Has any novelist been remembered for two books as wildly disparate as Russell Hoban? His Turtle Diary is a largely realistic work of mid-life anomie; his Riddley Walker is a linguistically innovative story of Britain years from now, where society has regressed to a pre-industrial state. If you didn’t know these two books were by the same author, you might assume that they were not. There’s some precedent for this: Iain (M.) Banks’s novels range from tender chamber dramas to ambitious science fiction. (And there’s a pretty clear line that can be drawn from Riddley Walker to Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, I’d say.) But it also begs the question: what else can be found in Hoban’s body of work?

I have read and enjoyed both of the books mentioned above, but until recently that had been the extent of my immersion in Hoban’s fiction for adult readers. While traveling, I picked up copies of two other Hoban novels: 1996’s Fremder and 2002’s The Bat Tattoo. Guess what: each of them is also very different from its fellows. Each is also quietly bizarre and eminently compelling, the kind of fiction that sparks hours-long conversations.

We’ll start with Fremder, which opens with a scene of disassociation: a figure “tumbling over and over” in a distant galaxy, with the first-person narration not kicking in until the second paragraph. This is Fremder Gorn, the novel’s protagonist. The year is 2052, and humanity has spread to the stars — due in part to an interstellar form of transportation that allows spacecraft to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye. 

Fremder is alone in space because the rest of the vessel he was traveling on failed to re-materialize. This sets into motion the two questions that will fuel the rest of the book: what exactly happened to Fremder, and how does this all relate to the technological breakthroughs made by his late mother, an eccentric genius whose work made this new era of intergalactic travel possible? 

Hoban describes this near-future society organically, parceling out details as Fremder encounters them, but doing so without adding too much exposition. Fremder is a part of this society, after all; it isn’t until partway through the book that we realize that there are some decidedly sinister and authoritarian aspects to it. By novel’s end, we’ve also received a better sense of his mother Helen, who experienced a series of horrific traumas over the course of her life. 

I think what Hoban is getting at here is a way in which traumas can propagate themselves; hurt people hurting people, but on a grander scale. That’s my read of it, anyway: when we do hear from Helen, there’s a dearth of empathy in her worldview, and a goal of changing the world no matter what the cost might be. 

The Bat Tattoo is, on the surface, a more overtly realistic book, focusing on the burgeoning relationship between Roswell Clark and Sarah Varley. Roswell designs toys and devices; Sarah sells antiques. Each of them narrates some of the chapters, and the slow development of their midlife romance makes for a charming experience. Except that there are bleaker things afoot: eventually, Roswell reveals that his wife died in an automobile accident after he drank too much alcohol, an event for which he feels understandably guilty. 

The title of The Bat Tattoo comes from the tattoos that both Roswell and Sarah have received, unbeknownst to one another. That’s one of several ways in which eerie coincidences creep into the narrative. Sarah’s previous relationship was with a man who comes off like a funhouse mirror of Roswell. There’s also the presence of a third narrator: the magnificently-named Adelbert Delarue, a wealthy client of Roswell’s who hired him to design a series of elaborate car crash-themed sex toys. (And yes, the subject of J.G. Ballard’s Crash comes up — more specifically, David Cronenberg’s screen adaptation of it.) Read for long enough and you may wonder if Adelbert, who seems both more eccentric and more sinister than he’s let on, might have had something to do with the death of Roswell’s wife. The Bat Tattoo is full of these strange and ominous hints: the sense that everything might be a bit more connected than Sarah and Roswell would like it to be.

There’s a sense of larger mysteries afoot in these books of Hoban’s, and they’ve left me wanting to go even further into his bibliography. If my quick glimpses at Bookshop and Blackwell’s are any indication, Hoban is better-represented in the U.S. by his books for young readers, while readers based in the U.K. have a wider swath of his work available to them. Perhaps there’s a cult dedicated to his work just waiting to happen.