h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is hard to imagine what the end of the modern world will be like, even hard to imagine what comes afterwards. Russell Hoban tried, and succeeded brilliantly, in his short but intensely profound 'Riddley walker'. This novel describes life in a post-apocalyptic Britain, viewed through the eyes of a twelve-year-old wise beyond his years and related in an argot that
all of us would recognise as the idiot sister of English: Walker's voice is thousands of years distant, but its message is perfectly clear. Unlike other, better known descriptions of the end of humanity, Hoban's interpretation of holocaust and its aftermath sees not only buildings and technology but language, science, history, the collective human consciousness being reduced to rubble.

As important as the attempts of the surviving humans to construct a meaningful future for themselves is their struggle to reconstruct their past, obliterated by a experiment performed in a particle accelerator the size of Kent. To provide the novel's mythological backdrop, Hoban weaves together the strands of the stories of the atom bomb, Punch and Judy and the legend of St. Eustace into a tapestry of belief as seductive - and probably as misbegotten - as that of any modern religion. This is the literary equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. It is a bad dream from which we, as a race, are collectively unable to wake, but which, like any recurring nightmare, draws the reader into its layers of meaning and allegory again and again.

Everyone who is fearful for the future of the human race should try to read this book. Be thankful, when you read it, that you can put the book down - eventually.