Random book purchases
They can be fun, they can be disappointing. But they don’t usually have a connection to one of my favourite bands.
I picked up a book in a charity shop a few months ago as the story appealed to me. It’s called The Bat Tattoo, and it’s by an author I’d never heard of before, Russell Hoban.
“Roswell Clark’s life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed to get an optimistic-looking bat tattoo on his shoulder. His ideal bat image was featured on an 18th century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat. What did it mean? Sarah dealt in antiques and Roswell soon ran into her stalls in Chelsea and Covent Garden. His calling, which grew out of an obsession with crash-test dummies, was a bit harder to explain. It led from the invention of a popular children’s toy to lucrative commissions from a Parisian sybarite for wooden working models with very adult moving parts. Both Roswell and Sarah had lost their spouses and were still grieving in their different ways. And then Christ started putting a hand in — not in the “born again” sense, but literally — a hand, a fragment of an ancient crucifix that fetched up in one of Sarah’s antique lots. Between some compulsion conveyed by this hand and Sarah’s natural urge to make improvements in people, Roswell’s work took a surprising new turn. Russell Hoban’s delicious new novel combines much about art — traditional and conceptual — with new angles on Christ, crash-test dummies, antiques and pornography — a pleasure on every page and as mysterious and uplifting as bat wings.”
It’s been lying on the shelf until this Wednesday when I needed something new to read, and I decided that was the one. I looked over the back cover again and saw this quote, ‘…completes a trilogy of masterful late works…’, as in, not a parts 1-3 type trilogy, but novels woven together by the same characters and themes. So, I decided to put it back on the shelf and see if I could find the previous books. When I did a search for him I discovered he had written a book entitled ‘Riddley Walker’ and almost immediately the Clutch song ‘The Rapture of Riddley Walker’ started going round my head. So I looked up Clutch’s website, checked the lyrics section, and sure enough, got this:
“Read Russell Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker.’ It’ll explain everything.”
So now I am intrigued. Hoban seems to be a well respected, almost cult status author, and I’ve never heard of him! To be fair, neither have two of my colleagues who work in the fiction section, and from what I’ve read about the man he seems to be a ‘word of mouth’ author, who has a highly devoted fanclub. His biggest selling books are actually a children’s collection about a badger named Frances! I’ve discovered that the books I should be looking for are ‘Angelica’s Grotto’ and ‘Amaryllis Night and Day’, so off I go on a hunt!