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Review
"Self seamlessly toggles between the two time periods, giving equal depth to frustrated, sympathetic Dave and to the inhabitants of the post-apolcalyptic future. The bastardized Cockney language of 523 A.D. (anno Dave), while sometimes difficult to understand, is one of the book's most puzzling yet satisfying joys. B+."--Gilbert Cruz, "Entertainment Weekly"
"The first 90 pages of this book read like a cross between "Jabberwocky" and "A Clockwork Orange." It's a devilishly catchy argot and once readers sink into it, they will find themselves wondering if the characters are traveling norf or souf... .Like Martin Amis, with whom he's often compared, Self marries his verbal acrobatics to social critique, gamely taking on corporate culture, family law, London urban sprawl, religion, racial division and the received wisdom of women's magazines and the pub. ...You're left with the intoxication of Self's wordplay and the clarity of his visions."--Regina Marler, "Los Angeles Times""" "A richer, more engaging enterprise... 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." - Donna Rifkind, "Washington Post"
"Fans of Self's previous edgy satires won't be disappointed with The Book of Dave, his latest riff on the strange complexities of the modern world. Balancing stories of pained intimacies between fathers and sons, it also brilliantly caricatures the fervor of literal-minded religious fundamentalism... Blisteringly astute." - Geoffrey Bateman, "Rocky Mountain News"
"Remarkable... Among his most ambitious and imaginative...The Book of Dave seems to be about the crippling nihilism of a world without transcendent meaning and the tensions and contradictions of the religious personality." - Daniel Sullivan, "Weekly Standard""" "The apocalypse that created the world in Self's new novel somehow incinerated all the Shakespeare and the Tolstoy and the Bible, leaving only the angry scrawlings of a divorced London cabdriver named Dave upon which to build a new culture. Dave's ruined life is worshipped and codified-bitterness as religion. Men and women live apart. Children's weeks are divided into mummytime and daddytime, and young women are known as Opares. The Book of Dave can be hard going. The language Self invents takes off from bangers-and-mash quaintness into near incomprehensibility, with jarring phonetic spellings and a whole goofball nomenclature. The Milky Way is the dashboard; the sun is the foglamp... It sounds as though it could devolve into inanity (in fact, the religion is known as Davinanity), but Self somehow breathes life into it. It's grim and compelling-a world to get lost in. That is, if we're not lost already. BUY IT." - "New York Magazine" "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 thesurvivors 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." - "New Yorker"
"In The Book of Dave, his satiric masterpiece thus far, Self proves again that with talent like his, it's never the what, but the how... Though his invention (often via inversion) of a future language owes an obvious debt to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and Orwell, Self spins his own brilliantly macaronic web between Now and Later... Self's inventiveness and control are dazzling... Self's novel achieves depth not by skewering organized religion, though it does so quite adroitly, but by exploring the many grids of modern despair, how we find ourselves cast adrift, and how, much like Dave, whose loneliness is unabated by the 'hateful company of his own kind, ' we fester unseen... A gripping, funny, and pleasurably intricate novel." - Sam Lipsyte, "Bookforum""" "Self satires the strange complexities of the modern world by juxtaposing two stories: the first set in London roughly 500 years in the future and the second involving a modern-day cab driver. The cab driver's written rants about an ex-wife, uncovered in the future London, provide the moral, legal and cultural foundation of the new world order in this blisteringly astute novel." -"Rocky Mountain News"
"The first 90 pages of this book read like a cross between "Jabberwocky" and "A Clockwork Orange." It's a devilishly catchy argot and once readers sink into it, they will find themselves wondering if the characters are traveling norf or souf... .Like Martin Amis, with whom he's often compared, Self marries his verbal acrobatics to social critique, gamely taking on corporate culture, family law, London urban sprawl, religion, racial division and the received wisdom of women's magazines and the pub. ...You're left with the intoxication of Self's wordplay and the clarity of his visions."--Regina Marler, "Los Angeles Times""" "A richer, more engaging enterprise... 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." - Donna Rifkind, "Washington Post"
"Fans of Self's previous edgy satires won't be disappointed with The Book of Dave, his latest riff on the strange complexities of the modern world. Balancing stories of pained intimacies between fathers and sons, it also brilliantly caricatures the fervor of literal-minded religious fundamentalism... Blisteringly astute." - Geoffrey Bateman, "Rocky Mountain News"
"Remarkable... Among his most ambitious and imaginative...The Book of Dave seems to be about the crippling nihilism of a world without transcendent meaning and the tensions and contradictions of the religious personality." - Daniel Sullivan, "Weekly Standard""" "The apocalypse that created the world in Self's new novel somehow incinerated all the Shakespeare and the Tolstoy and the Bible, leaving only the angry scrawlings of a divorced London cabdriver named Dave upon which to build a new culture. Dave's ruined life is worshipped and codified-bitterness as religion. Men and women live apart. Children's weeks are divided into mummytime and daddytime, and young women are known as Opares. The Book of Dave can be hard going. The language Self invents takes off from bangers-and-mash quaintness into near incomprehensibility, with jarring phonetic spellings and a whole goofball nomenclature. The Milky Way is the dashboard; the sun is the foglamp... It sounds as though it could devolve into inanity (in fact, the religion is known as Davinanity), but Self somehow breathes life into it. It's grim and compelling-a world to get lost in. That is, if we're not lost already. BUY IT." - "New York Magazine" "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 thesurvivors 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." - "New Yorker"
