Riddley Walker

....My apologies, all -- Jeff and I had a conversation today in which he (very, very kindly) mentioned that the Jim Henson clip I was so excited about...was one of your first posts. Oops.

So to make it up to you -- a book recommendation. This is definitely in the realm of "tangential, but still interesting;" a science-fiction book I've gotten fond of, in which Punch and Judy puppets are key elements.

Riddley Walker, by Russel Hoban, is set about two thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse. Mankind has managed to survive -- but has been living at a stone-age level of technology ever since. It's a coming-of-age story for the title character, in which he also comes upon a secret plot to try to redevelop and rediscover gunpowder.

What this has to do with puppets is in the cultural backstory Hoban's created for the characters. By this time, Hoban imagines, all history is an oral history -- based on half-remembered news reports and half-understood relics of this world. And in the world of the story, people have created an entire religious ritual out of Punch and Judy puppets. In the novel, one of the rituals is what the people call "the Eusa Show" -- pairs of puppeteers travel from town to town, setting up a puppet show to re-relate their own cultural history. The "Eusa Show" is a very ritualized re-telling of the nuclear conflict and the story of how people survived and came to live as they do in the world of the book; each town also has a sort of shaman figure who helps to "interpret" the show for the audience.

In the book, the main character Riddley also comes across a Punch puppet of his own. Another character tells him that the Punch puppet is related to the puppets from the "Eusa show," but that it's a very different character -- and the stories Punch tells aren't part of the Eusa narrative, they're supposed to be...for fun. It's the first that Riddley hears that there are puppet shows that tell different stories.

One word of warning if you do try reading it -- the language is really tricky at first blush. Hoban doesn't just imagine that culture would change, he imagines that language itself would also change, and the whole book is written in a sort of pidgin based on the phonetic sound of the Kentish accent (the book is set in what is now Kent, England). So it takes a few pages to get used to the language and make heads or tails of what on earth everyone's actually saying. But once you get past that -- it's fascinating to see how Hoban thinks a culture's idea of puppets and puppetry would have changed in those two thousand years, and how they interpreted and synthesized things that, to people in those conditions, would have been mysterious relics. (I've read it through three times, and it wasn't until the third time that I figured out that something Riddley was describing in one chapter was a "Green Man" gargoyle in a ruined cathedral.)

But especially interesting for the puppeteer project is how Punch is treated a little differently from other puppets, even still...the other puppets in the "Eusa Show" are based on other minor puppets from Punch and Judy, but Punch is different. And not because he's unknown to the culture -- Riddley shows the Punch puppet to an older mentor, who recognizes it and tells him that yes, this is a puppet like the others, but his stories are different. Riddley actually tries putting on an old Punch and Judy show using the Punch puppet, and the townspeople he shows it to are very disturbed by how unlike the regular "Eusa show" it is.

It's a very dense read, but a fascinating one.