The Book Of Dave: A Revelation Of The Recent Past And The Distant Future (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Note: This review was written on Aug 19th 2007 when the writer was a doe-eyed yoof of twenty.Were2guv? The Island of Ham?The latest doorstopper from the Prometheus of contemporary storytelling Will Self is a work of catatonic, lucid and breathtaking speculative fiction, alternating between a post-apocalyptic world governed by gibbering Cockernees and a present post-9/11 London, blighted by gibbering Cockernees.The Book of Dave is built upon the idea of what might happen were a bigoted, repulsive London cabbie to write a book of his opinions addressed to his estranged son, and for that book to form the basis of a new world order after rising sea levels have consumed the planet. The future world, or London at least, is governed from this book—the last remaining edict of civilisation. The novel establishes a clever and intricate parallel between the nightmarish future world of barbarous swamp-life and primitive tribalism, and the current life of Dave Rudman, a hateful racist and misogynist tumbling towards his own self-destruction.Plot & IntrigueThe narrative which opens the novel, set in 523 AD (After Dave, presumably) is perhaps the most fascinating of the two and Self has invented an entirely concurrent mythology which borrows from the current day scheme of things to create both its humour and intrigue. He has also invented his own form of warped linguistics for his primitive characters to communicate in, which is used just for the parts of direct speech and lightly punctuates the narrative. The protagonists talk in a distorted form of text-speak, and words are spelled out phonetically in the thick London accent they have retained, regressing to an almost incomprehensible tide of gibberish at times. The capital of London itself has split into an archipelago, and the narrative becomes a bewildering adventure and religious pilgrimage not unlike a certain Gormenghast trilogy, and the complex nature of their quest makes the mythology and its lingo an integral part of its understanding.The second narrative is more straightforward, at least on an aesthetic level, and is dominated by the aforementioned Dave, and Self selects episodes from his life to chronicle his inexorable spiral downwards into complete mental collapse. In the first section, large paragraphs of italicised prose give insight into his mind, which is often just an outpouring of bile and racism, and we later learn of how he met his wife, ended up with a child and how he turned out to be such a despairing no-hoper with an incredible axe to grind with the world. The names of protagonists in both narratives are interchanged to link antecedents with descendents and so on, and the art of cab driving is the strongest metaphor which is spooled back into the fantasy world.As someone with a terrible mind for storing plot detail, this book places no onus upon the reader to keep on top of the terminology since much of it is a mere bonus and indulgence. It is actually the strongest comedic device used in the book, and underlines the awfulness of a new world order being a derivative universe dictated by the most unappealing and inappropriate trappings of commercial, New Labour Britain. The plot is therefore accessible with each chapter, provided the reader is willing to follow the flights of spontaneous imagination Self builds his world upon brick-by-brick. As an example, burgerkine is a word used to describe cattle and cloakyfing is used to indicate a Muslim burka. There is a point to this. I’ll come to it in a moment.Theme & StyleJust from the dizzying feat of descriptive ingenuity that gushes forth from the first paragraph alone, it is clear that Will Self is one Leviathan talent, and one of the most innovative writers at large in the world just now. The Book of Dave manages to meld adventure, fantasy, social concern, religious and political intrigue, surreal and ingenious satire and a staggering character portrait into a seamless tome that ascends into its own untouchable pantheon of artistic genius. The prose in all Self texts is an unflinching tapestry of experimental wordplay, erudite phraseology and relentless poetic wonderment, woven with a stoical third-person narrative voice which is unafraid to diffuse the loftiness of his intention with a sprinkling of earthbound humour.The influences of Self are often simple to pinpoint, be it the preoccupation with dehumanised male protagonists, channelled through intricate allegorical conduit such as the work of Franz Kafka, the obsession with pushing the boundaries of language and the academic’s desire to experiment with conventions a la Martin Amis or even the introverted gloominess and postmodern mind-scrambling of lit-fixated Ubermenschen such as Alasdair Gray. Here, Self manages to do this while tipping his hat to the great tradition of darker southern gothic writers such as Mervyn Peake, and Anglicising the humour of sci-fi genius Kurt Vonnegut. This album has components of all those authors, but then again, a person can read hundreds of authors influence into a text if he looks hard enough. These are some of the obvious points of comparison for those in the dark about Self.While the fantasy element of the book is captivating, Self has structured the novel so that each chapter is approximately 30 pages in length, meaning the reader is forced to immerse his or herself in his world. Which is no chore given the quality of his writing. The book itself is his largest to date, and took me about two weeks to complete, giving me sufficient time to contemplate the message he wished to convey at some length. As did this review, in fact. Often Self, as a moralist, can come across as too lecturing at times, although this book has been designed as a weary portent of what might happen to the world should people continue to behave as they do at present, subtitled a Revelation of Recent Past and Distant Future.With this in mind, The Book of Dave I believe has two main intentions. The first is, through its preoccupation