I found The Book of Dave, Will Self’s 6th novel, a difficult read at times, and almost gave up (much to my disgust) a couple of chapters in, as I found the dialect-rich prose that parts of the novel are written in a struggle to follow. Ultimately though, I persevered, and once I had got to grips with ‘mockni’ (a language based on a combination of slang, text-speak and cockney), found a witty, scathing and an all too frighteningly possible vision of the future of humanity.
The eponymous Dave is a taxi driver, living in turn of the millennium London and battling his estranged wife for contact with his son. Dave is flawed - misogynistic, racist, homophobic – and obsessed with The Knowledge, viewing London as a series of runs and points, his cab being the only place he feels at ease. As he slips further in to depression, Dave begins writing the Book, a treatise on how relationships between men, women and children should be governed. He then buries the Book in the back garden of his wife’s new home for his son to find.
Interspersed with the ‘Dave’ chapters are those set at some indeterminate time in the future, after the UK has been submerged by water and exists as a series of islands. Dave’s Book has been found and developed in to a religion – Davinity – and this new code decrees that men and women live separately, with children spending part of the week with the women and then at ‘Changeover’ moving across to the homes of the men. Questioning the Book is punished through torture and exile. The lead character in these sections, Carl, is conscious of the iniquity of the Book’s teachings and begins a quest to discover what happened to his absent father, said to have discovered a second, more compassionate Book and tried to enlighten his compatriots as to its contents.
Whilst on the surface the characters in the novel appear to be disagreeable, there is actually deep emotional warmth to them and as a reader I found myself rooting for the anti heroes throughout. The complexity and cross-referring of the storylines is cleverly handled – at times you can see direct correlations between the events of ‘now’ and the future, at others the unveiling is a slow-burn process. If you’re a fan of Will Self and his erudite vocabulary then this is the book for you, but it is not, I suspect, the best introduction to his works.
The eponymous Dave is a taxi driver, living in turn of the millennium London and battling his estranged wife for contact with his son. Dave is flawed - misogynistic, racist, homophobic – and obsessed with The Knowledge, viewing London as a series of runs and points, his cab being the only place he feels at ease. As he slips further in to depression, Dave begins writing the Book, a treatise on how relationships between men, women and children should be governed. He then buries the Book in the back garden of his wife’s new home for his son to find.
Interspersed with the ‘Dave’ chapters are those set at some indeterminate time in the future, after the UK has been submerged by water and exists as a series of islands. Dave’s Book has been found and developed in to a religion – Davinity – and this new code decrees that men and women live separately, with children spending part of the week with the women and then at ‘Changeover’ moving across to the homes of the men. Questioning the Book is punished through torture and exile. The lead character in these sections, Carl, is conscious of the iniquity of the Book’s teachings and begins a quest to discover what happened to his absent father, said to have discovered a second, more compassionate Book and tried to enlighten his compatriots as to its contents.
Whilst on the surface the characters in the novel appear to be disagreeable, there is actually deep emotional warmth to them and as a reader I found myself rooting for the anti heroes throughout. The complexity and cross-referring of the storylines is cleverly handled – at times you can see direct correlations between the events of ‘now’ and the future, at others the unveiling is a slow-burn process. If you’re a fan of Will Self and his erudite vocabulary then this is the book for you, but it is not, I suspect, the best introduction to his works.
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