Product Description

The Book of Dave is a misogynistic, racist, homophobic rant, written by a demented London cabbie, buried in November 2001 in the Hampstead garden of his hated ex-wife and addressed to the son he idealizes rather than fathers.

Several centures pass and, as sea levels rise, the only land left in central London becomes the isolated isle of Ham. There, the Six Families scratch a meagre living from the land. Their lives, however, are full of religion. For Dave's book has been disinterred and transformed into Holy Scripture. The peasants know his text by heart. The doctrines of Breakup and Changeover are rigid and absolute. Only one islander, Symun, remains incredulous. Rather than finding certainty in the Book and its Knowledge, he finds only questions. Desperate to discover answers, Symun embarks on an epic journey into the Forbidden Zone, and eventually to the terrifying heart of New London ...

Big, bold and dazzlingly inventive, Will Self's fifth novel is at once a profound meditation upon the nature of revealed religion, a love story, a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future. A gripping read from start to finish, it proves there is at least one contemporary novelist prepared to take on the grand themes in the grand manner.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158694 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 495 pages

GQ, July 2006
'Vivid, visceral and breathtakingly ambitious, this is Self's best yet'

Telegraph, May 20, 2006
The Book of Dave is Self's most successful novel to date. Funny, frightening, moving'

Arena, July 2006
'Epic and bitterly funny, this stew of satire and linguistic wizardry is everything you'd expect from Britain's master of misanthropy'

Customer Reviews

A flawed epic
Alot of gushing praise for this book that i feel is slightly undeserved as the central premise is slightly obvious, man writes book, in the future book is mistaken for religious text and becomes a religion. The phonetic language in the future made the 'future' chapters largely intelligible definitely read the translations at the back of the book before you begin!

Another problem with the book is that is filled with 80% hate and 20% redemption, completely pessimistic view on the future and Dave Rudman's perspective is negative, racist and jarring. This is all well and good but where is the balance? Do people really need to read about how crap London is? and then find out that in the future, guess what if nothing is done it will be even worse! (who wants to think like that?!)

Yes the book is well written and the use of language is original, but the outlook is so pessimistic as to discourage a second read.

So hard to understand
I can see I'm in the minority but i really really didn't enjoy this book. The mocked up and phonetic sounding language was excruciating to read and unfortunately i just couldn't get used to it - which was a shame as it continues throughout the use of the book. You never got to find out more about the Hams and generally, I didn't find it a gripping read although I think the concept was a really good one and has led me to apply it to religions of today!

Organised religion is absurd and the postnuclear family is grim
The Book of Dave opens in unfamiliar territory: a bizarre, apparently post-apocolyptic colony of the far future, described in Stanley Unwin pidgin English-cum-text speak mixed with EastEnders/Jade Goody mockney using references which can only be made sense of by gradually piecing them together from their context (and/or reference to the Arpee/English lexicon at the back of the book). It takes you a few pages to adjust to this new paradigm but once achieved, the opening chapter describes an isolated island, 'Ham', within the flooded environs of what used to be the capital. Ham's population share a symbiotic relationship with 'Motos' - some kind of hog/innocent child/taxi hybrid. The Hamsters are ruled and, from time visited, by totalitarian external authorities from London to whom they owe obeisance, who ensure that tithes are paid and that the colony is observing the official religious ordnances prescribed by, and interpreted from, the writings of the prophet Dave, written five centuries earlier (around 2002). But who was this prophet?

After a random, rash sexual liaison with a fare, disaffected London cabbie Dave Rudman finds himself locked in an unhappy marriage, becoming increasingly isolated from his wife, his friends and finally separated by restraining order from his son Carl. Some time during this inexorable descent to a nervous breakdown via disaffection, depression and drug abuse Dave writes a quasi religious manifesto, transcribed from a conflated, spewing stream of his jaded life - lawyers, restraining orders, the parental reconciliation self-help group, the Public Carriage Office and final demands - all are melded within a framework of cabbing and The Knowledge hardwired via his hippocampus.

The story then alternates back and forth between these two asynchronous narratives, each mirroring the other with the 21st century characters all having their Dävine counterparts projected forward 500 years. Whilst one backtracks over the circumstances of Dave's life leading up to his nervous collapse and the burying of his first Book, the other illustrates how these writings have been disinterred, [mis]interpreted and enforced as a religion over the intervening time, developing into a civilisation where Jeremy Kyle meets Lord of the Flies rendered in Jabberwocky. In fact the future society of Ham reminded me a lot of 'Daily Mail Island' - an imaginary reality TV series from the brilliant Radio Times spoof website 'TV Go Home'. The premise of this show was that a bunch of people were thrown together in a captive environment with no contact with civilisation other than through the pages of the Daily Mail.

As Dave starts to recuperate and realise just how sick he has been, he is encouraged to write a second book - an Epistle to Carl the 'Lost Boy' - refuting the deluded loneliness and bigotry of the first. As this is happening, so in the future the religious doctrines established from the first book are being similarly questioned: Symun is the first 'Flyer' (heretic) who, in a moment of epiphany, claims to have been exposed to this second book of Dave. He is followed by his son, Carl, a messianic 'Gaffer' figure who, with the help of a Teacher (whose 21st century counterpart is a psychiatrist), has similar reservations about how the Dävinic religion has been misinterpreted and turns against the authorities and adherents of the first book.

The blurring of these two incongruous worlds is brilliantly handled by Self with his usual clever playfulness with the English language - the jarring-but-perfect metaphor, the free invention of portmanteau words. Thrown in at the deep end in Ham you are initially at a total loss surrounded as you are by babel, but subsequent chapters start, subtly and brilliantly, to throw light upon the strange Arpee terms and you begin to see how cleverly the mundane references of Dave's life have become ingrained in the religion and culture of Nu Lundun which, like Self's London, is as unremittingly ugly and tawdry, iniquitous and grotesque as Jonson's or Hogarth's.