Product Description

"The Book of Dave" is based around the rants of Dave Rudman, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, who writes his woes down and buries them only to have them discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London. Will Self's big bold book dares to take on the grand themes in the grand manner. It is at once a profound meditation upon the nature of received religion; a love story; a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #286813 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• 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

Deep, dark and brilliant - but not my idea of fun.
The Book of Dave looks at the logical conclusions of the rise in our society of acrimonious divorce, with the dice loaded against fathers in terms of both access and child support. Will Self presents the bleak, flawed life of Dave, a bigoted, occasionally violent London cabbie who is fighting to sustain access to his son. Dave, in an anti-depressant fuelled psychosis, writes and buries his own book of holy law, based on the Knowledge, his hatred of `mummies' and his longing for `the lost boy'. Self juxtaposes this with a grim post-apocalyptic vision of the future, where Dave's book has been unearthed and adopted as the new religion. Relationship breakdown, domestic violence against women and hatred and disenfranchisement between parents hasn't just become the norm, it's now the law.

The Book of Dave is as adventurous, inventive and socially-relevant as, say, Great Apes but it just doesn't have the laughs of Will Self's earlier fiction. His sense of the ridiculous that makes his earlier books so funny is present but is drowned by a relentlessly depressing story of cruelty, despair and failure which at times is hard for the reader to bear. Some readers might find the first sight of the dialogue off-putting as the majority of it is written phonetically but it's actually just Eastenders-style Cockney and is much more accessible than the narration in Anthony Burgess' brilliant A Clockwork Orange, for example.

It's been said before that people are either fans of Will Self's journalism or fans of his fiction. Personally, I'm in awe of his fiction. This particular example of it didn't make me laugh but it was as unnerving, intelligent and compelling as the best of his earlier work.

Not for everyone
I suspect this is not a book for the masses.

As other reviewers have noted, the novel does have two strands narrated across alternating chapters - one set in the very recent past following Dave the Cabbie and one in the far future, where Dave the Cabbie's demented ramblings have sparked off a new world religion.

I suspect that if one had the patience, there is a work of genius bursting to get out. The references from the future turn up later in the text as deriving from the past. Read across is not always obvious, and one comes to accept eccentricities from the future before realising how far out of context they have become from references in the present.

The phonetically rendered vernacular is irritating, although I rather liked cloakyfings. But as with other texts written in vernacular, the use of it becomes both less frequent and less irritating as the novel progresses. And underneath it all is a brilliantly detailed vision of a future dystopian society.

The plots in the two stories are set out in non-linear style and each has a cast of similarly named characters, makign it quite difficult to follow. However, each plot is engaging in its own way. And whislt the Dave the Taximan story is the most gripping, the far future story is more poignant because of its finality. The Dave the Taximan story offers a rationale for the later events, but one knows, ultimately, where the story will end up. The downside of the interleaved narratives, of course, is that the penultimate chapter has to reach a crescendo, and then the last chapter has to work up to a second one when you really feel as though the story's finished.

The characters themselves are less well drawn in the future narrative than the complex characters of the recent past. Dave the Cabbie is not the racist, mysoginist bigot portrayed in the blurb. In fact, he is repelled by his colleagues who are that way inclined. He is caring and sensitive, and that is probably his downfall as he finds his life spinning out of control. This adds to the irony of Dave's book becoming a sacred text. There are wonderful cameos from the Skip Tracer and the Fighting Fathers (or whatever they called themselves).

Overall, this is a wonderful and funny satire on the nature of religion and personal destiny, along with some dazzlingly imaginative speculation of a far future revisitation of mediaeval values. It is heavy going, though, with dense plotting and lengthy detail. Worth it, though, and it deserves to get somewhere in the annual awards round.

Tedious
I got a third of the way through this book and by then had realised that every other chapter was going to be written in an invented future language. Slow to decipher, tedious and an unrewarding excercise.