with fractured families and feuding tribes, to remind people that through our intolerant, dissatisfied culture where everything is immediate and people are comparatively greedier and more self-obsessed, children are being given the wrong message with regards to both the sanctity of marriage and human relationships in general. There has been a marked decline in the sophistication of children and the attitudes of young people towards religious beliefs and minority groups at large, and the one causation for this—as with most things—is a ruptured family unit. Although it might sound like a somewhat trite aim, Self does want to remind people how important it is to respect almost every living organism we are faced with, since we might just regress back to being savages after a nuclear holocaust and end up the lowest form of being. All organisms with the exception perhaps of the motos, a repulsive creature used for oil and food.It is possible to scour this book for its metaphors, but this would take me a lengthier period of time and I need to sum it up in a pithier manner than this. Aside from the notion of family, this novel is a prescient religious allegory, especially in recent times when people have yet to learn from history. The primitive brutality of the primeval civilisation holds a clear mirror to the situation in Iraq (hinted in the second chapter) and that the causation of war and strife is all predicated upon documents as unverifiable as the next. The Book of Dave represents all religious texts: no-one knows where they came from, but one day they were found and people started to follow them. The anger and frustration in this text is palpable, a sentiment most readers will pick up on. Religion is not dismissed in this book, since Dave refuses it too help redeem himself when he needs it most, but instead it is approached with a incisive eye and gigantic brain.Flaws?Self has written with an often ironic or misanthropic detachment in the past, which makes his moments of genuine redemption or visceral emotion harder to pick up on. Although these moments are here, albeit tangled in a net of irreverent humour or fanciful poetic phrasing, the vivid prose of the future is too accurate to overlook and a person just might throw up were he to recognise a crumb of himself in Dave Rudman. The fact is, there is a little of Dave in all of us, since he represents the worst of our excesses and the most intolerant of our personalities. As painful as the truth might seem, most of us are in our own little way just as responsible for social exclusion, religious discrimination or moral indifference.Some might complain about the gumption Will Self has to take on the dialect and least privileged area of the working classes, when he himself is a bourgeois suburbanite through and through. We can only assume since he is himself a Londoner, he has a fine knowledge of both the patois of cabbies, and in his research performed some undercover work in refining the nuances of the dialect and the sorts of opinions he heard that helped form the character of Dave. However, the nature of Self’s writing makes it almost inaccessible to those who perhaps do little reading, or those who are involved in cab driving with a poorer education. This novel might end up at the hands of the discerning middle classes again, which somehow feels a little dissatisfying.The Book of Dave might not put a spring in one’s step – it is an uncompromising and bleak book – but it should shake a person from their lethargy with the aim to a little self-improvement here and there. It is also (it needs reminding) a staggering work of literary genius, combining a Swiftian satire with a vertiginous trek through the boggy swamps of Kafkaesque dislocation. Perhaps the finest novel about the “state of things” in Britain this millennium.
The Book of Dave isn't here to make your life as a reader easy. It's a book that kicks sand in the face of the casual, more easily distracted, reader. I first started it back in 2008, and I wasn't focused enough. The book became harder and harder to follow. So I gave up, less than a quarter of the way through, and popped it back on the shelf. Since then it has sat there, like a guilty secret, a book by one of my favourite authors – unfinished. Calling to me, mocking me, asking me if I felt happy with it sitting there unfinished on my bookcase.It wasn't that I didn't like the book, I always wanted to finish it. But, the book is written in a deliberately confusing style and I got distracted. The chapters alternate between a 'present day' (early 2000s) and a future, post-apocalyptic, time. Both stories are set in London, but one is the London of the 1980-2000s, and the other is the London of the 500-520s AD (After Dave). The present-day story tells the tale of a London cabbie, Dave Rudman, a somewhat pathetic character who it seems you are to both pity and feel disgusted by, as he meets a woman, has a son, gets divorced, and has a total mental breakdown. During that breakdown Dave writes a book, his manifesto, and he buries it in the Hampstead back garden of his estranged wife for his son to find. The future chapters tell of a small village, Ham, where Hampstead used to be. The rest of London is flooded, and Dave's book has been discovered several hundred years ago before, and somehow, the ravings of a depressed cabbie have spawned an entire religion.Not only do the chapters alternate between the two parallel stories, they also jump around in time. Neither story is told in a linear fashion, although both stories jump forwards and backwards in parallel. If this isn't going to be confusing enough, both stories are written with a phonetic approach to dialogue. The present-day characters speak a phonetic cockney that frequently has to be read aloud (at least in your head) to understand it. However, the future dialogue, Self has taken to a totally different level. Again, the dialogue is written phonetically, but it's a made-up 'mockni' language. As a crutch, of sorts, for the poor reader, Self has provided a glossary at the end so you can keep referring back to