tani reviewed on
I enjoyed Alas Babylon very much, years ago, and the post-apocalyptic setting of this book looked interesting. It appealed to me so much that I suppressed my irritation with the weird spelling of practically every word in the account. After all, the narrator was supposed to be writing in a society that had lost most of what it used to know, and in fact, not many people in it could write at all.
However, before much of anything at all had happened, story-wise, the struggle of trying to figure out the presumed pronunciations of so many words (a necessary preliminary to understanding them) became not worth the effort, so I gave up in the middle.
There is no doubt that this is a very original book--made all the more so by those weird spellings--but I wish the author had considered some literary ruse that would allow him to abandon these spellings after a few pages and go back to more or less the modern ones. He could still have kept his wording, which was also unusual and the book would have been, for me, readable.
English spelling has many inconsistencies, but this book has reinforced my belief in the value of not switching to phonetic spellings. Inconsistent or not, the spellings that we now have, more or less standardized, allow us to read and take in the meaning without bothering to figure out how to pronounce every word. They work in much the way that Chinese characters do.
Riddley Walker had me pausing over and over again because I couldn't even get used to the way it spelled common contractions such as the one for "we will," and there were other less common words, for which knowing how they were meant to be pronounced still left me with no clue as to their meaning. With this latter type of word, one is simply left wondering whether it is really an English word that should be recognizable, or if it is some new word supposed to have been coined since the disaster that practically destroyed all civilization.
I feel a little bit sorry that I will never know whether or not the book's story line is truly original and interesting, unless I someday read comments on it written by a more patient soul. I can live with that.
However, before much of anything at all had happened, story-wise, the struggle of trying to figure out the presumed pronunciations of so many words (a necessary preliminary to understanding them) became not worth the effort, so I gave up in the middle.
There is no doubt that this is a very original book--made all the more so by those weird spellings--but I wish the author had considered some literary ruse that would allow him to abandon these spellings after a few pages and go back to more or less the modern ones. He could still have kept his wording, which was also unusual and the book would have been, for me, readable.
English spelling has many inconsistencies, but this book has reinforced my belief in the value of not switching to phonetic spellings. Inconsistent or not, the spellings that we now have, more or less standardized, allow us to read and take in the meaning without bothering to figure out how to pronounce every word. They work in much the way that Chinese characters do.
Riddley Walker had me pausing over and over again because I couldn't even get used to the way it spelled common contractions such as the one for "we will," and there were other less common words, for which knowing how they were meant to be pronounced still left me with no clue as to their meaning. With this latter type of word, one is simply left wondering whether it is really an English word that should be recognizable, or if it is some new word supposed to have been coined since the disaster that practically destroyed all civilization.
I feel a little bit sorry that I will never know whether or not the book's story line is truly original and interesting, unless I someday read comments on it written by a more patient soul. I can live with that.
