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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
William Woodard "Will" Self was born on September 26, 1961. He is a British author, journalist and political commentator. He wrote ten novels, five collections of short fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction writing. His novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His subject matter often includes mental illness, illegal drugs and psychiatry.
Self is a regular contributor to publications including Playboy, The Guardian, Harpers, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. He also writes a column for New Statesman, and over the years he has been a columnist for The Observer, The Times and the Evening Standard. His columns for Building Design on the built environment, and for the Independent Magazine on the psychology of place brought him to prominence as a thinker concerned with the politics of urbanism.
Will Self will deliver the closing address at the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
A whole new future is inflating itself like a fat grape from the side of Dave Rudman's head. Dave's friends went to university, but, craving London "like an identity", he stayed behind, became a cabbie, and in 1987, with the "matte black chrysalis" of Thatcherism splitting open to reveal tinted glass wings, married Michelle, a woman struggling "to keep up with her idea of who she ought to be". Thirteen years later Michelle has fled to Hampstead, the lawyers and the Child Support Agency are managing the remains of their relationship, and Dave can't get time with his son. Instead he drives all night, medicates his rage and "fingers the shameful site of his failed hair transplant". His cab is a rubbish bin of old sandwich wrappers. He smells. He wants revenge. All he has left of the life he started with is the Knowledge - that map of London every cabbie must carry in his head - and his homophobic, misogynist, self-pitying inner monologue: being a product of the times, and as susceptible to a high-concept notion as his author, Dave interprets the one in terms of the other and turns it into a book, which he buries in Michelle's garden in the night. It's a curious method of publication. It's an act of complex spite, an act of love. It's a legacy to the son with whom he can no longer make contact. Five hundred years after his death, the Book of Dave will be disinterred to become the template for a new civilisation. To us, Dave's other readers, this future presents itself as "a control experiment", a world the grotesquerie of which, in 16 alternating chapters, maps itself on to the grotesquerie of the world we know - or at least the one Dave Rudman knows. It's a mapping that works in both directions, not just of one topography on to another but one time on to another, one culture on to another, one psychic space on to another - a psychogeography summed up in the subtitle, "A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future". The result is a large, mad novel which resembles the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K Le Guin as much as it does Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker , its obvious precursor. Rising sea levels have turned Britain into an archipelago. Small, isolated communities struggle with nature and ideology, their lives a harsh idyll mediated by the Book. The inhabitants of the tiny island of Ham grow wheat, harvest gulls' eggs from the stacks in the bay, and herd the moto, a genetically modified herbivore which exists somewhere at the intersection of pig, cow and two-year-old child. The men, or "dads", live on one side of the village, the women, or "mums", on the other. The children stay with their mums for half the week, and with their dads for the other; after each Changeover it's as if the kids are "other people altogether". The dads pass on the Knowledge, and along with it their maleness, which consists of screwing the "opares", or teenage girls, and abusing the "boilers", women wrecked by childbirth. The women don't get much chance to pass anything on, being too busy pulling the island's only plough. The language of the Book mediates this savagely satirical transfer of taxi-driver values. Dads wear "bubbery car coats"; the generic word for food is "curry"; when you make an opare pregnant, the bargain you enter into is known as "child support". Language also constructs the Hamsters' natural world: the young of the motos are known as "mopeds"; by day the "headlight" rules the sky, while at night, when the headlight is dipped, you see the "dashboard" laid out in stars. Such conceits are worked into the text with obsessive care. They're more or less ef fective. "Davinity" - spirituality in the religion of Dave - is inspired, while "The bigwatt rays of the now fully risen foglamp" seems strained, intellectualised, reached- for from too great a distance. You're willing to deal with constructions like this at the beginning of the book, when every image promises a clue to the nature of Ham and the Hamsters, but after a couple of hundred pages the future has clarified itself as far as it ever can. The reader experiences a sense of being ground down. The analogy goes on stating and restating itself, as if a demonstration of imaginative rigour, rather than meaning, is the end product of the process. As a result, Self's distant future, despite its bizarre social perspectives and cartoonlike visual qualities (not to say a quest plot which could grace an episode of Xena Warrior Princess ), proves less interesting than his recent past, which is full-on Blatcherite London, best expressed in the psychoeconomic arc of Michelle Brodie. Michelle's career in display - fashionista, exhibition organiser, trophy wife - rewards her with the ownership of a little Hampstead lingerie shop called Liberation, its window full of "flesh pink, organdie and eau-de-nil scraps, worth, weight for weight, more than currency". The Queen Anne house she shares with her second husband and Dave's son, Carl, has 12 12-paned windows, "a gross of affluence". "This, surely," she reflects, "was what had been meant for her all along?" Meanwhile, Dave is cruising the underbelly of London, carrying "junkies to score in the All Saints Road, tarts to fuck in Mayfair". London draws out Self's best, although even here he will over-reach for an effect. Driving the cab into Heathrow, Dave thinks that the submachine guns of the armed police look "like necklaces