THE BOOK OF DAVE
by Will Self
Viking, £17.99; 512pp
“A REVELATION,” reads the subtitle of Will Self’s novel, “of the Recent Past and the Distant Future.” This book of revelation, like the original one, is an outlandish document, full of apocalyptic visions, strangely dressed apparitions, misshapen beasts and tormented linguistic flourishes.
Two narrative strands furnish the revelation. The first, set in the recent past, concerns a London cabbie, Dave Rudman, who suffers from all the afflictions to which London cabbies are traditionally prey: baldness, pot belly, bad breath, misanthropy. The second takes place five centuries or so “After Dave”, in a future Ingerland transformed by climate change into an archipelago. All that remains of London is the remote Isle of Ham, the finding-place of the “Book of Dave”, the scripture that shapes the lives of the inhabitants of Ingerland.
Back in the 21st century, Dave is losing it on every front. A one-night stand with a distraught fare, Michelle, produces a son, Carl, and a baleful marriage that Michelle eventually leaves, taking herself and Carl to live in Hampstead with her rich lover, Cal Devenish.
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Sexual humiliation, separation from his son, lawyers — the ingredients are all there for Dave to slide from rage to psychosis — which he does in spectacular fashion.
His fury finds outlet in a text, a compilation of the London taxi-drivers’ “Knowledge”, with a collection of bitter social doctrines. This volume, printed on metal plates, Dave buries in Cal’s garden from where it is retrieved, centuries later, and becomes the holy book of Davinanity, the religion of Ingerland and the basis for all social intercourse, including vocabulary (a “fare” is a soul, “where to, guv?” the standard greeting).
Under Davinanity, family life is an abomination. Daddies and Mummies live separately, according to the doctrine of Breakup, and the children pass between them at Changeover.
Yet within the sacred community of Ham are dissident voices, even some who believe that Dave lived to repudiate his Book. For one of these heretics, Symon Devush, and his son, Carl, such freethinking results in a terrifying, picaresque tour of Ingerland.
The technical problems associated with dystopias are twofold. First, is the need for what Alexander Pope called Invention — the sustained imaginative drive necessary to keep an audience captivated. Then there is the essential ingredient of humanity, the spark that separates “serious” futuristic fiction from computer games in narrative form.
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Self burdens his readers with an additional challenge in The Book of Dave, extended passages of which are written in “Mokni”, an ingenious compound of cabbies’ vernacular and text-speak, rebarbative to the eye, though fairly yielding of sense if spoken aloud.
A false step on any front and your readers are off, leaving you with a book that may be talked about, but is not much read. There is no danger of that with The Book of Dave, which mixes imaginative vigour and savage satire with an unexpected tenderness and a dazzling exuberance of linguistic detail and is stamped, moreover, with the curious, legend-like quality that is the infallible mark of a really great fiction: the disorienting impression that this is a story that one knows already, in some partial, fragmentary sense. But that here, at last, is the ur-text — the full, authentic revelation of what really happened.