“On my naming day when I come 12 I 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 time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”
The opening line of the novel gives the game away. This is one of those futuristic dystopian novels where language has evolved or at the very least transformed significantly from what we know. It is still clearly enough English to be relatively easy to translate, but one can’t deny it takes work. Fortunately, for those who found A Clockwork Orange to be too much to bear, the novel doesn’t require a prefabricated translation dictionary to figure out what the heck its young narrator is saying. In place of the Russian-invested English of Alex’s Nadsat is Riddley’s stripped down phonetic English. It looks more difficult than it is. In fact, it is arguably even easier to read than the dialect stories of Charles Chesnutt, though the payoff falls well short.
“Seamt like a lot of tea got spilt at breakfas nor the talk wernt the userel hummeling and mummeling there wer some thing else in it. Like when you see litening behynt the clouds.”
The novel is considered a lexical masterpiece; a frenzied work of linguistic creativity and imagination ranking among the best ever written. The novel is also considered science fiction and here is where the aesthetic superlatives begin to weaken. More than a few hardcore science fiction critics and academic scholars have pointed out mistakes so common and easy to avoid that they stick out like a sore thumb. Then again, those guys were the original “geeks” before geek was cool.
The problem here is with the tea. In the kind of devastating post-nuclear England in which the story takes place, conventions of science fiction would mandate that tea has not been the British beverage of choice for some time for the simple reason that the British do not grow their own tea, but export it. While it is quite easy to admire the contextuality of the evolution of language, generic rules make the existence of tea futuristic equivalent of a mechanical clock striking three in the ancient Rome of William Shakespeare. Of course, people have not stopped performing Julius Caesar because a clock strikes so a reader’s depreciation of Riddley’s narrative due to scenes of tea drinking should be left to each individual. Still, it is a good thing to know.
"I keap saying I dont know but its Truth it jus like come in to my mynd I thot we bes not break the circel then."
Certain words in the narrative always appear in capitalized form, regardless of their placement in the sentence structure. For instance, “Truth” here appears in the middle of this line of dialogue, yet is fronted with a capital “T” as if it appeared at the beginning. Another example of this peculiarity is the word “Power.” One well can well imagine such fundamentally abstract concepts that have been forwarded as literal embodiments of the striving of humanity taking on an almost talismanic force over the course of a few millennium.
What is particularly interesting about this rare grouping of words deserving of special treatment is a third member of this trinity. Luck also shows up capitalized, accompanied by either Good or Bad depending on whether such a precision is relevant. What is the ultimate meaning behind this choice? Well, that is another interpretation left up to readers to determine on their own. What is significant is that it surely must have some special meaning, these words that show up with the big tall letter when it would seem a nice short one would suffice.
