Hoban, who passed away in December last year, was a maverick writer who fascinated readers with his complex and highly-imaginative tales filled with words that seemingly invite self-realisation within the reader. His ability to shun literary tradition and form his own unique blend of magical realism and fantasy, whilst resulting in neglect from the academic world, received much praise from critics, readers and fellow authors. Hoban found commercial success (mostly with his children books) but the level of popularity of his novels, however, was not proportionate to the brilliance of his writing.
“Who really knows?” questions Hand on the topic of his relative lack of popularity. “It might be because there’s nothing obviously common to all his books — he has such a range of ideas and weirdnesses that anyone trying to ‘sell’ him haven’t a clue where to start. The result seems to have been different Hoban books gaining their own cult audiences. Riddley Walker, for example, is huge in the sci-fi community, while The Mouse And His Child became a children’s literature phenomenon even though it wasn’t written for children specifically…It should be said, though, that his work for children — especially his strange and powerful picture books — are hugely loved, especially in the USA and the UK”.
The Slickman A4 Quotation Event (SA4QE), now in its tenth year, is celebrated worldwide on the birth date of Russell Hoban. Anyone can participate; it simply involves writing a quote from one of his novels on a neatly-folded piece of yellow A4 paper (a motif in his books) and leaving it in a public place for someone else to pick up and be inspired or intrigued.
“I’ll be doing lots of 4Qating (fork-you-ate-ing), mainly in the CBD — cafes, libraries, a tango hall if I can find one. Usually it’s one or two quotes a year for me but it’s the tenth anniversary this year, and the first SA4QE since Hoban’s death, so I’ll be going for 44. And probably continuing into the next week.
“At least one Melburnian has been involved since the beginning, and she tends to focus her 4Qating on the underground City Loop train stations, as the London Tube is a recurring Hoban theme. There are those who 4Qate every year — the State Library and the hipster end of Chapel St have been done repeatedly — and don’t announce it on the website, and some who do. Their quotes are always intriguing. And it’s all over Australia — Toowoomba, Sydney, Bendigo. Actually it’s all over the world, at least 14 countries so far. In London they go all out and make a day of it, going to places out of the stories and reliving/re-enacting scenes –generally initiating as many passers-by into the cult as possible. Someone was going to bury themselves in the mud on the bank of the Thames and pretend to be the (severed) head of Orpheus. There are also Christo-inspired plans to cover public monuments and train platforms with yellow paper.”
Hoban himself once sorrowfully admitted that perhaps his death would be a wise career move: “People will say, ‘Yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s look at him again’”. However, as John says, Hoban has already left an indelible impression on the literary world and in the minds of his readers. When prompted for his personal favourite quotation, John drops this gem from Hoban’s first novel: “I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?”
While Hoban has now left us, his oeuvre is a gift to those that discover it, and the profound way his works affect his readers may well define his legacy.
“If he wasn’t to gain any more recognition, [his legacy] would be that he was the writer’s writer, as he’s often described now. Quite a few authors happily admit to nicking his ideas – Will Self and David Mitchell are a couple. But his fan base is slowly growing, and I’ve never heard so many people describe their reading experiences in such personal terms — for such a variety of stories to find a way to the heart blows the mind. In one novel a couple fall in love while planning to free sea turtles from London Zoo, in another a hippogriff from a 16th-century painting wants to have sex with a woman in present day San Francisco. So I think his legacy will eventually be recognised as a fearless encounter with the strangeness of being alive, and the ability to take bring the reader into that encounter. You do feel so much more alive when reading a Hoban novel.”
BY NICK TARAS
