People were discussing pidgin languages in comments on the last post, and this reminded me of one of the most remarkable novels of the last 30 years, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which language along with civilisation has been broken down to shards and fragments. I had to read it about three times before I could read the new language easily – I nearly wrote "comfortably" but it's an impossible book to read comfortably.

The action takes place in what was once Kent. The pillars of Canterbury

Cathedral still stand ("a forest made of stone") but nothing remains of

religion or literacy except a vague shamanism and a cult organised

around Punch and Judy shows which culminates in the ritual murder of a

sacrificial victim:

'sharna pax and hed on a poal when the ardship of Cambry come out of his hoal'

In English:

'Sharpen axe and head on a pole, when the Archbishop of Canterbury comes out of his hole'

There are times when I wonder why the book is treated as science fiction.

What makes the book so memorable is the sense of what it is like to live in a polytheistic world, full of conflicting and often implacable powers. It is a portrait of a world which was destroyed by science and is now trying to reconstruct itself on the basis of superstition. The nature of the great catastrophe is unclear, as it would be in any succeeding age of barbarism; but the characters remember the legend that it involved:

the littl shynin man, the Addom he runs in the wud.

In the rough rubble of "Addom" and "wud" are buried both "Adam" and "Atom"; both "wood" and "would". The little shining man is both the atom and the soul, "the realest part of you" as the archbishop says when he is haltered and waiting for his death.

You couldn't do that in ordinary language without looking arty, which Riddley Walker emphatically is not. I don't know anything that catches the sense of fear in front of unknown powers as well as this passage, from early on, when Riddley Walker is with the village shaman:

Looking at the moon all col and wite and oansome. Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres something in us it don't have no name.' I said, 'what thing is that?' She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals … Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome, Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. Whatever it is we dont come naturel to it.' I said, 'Lorna I dont know what you mean.' She said, 'We aint a naturel part of it, We dint begin when it begun we dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I don't know what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to it or boyls on the arse of it I don't know.'

If you were to deify the DNA that Richard Dawkins writes about, and give it still more character traits than selfishness and indifference, that is how it would appear, as a thing which puts us on like we put on our clothes.