ABSTRACT
Seemingly endless in the fertility of his imaginative and linguistic resources, Russell Hoban writes magical and bizarre parables, and has been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Hesse. He has published more than forty children’s books (including a modern classic, The Mouse and His Child (1969)), and five acclaimed adult novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), Kleinzeit (1974), Turtle Diary (1975), Riddley Walker (1980) and Pilgermann (1983). By turns funny, grotesque and puzzling, he creates and enquires into the mysteries of time and place and pattern. Like the eponymous hero of his masterpiece Riddley Walker, he is essentially a ‘connection man’, drawing together metaphysics and magical fantasy. Riddley Walker’s profoundly weird and compelling odyssey – his quest for the meaning of the evil riddle of a post-apocalyptic world – has been widely acclaimed as one of the outstanding fictional achievements of recent years.