that when you hit a word you don't understand. But even then, lots of words aren't in the glossary. Some of these you can guess from context, others you have to read aloud (in your head isn't always good enough – cue strange looks on the bus), sometimes in a funny cockney accent, before your brain will make the connection and the conversation will become clear. As a final nail in the coffin of easy to understand dialogue, Self has dispensed with any form of quotation mark and instead you have to rely entirely on context to understand where the spoken sections start and stop. To be fair, the lack of quotation marks isn't nearly as limiting as you'd think – I soon barely noticed them not being there – and while the regularly flicking back to the glossary is hard work at first, as the book progresses you find yourself needing to do it less and less (so long as you're not getting distracted while you're reading that is).The book is maybe a little longer than it needs to be, and maybe a little bit more confusing than it needs to be. But, the premise of the story is fascinating, and Self's love of language for its own sake shines through. The parallels between the two stories is expertly done – the more you read, the more you spot the hidden clues and connections. So many parallels could be explained just by the presence of the book of Dave, the future culture has been built entirely around his warped view of the world, their language is a degeneration of the already obtuse cockney spoken, and presumably written, by Dave himself. But Self takes it still further. You notice that some characters in the two stories have very similar names. Initially, I assumed this was coincidence, maybe they named themselves after people in the book, but as the story unfolds you realise that the parallels run much deeper than that. I'm glad that I forced myself to go back to it, and glad that I persevered when even this second reading seemed to be going so slowly – two weeks to read less than 500 pages is very slow for me.
What do You think about The Book Of Dave: A Revelation Of The Recent Past And The Distant Future (2006)?
I would have give it 9/10, but it's more 5 star than 4 star ...“The Book of Dave” is based around the rants of Dave Roth, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, who writes his woes down and buries them only to have them discovered 500 years after the flood and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the remnants of London. Will Self’s big bold book dares to take on the grand themes in the grand manner. It is at once a profound meditation upon the nature of received religion; a love story; a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future. "This book does have some of the faults described in the linked review, but it is, nevertheless a fantastic suggestion of how revealed religion probably works, and how close you might come to understanding a document from the distant past. Read it straight after "The God Delusion" and you'll never look at a religious ceremony the same way again!
—Jim
This is an amazing book. Amazingly twisted. Amazingly disturbing. Amazingly imaginative. Amazingly differently-told.First and foremost, having a knowledge (not necessarily Knowledge) of London and its environs would be useful to enhance appreciation of the tale. The use of written cockney is really painful at first, but you kinda get used to it slowly. And the switching from "present day" to "the future" at each chapter provides a great way of painting the end result *and* slowly doling out HOW these results came about.So what's it about? A temporarily insane cabbie suffering from depression and schizophrenia writes a book of misogynistic and twisted advice to his estranged son, and buries this "book" in the garden. Much later, some natural catastrophe occurs: England is inundated, everything regresses.... and "The Book of Dave" is not only discovered, but treated like the Bible. The story that unfolds is twisted, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful.I highly recommend this book, but be prepared to take it slow.
—lynne naranek
I've always enjoyed Will Self, both his writing and whenever he appears on television. I find him an incredibly subtle and particularly insightful person and I love his verbose, indulgent style of prose. Having said that, I didn't just enjoy this book, I ADORED it. I think it's the best thing I've yet read by him. It just works on so many levels. As a contemporary drama about real people in this world, it is perceptive and astute in its characterisations and compelling and moving in its storytelling. As a piece of science fiction/distopian futurism (for the two books are intertwined throughout the work), it's vivid, satirical, engaging and illuminating of our own time. It also works as a new perspective on the past, as nothing presented in his vision of the culture in future England (save for the genetically mutated motos) is really an invention: it is all exactly as society lived in the dark ages when the church ruled the hearts and minds of all people and burned heretics at the stake and broke them on the wheel for daring to question an ancient text. One thing though; it is intricately bound up with England, English people, English vernacular (particularly cockney) and English society and culture. If you're an English person or sufficiently familiar with us, it will be funny and brilliant throughout. If not, I don't see how most of it wouldn't go over the head of someone not steeped in English culture. It's just so rife with references and linguistic jokes particular to England that it might be just too much for anyone else. In particular, the language of the people in the future land of "Ing" is that of "Mockni" and written in full, phonetic cockney vernacular. If you know how cockneys talk then you can simply read it in their accent and it makes perfect sense. If not, it may well be nigh unreadable. At any rate, I dove into this book and swam indulgently in its literature from the first page to the last. I wanted to applaud Self when I had done.
—Sonny Williamson
