David Blackburn

In memory of Russell Hoban

American author Russell Hoban died yesterday, aged 86. I’ve never read a word of Hoban, nor do I know anything about him: so the obituaries made for very interesting reading.

There appear to have been two Russell Hobans. The first was the dreamy writer of children’s books; the second was an émigré in London who wrote experimental science fiction, of which Riddley Walker is the most famous and challenging example. The book opens:

‘On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen.’

That sentence discouraged me, but less faint-hearted souls have elevated the book to cult status. Hoban was renowned as an innovative stylist, who was fascinated by where language came from and might mutate — his fiction, therefore, has a metaphysical quality. He once wrote:

‘Language is an archaeological vehicle… the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.’

He also had a fine line wry and dry humour, suffused with folksy wisdom:

‘Explorers have to be ready to die lost.’

The most striking point to arise from the obituaries is that Hoban probably would not have found prominence or success without the GI Bill paid to him on his honourable discharge from the US Army in 1944, which allowed him to try his hand as a painter, illustrator and writer in the early years of his career. The GI Bill also gave Joseph Heller similar opportunities, as was recently revealed by the publication of some of his lost letters.

Perverse though it sounds, the second world war was a route out of a dead-end life for many people, in booming America at least. In Britain, the military have come to offer often ill-educated recruits a vast array of remedial and further education programmes. Andy McNab admitted to us in a recent interview that the military gave him a second stab at education after his initial failure in the state system; he added that he owes his material success to that benevolence. The old adage that there’s no school like the army rings true among these examples.

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