on their Kevlar decolletage", a gruelling search for a simile which doesn't quite exist. It's hard not to put Riddley Walker at the centre of The Book of Dave , if only because, like Self's novel, it is written in a constructed post-disaster dialect, with its own glossary. But the difference between the two men is anger, and how anger manages the comic sensibility. Typically, Hoban's amused gaze hunts and pecks from place to place and, though it never settles anywhere for long, eventually assembles a sort of magpie nest of cultural items from which the possibility of humanity can hatch. Self is obsessive. His intellect swings across its subjects like a headlight, and, once it locks on, won't let go until it's seen what it wants us to see. There's a great rationality - it's almost as dismissive as J G Ballard's or John Gray's - and great rage, but is there any of the tenderness Hoban always achieves? Well, in a weird way, this time, there is. Michelle and Dave aren't caricatures. They've messed up their lives, but they're encouraged to stumble towards some sort of self-knowledge. This time even the psychologists - Zack Busner makes a predictable appearance - seem benign, and achieve something like a cure. Will Self is such an overpowering presence in his own books that it's sometimes difficult to tell what he's actually written. Behind satire, deep anxiety always lies; the reader is as interested in that as in an explanation of the universe inflating itself from Dave Rudman's head. The Book of Dave is a novel about trying to come back from the brink of something without quite knowing what it is. Despite his evident articulacy, Dave can't say what's happened to him - he can't lay blame. It wasn't his upbringing, it wasn't the job, it wasn't Michelle, or even, really, the loss of his relationship with his son; it wasn't the depression, or the drugs, or the psychosis, or his book, or even his eventual recovery. Those things, and the indescribably complex feedback relationships between them, serve only to suggest something else, something deeper, some malaise that can only be articulated by a description of its symptoms. As with Dave, so with his times. M John Harrison's latest novel is Light (Gollancz). Will Self appears at the Guardian Hay festival tomorrow at 11.30am (www.hayfestival.com). To order The Book of Dave for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-self.1 [Dave Rudman]'s friends went to university, but, craving London "like an identity", he stayed behind, became a cabbie, and in 1987, with the "matte black chrysalis" of Thatcherism splitting open to reveal tinted glass wings, married Michelle, a woman struggling "to keep up with her idea of who she ought to be". Thirteen years later Michelle has fled to Hampstead, the lawyers and the Child Support Agency are managing the remains of their relationship, and Dave can't get time with his son. Instead he drives all night, medicates his rage and "fingers the shameful site of his failed hair transplant". His cab is a rubbish bin of old sandwich wrappers. He smells. He wants revenge. All he has left of the life he started with is the Knowledge - that map of London every cabbie must carry in his head - and his homophobic, misogynist, self-pitying inner monologue: being a product of the times, and as susceptible to a high-concept notion as his author, Dave interprets the one in terms of the other and turns it into a book, which he buries in Michelle's garden in the night. It's a curious method of publication. It's an act of complex spite, an act of love. It's a legacy to the son with whom he can no longer make contact. As a result, Self's distant future, despite its bizarre social perspectives and cartoonlike visual qualities (not to say a quest plot which could grace an episode of Xena Warrior Princess ), proves less interesting than his recent past, which is full-on Blatcherite London, best expressed in the psychoeconomic arc of Michelle Brodie. Michelle's career in display - fashionista, exhibition organiser, trophy wife - rewards her with the ownership of a little Hampstead lingerie shop called Liberation, its window full of "flesh pink, organdie and eau-de-nil scraps, worth, weight for weight, more than currency". The Queen Anne house she shares with her second husband and Dave's son, Carl, has 12 12-paned windows, "a gross of affluence". "This, surely," she reflects, "was what had been meant for her all along?" Meanwhile, Dave is cruising the underbelly of London, carrying "junkies to score in the All Saints Road, tarts to fuck in Mayfair". London draws out Self's best, although even here he will over-reach for an effect. Driving the cab into Heathrow, Dave thinks that the submachine guns of the armed police look "like necklaces on their Kevlar decolletage", a gruelling search for a simile which doesn't quite exist. - M John Harrison.
Kirkus Review
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 A Clockwork 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This searing satire maps the unraveling of London cabbie Dave Rudman's life--and the resulting Book of Dave he prints on metal pages and buries in his former backyard after his ex-wife cuts off visitations with his son. Meanwhile, sometime in the twenty-sixth century or beyond (dating of the period is pegged to the purported discovery of The Book of Dave ), England has entered a second Dark Age; the country, now called Ing, is broken apart by rising seas and spiritually bankrupted by the twisted teachings of Dave, which mix mad misogynistic dictates with the legendary knowledge of London streets (the runs and the points ) that the city's cabdrivers must internalize. On the former heights of Hampstead, now known as the isle of Ham, villagers live side by side with the gentle motos--walruslike creatures who talk like lisping human children, products of twenty-first-century genetic engineering. As present-day Rudman slowly reclaims his life, the future sons of Ham seek out Dave's rumored second book--the one recanting his earlier ravings and giving mummies and daddies permission to love each other again. But as Dave's ex prophetically muses, everyday life was made up of a series of small botched actions, which, although instantly forgotten, nonetheless ruined everything. This is as rousing an indictment of organized religion--and especially fundamentalism--as readers are likely to encounter in the post-9/11 canon. --Frank Sennett Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
