Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I’ve moved on to Wolfe’s Sword Of The Lictor this week and, readers, I’m starting to think that Severian might not be a very good dude. This week it’s Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus, and Robocraft designer (along with many others) and current lead technical level designer at Half Mermaid, Robert McLachlan! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I’m debating re-reading Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It’s set in a past/near/far future Kent, a post-apocalyptic mix of horror (black trees, black forests, mud, dogs and death) and beauty (Punch and Judy, St Eustace, rebirth), written in a version of English as wrecked as the nuclear-blasted landscape. It’s bleak – though not quite as brutally resistant to re-reading as The Road – and now I’m older with kids in this modern world, the thrill of reading the apocalypse is replaced with uneasiness and fear, but what an amazing piece of work. Apparently Hoban couldn’t spell properly for the rest of his life after finishing writing it.
Hoban was an American who spent half his life in London, and this superficial fact made a connexion (in Riddley Walker speak) in my mind with another book I read this year, by a genius writer who also made England their home – W. G. Sebald. The Rings Of Saturn is also written around the East of England and its boundary with the North Sea, although there’s so much more to the book than that. There’s a real desolation and liminality in his descriptions of the towns and landscapes which lie along the restless North Sea coast… Who knows what secrets lie beneath those waves?