Life’s Too Short
Oct. 1st, 2006 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselRidley Walker - Russell Hoban - Picador, 1980
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I turned forty recently and have been thinking quite a bit about the aging process and why it is that most of us become progressively more stuck in our ways as we get older. My theory is that it’s to do with reward-to-effort ratios. From our mid-twenties onwards, our energy levels decrease steadily, but the perceived reward for the things that we enjoy remains the same. So we gravitate towards those things that give us a real buzz and give up on those activities which we only quite enjoy. “Life’s too short” has become my frequent muttered catch-phrase when getting up to switch off a trashy television program or annoying computer game. It’s particularly noticeable in old or ill people who often express themselves in a sort of telegraphese which they expect you to understand. The effort of explaining themselves is too great and the reward of being fully comprehended isn’t enough.
Despite the previously mentioned signs of old fogeydom, I still haven’t quite got to the stage where I will give up on a book half-way through. I am selective in what I choose to read and if I start a book I will finish it, even if it turns out not to be very good. It just seems good manners to the author to let them have their say in full - and you never know what you might miss on the final page. However I almost gave up on this one, so great was the effort of reading it, and felt unrewarded at the end.
It’s not as if I am afraid of long or difficult books. I have tackled several of the lengthier Dickens novels, ploughed through Ulysses, and read the Bible and the Koran cover to cover. But Ridley Walker is written in an infuriating mangled dialect with the sort of punctuation that is Lynne Truss’ worst nightmare. The justification is clever - following a world-wide nuclear war, human society has degenerated into semi-savage tribes with a folklore based on hopelessly mangled memories of twentieth century culture, and the language has followed suit - but Hoban takes it much too far. An example:
Thay sed, Eusa aul thay menne leavs as rattelt that’s how menne peapl yu wil kil. (p 31)
If you read that line twice, you will probably get the gist of it. The problem is, by the time you’ve done so you’ve lost the flow of the story. And almost every single sentence in the book is like that, only longer.
As a result, the story and the characters are completely unengaging. Once you have managed to decode the prose, Hoban’s bleak vision of a post-holocaust society is effective and striking, but you get the idea within about two pages and there are no significant plot developments in the entire story. We follow Ridley as he wanders around the south-east corner of England near Canterbury and gets involved in various adventures, but ultimately it’s all pointless. When meaning itself is corrupted, nothing matters any more.
If any of the characters in the book were sympathetic or engaging this might be justified as a form of tragedy, but trying to discern their motivations or thought processes through the thicket of the prose is near impossible. Ridley doesn’t understand the people he meets and we don’t really understand Ridley, who switches between liking and hating the other characters for no clear reason.
This is supposed to be a classic of SF and in terms of its vision I suppose it is, but the world has moved on since it was written and in my view life’s too short to spend on a book that’s so hard to read and has so little to say. And yes, that does apply to Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake as well...
*
I turned forty recently and have been thinking quite a bit about the aging process and why it is that most of us become progressively more stuck in our ways as we get older. My theory is that it’s to do with reward-to-effort ratios. From our mid-twenties onwards, our energy levels decrease steadily, but the perceived reward for the things that we enjoy remains the same. So we gravitate towards those things that give us a real buzz and give up on those activities which we only quite enjoy. “Life’s too short” has become my frequent muttered catch-phrase when getting up to switch off a trashy television program or annoying computer game. It’s particularly noticeable in old or ill people who often express themselves in a sort of telegraphese which they expect you to understand. The effort of explaining themselves is too great and the reward of being fully comprehended isn’t enough.
Despite the previously mentioned signs of old fogeydom, I still haven’t quite got to the stage where I will give up on a book half-way through. I am selective in what I choose to read and if I start a book I will finish it, even if it turns out not to be very good. It just seems good manners to the author to let them have their say in full - and you never know what you might miss on the final page. However I almost gave up on this one, so great was the effort of reading it, and felt unrewarded at the end.
It’s not as if I am afraid of long or difficult books. I have tackled several of the lengthier Dickens novels, ploughed through Ulysses, and read the Bible and the Koran cover to cover. But Ridley Walker is written in an infuriating mangled dialect with the sort of punctuation that is Lynne Truss’ worst nightmare. The justification is clever - following a world-wide nuclear war, human society has degenerated into semi-savage tribes with a folklore based on hopelessly mangled memories of twentieth century culture, and the language has followed suit - but Hoban takes it much too far. An example:
Thay sed, Eusa aul thay menne leavs as rattelt that’s how menne peapl yu wil kil. (p 31)
If you read that line twice, you will probably get the gist of it. The problem is, by the time you’ve done so you’ve lost the flow of the story. And almost every single sentence in the book is like that, only longer.
As a result, the story and the characters are completely unengaging. Once you have managed to decode the prose, Hoban’s bleak vision of a post-holocaust society is effective and striking, but you get the idea within about two pages and there are no significant plot developments in the entire story. We follow Ridley as he wanders around the south-east corner of England near Canterbury and gets involved in various adventures, but ultimately it’s all pointless. When meaning itself is corrupted, nothing matters any more.
If any of the characters in the book were sympathetic or engaging this might be justified as a form of tragedy, but trying to discern their motivations or thought processes through the thicket of the prose is near impossible. Ridley doesn’t understand the people he meets and we don’t really understand Ridley, who switches between liking and hating the other characters for no clear reason.
This is supposed to be a classic of SF and in terms of its vision I suppose it is, but the world has moved on since it was written and in my view life’s too short to spend on a book that’s so hard to read and has so little to say. And yes, that does apply to Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake as well...