Just back from a much-need­ed break in Paris. It’s a great place in which to just wan­der aim­less­ly around, absorb­ing the sights and sounds. And that’s pre­cise­ly what my part­ner and I have been doing for the last cou­ple of days. The washed-out colours of autumn go well with the fad­ed impe­r­i­al grandeur of its avenues and mon­u­ments.

 Of course, when it comes to food and wine, France still rules the world. Even sim­ple and inex­pen­sive things like cheese and bread taste bet­ter here. How is it that we have com­plete­ly for­got­ten how to make mouth-water­ing bread here in Britain? Answers on a (French) post­card please.

My tip for a café: Le Boulanger des Invalides Joc­teur on the cor­ner of the Ave de Vil­lars and Bd des Invalides. After indulging in their cof­fee and cakes you could do worse than take a stroll in the Parc André Citroën, a new dis­cov­ery for me. It’s a for­mal, French gar­den updat­ed for the mod­ern age: large in scale but full of beau­ti­ful, inti­mate spaces. A great place to take pho­tos – I’ve put some on my Flickr site. (Thanks to Kin­dra for explain­ing how to post images in the blog…let’s see if it works!)

I’ve been mean­ing to read Rid­dley Walk­er by Rus­sell Hoban for a long time and the Eurostar train jour­neys to and from Paris pro­vid­ed the ide­al oppor­tu­ni­ty. I’m glad I did – it is a quite extra­or­di­nary nov­el: the kind of writ­ing that haunts your mem­o­ry for days and weeks afterwards.  The nov­el – which was pub­lished in 1980 – is set many years after civil­i­sa­tion has destroyed itself in its quest for the “1 Big 1”. The world has been blast­ed back to the stone age, to use the unfor­get­table phrase of one Cold War gen­er­al. Life for the inhab­i­tants of the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic plan­et is now nasty and short. Their tech­nol­o­gy is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent and they have an under­stand­able fear of “clev­er­ness” – any­thing that we might call sci­ence. The hubris of “Eusa” and his dead­ly fas­ci­na­tion with “the Addom” that led to dooms­day has become a myth­ic sto­ry that fills the peo­ple of the future with dread. Rid­dley Walk­er, the main char­ac­ter, is thrown into an intrigue involv­ing “yeller­boy”, “chard coal” and “Saul and Peter”. Sul­phur, char­coal and salt­pe­tre to you and me – the ingre­di­ents of what this future world calls the “1 Lit­tl 1”. Their soci­ety is about to take its first steps on the road that leads first to gun­pow­der and explo­sives, then even­tu­al­ly to atom bombs. It seems humankind is sim­ply too clever for its own good.

Hoban’s cre­ation of a new lan­guage or dialect in the nov­el is a great achieve­ment. At first, the dif­fi­cul­ty of read­ing is a bar­ri­er between you and the text. But grad­u­al­ly the lan­guage draws you into a new world, one that is also dis­turbing­ly famil­iar. Let me give you a sam­ple of his writ­ing. Here’s a char­ac­ter telling Walk­er how the knowl­edge of mak­ing gun­pow­der can­not now be sup­pressed:

“You can get jus as dead from a kick in the head as you can from the 1 Lit­tl 1 but it’s the nature of it gets peo­ple as cit­ed. I mean your foot is all ways on the end of your leg innit. So if youre going to kick some 1 to death it aint all that thrilling is it. This oth­er tho you’ve got to have the Nos. of the mix­ter then you’ve got to fynd your gready mints then you’ve got to do the mix­ing of the mix­ter and you’ve got to say the fis­sion­al seak­erts of the act befor you kil some body its all that chemis­tery and fizzics of it you see. Its some thing new.”

There’s a remark­able poet­ry and range in this arti­fi­cial lan­guage. The strug­gles of the boy-man Walk­er to under­stand the past of the world he has been born into echo our own attempts to cope with inno­va­tion and change in a world poised on the brink of self-destruc­tion. As Walk­er puts it, almost in despair:

“If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you nev­er wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the mid­dl of it liv­ing it or mov­ing thru it. Nev­er mynd.”

So that’s my rec­om­men­da­tion to you for the autumn: take a trip to Paris and buy a copy of Hoban’s bril­liant book. It worked for me.

[orig­i­nal­ly on MySpace]