are words that seem totally made up but might not be. I was a good halfway through the book before the place names made sense to me, I thought the book was taking place in some fantasy land but it isn’t.

An absolutely wonderful book and one I’m glad I took time to read. Like nothing I’ve ever read before.