“It was a happy experience to walk down the main street - to hear the ring of the hammer and the hack of the wood-worker. “The destruction of the big combines and chain stores had brought individuality back to English life,” he writes. Far from rolling English back to some imaginary pure state, Riddley Walker is a heaving stew of loan words, linguistic drift, and cultural shift. Sherriff appears to have taken to heart William Morris’s pastoral, utopian-socialist novel, “ News From Nowhere” (1890), for his rural survivors are soon establishing small communities based on barter and handicrafts. Hoban, who was born in Pennsylvania to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant parents and spent half his life as an expat in England, had no such impulses. The second half of “The Hopkins Manuscript” initially seems far more upbeat than any of these. Beresford’s “ Goslings” (1913), nearly all men die from a plague, but the surviving women establish sisterly cooperative farms. In Russell Hoban’s “ Riddley Walker” (1980), England is literally bombed back into the Dark Ages in Richard Jefferies’s “ After London” (1885), feudal courts exist, surrounded by menacing wilderness and in J.D. Writers of fiction about life following a global pandemic, climate catastrophe or nuclear war usually imagine a return to barbarism and savagery.
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