Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Book of Dave

Name: Book of Dave
Author: Will Self
ISBN: 9781596913844

by Will Self

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Overview

When East End cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife takes from him his only son, Dave pens a gripping text—a compilation about everything from the environment, Arabs, and American tourists to sex, Prozac, and cabby lore—that captures all of his frustrations and anxieties about his contemporary world. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife's Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age.

Five hundred years later, Dave's book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in post-apocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization. Only one islander, Symum, remains incredulous. But, after he is imprisoned for heresy, his son Carl must journey through the Forbidden Zone and into the terrifying heart of New London to find the only thing that will reveal the truth once and for all: a second Book of Dave that repudiates the first.

The Book of Dave is a profound meditation upon the nature of religion and a caustic satire of contemporary life.

Synopsis

When cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife of five years deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, he is thrown into a tailspin of doubt and discontent. Fearing his son will never know his father, Dave pens a gripping text—part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of "the Knowledge" learned by all London cab drivers. Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet.

The Washington Post - Donna Rifkind

The good news is that, while The Book of Dave is sometimes as aggressively off-putting as Self's five previous novels, it's also a richer, more engaging enterprise. In each of those earlier books there lurked a magic page of doom on which the reader became certain that Self had already thoroughly explored his gimmicky premise؏the guy is really a chimpanzee in Great Apes; death is just a more tedious version of life in How the Dead Live—and would now spend several hundred more pages methodically kicking the life out of it.

No such page exists in the new novel, whose plot is sturdy enough to support its voluptuous prose. Most significantly, the author has worked hard to increase his emotional repertoire from a three-chord punk chorus of rage, contempt and despair to a more expansive range of sensibility.

About the Author, Will Self

Will Self is the acclaimed author of such books as The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Great Apes, and How the Dead Live. He won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year. Will Self lives in London.

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Editorials

The New Yorker

In this tale of an embittered taxi-driver whose psychotic rantings become the creed of a blighted people hundreds of years after his death, Self unleashes his apparently boundless misanthropy on modern London, the origins of religion, and the postapocalyptic future. Dave Rudman, driven mad by divorce and ill-prescribed antidepressants, thinks he is God and writes a vitriolic screed, which he has printed on metal plates and buries in a garden. Discovered by the survivors of a catastrophic flood and adopted as a gospel, it demands the complete separation of mothers and fathers (children to spend exactly half the week with each). Switching between a narrative of Dave’s unlucky life and the phonetically rendered “Mokni” speech of his wretched followers, Self achieves an elaborate vision of vicious superstition and hopeless struggle, but his insights never quite repay the effort of engaging with his stylistic pyrotechnics.

Donna Rifkind

Publishers Weekly

Self, the provocative British raconteur who used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to map London (How the Dead Live, 2000) is taking another literary shot across his home city's bow. In his gleaming new puzzlebook, Self creates a dystopian future London, ruled by a cynosure of priests, lawyers and the monarchy. He invents Arpee, the musical language they speak that is based on a sacred text-The Book of Dave-which also serves, satirically, as the society's moral and legal foundation. And who is this deity named Dave? An embittered London cabbie from the distant past-the year 2000. As the book opens, the kingdom of Ingerland is ruled by the elite and ruthless PCO. (Self is riffing on the Public Carriage Office, London's transit authority.) People live according to The Book of Dave, which was recovered after a great flood wiped out London in the MadeinChina era. Flashing back more than 500 years, cabbie Dave Rudman types out his idiosyncratic, misogynist, bile-tinged fantasies while in a fit of antidepressant-induced psychosis and battling over the custody of his child, Carl. His screed becomes both a blueprint for a harsh childrearing climate (mummies and daddies living apart, with the kids splitting time between them) and a full-blown cosmology. As Self moves between eras, he divides the book between Dave's story and the story of the great Flying (slang in the future for "heresy"). The latter involves the appearance of the Geezer (prophet) on the island of Ham (Hampshire) in 508 A.D. (after the "purported discovery of the Book of Dave"), who claims to have found a second Book of Dave annulling the "tiresome strictures" of the first. He is imprisoned by the PCO and mangled beyond recognition, but, 14 years later, his son, Carl Devush, travels from Ham to New London, determined to create a less cruel world that responds to the "mummyself" within. Self's invention of a future language (including dialect Mokni, which combines cabby slang, cockney and the Esperanto of graffiti-and, yes, a dictionary is provided) is wickedly brilliant, with surprising moments of childlike purity punctuating the lexicon's crude surface (a "fuckoffgaff" is a "lawyerly place," while "wooly" means sheep). Self is endlessly talented, and in crossbreeding a fantasy novel with a scorching satire of contemporary mores, he's created a beautiful monster of the future that feeds on the neurotic present-and its parents. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

London cabbie Dave Rudman, in a rage over losing visitation rights to his son, writes a book about his working life for the boy. Five hundred years after the destruction of present-day London by flooding, this book is found by a primitive tribe called the Hamsters and made the basis of its religion. Priests, therefore, are referred to as "drivers," the average person is a "fare," and a typical greeting is "Where to, guv?" This cleverly written narrative playfully transforms the life of a taxi driver into sacred rituals. Self (Great Apes) alternates chapters between life on the Isle of Ham (formerly Hampstead Heath) circa A.D. 523 (after Dave) and Dave's life in the present. In the future, a young Hamster and his teacher go in search of a "geezer" who claims to have found a second Book of Dave that refutes most of the first book. Meanwhile, chapters focusing on Dave recount his marriage, divorce, depression, and eventual death. The Hamsters speak in a heavy cockney accent that Self writes phonetically; this and the many words and customs derived from the Book of Dave initially make for difficult reading. As the picture comes into focus, however, you will marvel at the ingenuity of this highly literate, superbly written satire of what societies deem sacred. Highly recommended.-Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

England in the future and (mostly) underwater is the post-apocalyptic setting for the brazen Brit author's ambitious dystopian satire. The title story, one of two energetically detailed narratives, is the "text," written, in 2000, more in anger than in sorrow, by London cabdriver Dave Rudman, whose wife Michelle has fled their rickety marriage, remarried and kept Dave from seeing their son Carl. Dave's mad, self-justifying, misogynistic "memoir," which he buries in the backyard of Michelle's new home, takes on a vivid extended life more than 500 years later, when it's excavated, fervently embraced as a sacred text and used as a template by a rigidly structured society in which parents live apart and children are shuttled between them during designated "Changeovers." This stripped-down future, after rising sea levels have turned Britain into hundreds of tiny islands (e.g., that of "Ham," formerly Hampstead, where Michelle's family now live), stimulates both Self's abrasive genius for elaborating ingenious premises in mordantly funny detail (Great Apes, 1997), and his maddening tendency to beat every idea to death (How the Dead Live, 2000). In the 2500s, the practice of "Davinity" (i.e., worship of Dave) is expressed in the language (derived from his chaotic book) of Arpee, specifically the dialect of Mokni-of which numerous brilliant examples are given, and minimal interpretation is supplied in a brief concluding glossary. Much of this is superb, but a byzantine plot involving the son (another Carl) of a "heretic" who opposed Davinity and preached the equality of the sexes, is simply tedious. Though this edgy novel invites comparison with such contemporary classics as Anthony Burgess's AClockwork Orange and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, its anarchic vision of future shock is far less compelling than Dave's own story of loss, grief, surrender to drug addiction and madness. Thus, this is indeed divided: by turns acrid, funny and perversely moving, yet marred by sourness, shrillness and redundancy.