"In The Book of Dave, his satiric masterpiece thus far, Self proves again that with talent like his, it's never the what, but the how... Though his invention (often via inversion) of a future language owes an obvious debt to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and Orwell, Self spins his own brilliantly macaronic web between Now and Later... Self's inventiveness and control are dazzling... Self's novel achieves depth not by skewering organized religion, though it does so quite adroitly, but by exploring the many grids of modern despair, how we find ourselves cast adrift, and how, much like Dave, whose loneliness is unabated by the 'hateful company of his own kind, ' we fester unseen... A gripping, funny, and pleasurably intricate novel." - Sam Lipsyte, "Bookforum""" "Self satires the strange complexities of the modern world by juxtaposing two stories: the first set in London roughly 500 years in the future and the second involving a modern-day cab driver. The cab driver's written rants about an ex-wife, uncovered in the future London, provide the moral, legal and cultural foundation of the new world order in this blisteringly astute novel." -"Rocky Mountain News"
Telegraph, May 20, 2006
The Book of Dave is Self's most successful novel to date. Funny, frightening, moving'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
Carl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Carl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Will Self is an author that is a bit hit and miss with people, people either love his quirky tales and devour him or people are put off by the fact that he can come across as being too clever or pompous he can also be seen as being dark and this book is quite bleak, well very bleak, but he is an author that if you work at reading you will get so much out of. `The Book of Dave' is set in the recent past and the distant future. The recent past tells the tale of Dave Rudman a London taxi driver and the lead up to his marriage and then onto its break up, a break up that affects him so much he writes a book to his estranged son. A book that is discovered in the distant future and spawned a major religion, in fact everyone lives by `The Book of Dave' or else. Self uses this present to show us just what could happen in the future, and it's not the prettiest of pictures.
This is by no means a quick or easy read. Firstly Dave is not instantly a hero or a likeable chap, he is normal, extremely flawed and at first I just thought he was a waste of space, my opinion did change as his character did. The alternating chapters between the future and the recent past are made more complicated by two things, firstly is the fact that they are not in chronological order, secondly you need to learn some Mokni. Self has done something which I was originally annoyed by slightly, the lazy reader in me, and then very impressed by... he has created his own future version of cockney based not on rhyming slang but on phonetics. I should add that there is a glossary in the back of the book that helps you, though a note in the front to tell you that would be helpful as I know that lots of people put the book down after finding the Mokni a challenge and not knowing the glossary is there.
The fact that it's not in chronological order is slightly confusing but many writers use this style in order that by the end everything slots into place and with this book it does, and it has some very clever twists. My only slight problem was all the same names in the distant future, I got totally confused a few times, however with perseverance I was fine in the end. People will either love this book or they will hate it, it's not for everyone. However if you persevere it's a very clever story from a very clever author and one that I would recommend as being worth the effort.
This is by no means a quick or easy read. Firstly Dave is not instantly a hero or a likeable chap, he is normal, extremely flawed and at first I just thought he was a waste of space, my opinion did change as his character did. The alternating chapters between the future and the recent past are made more complicated by two things, firstly is the fact that they are not in chronological order, secondly you need to learn some Mokni. Self has done something which I was originally annoyed by slightly, the lazy reader in me, and then very impressed by... he has created his own future version of cockney based not on rhyming slang but on phonetics. I should add that there is a glossary in the back of the book that helps you, though a note in the front to tell you that would be helpful as I know that lots of people put the book down after finding the Mokni a challenge and not knowing the glossary is there.
The fact that it's not in chronological order is slightly confusing but many writers use this style in order that by the end everything slots into place and with this book it does, and it has some very clever twists. My only slight problem was all the same names in the distant future, I got totally confused a few times, however with perseverance I was fine in the end. People will either love this book or they will hate it, it's not for everyone. However if you persevere it's a very clever story from a very clever author and one that I would recommend as being worth the effort.
30 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Exceptional
In some places difficult, true, but nevertheless a stand-out piece of literature - original (the rarest of things these days), humorous and important. Deserves more recognition.
Published 4 days ago by Orson Tells
Don't judge a book by its cover
What happens when an ordinary man accidentally becomes a God?
This week I finished The Book of Dave and wow, Will Self is a genius. Read more
This week I finished The Book of Dave and wow, Will Self is a genius. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Etain OKane
Hard work, but worth it.
A very dense read to begin with, but if you stick with it you will find reward. Set partly in the present, partly in the distant future, and partly in the even more distant... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Longuspoddius
It Stays With You
This is my favourite of Will Self's novels. The world, the language, the beasts created in these pages linger long after the final page is read. Read more
Published 8 months ago by robotfish
Will Self rips apart "revealed religion"
Will Self refers to "the mad bigotry of the London cabbie, his aggresiveness loneliness, his poisonous arrogance, his fearful racism". Read more
Published 11 months ago by Howler
I loved this
There is something incredibly human about this book. Although the characters and plot are outlandish and sometimes you feel the story and characters are like cartoons, it still... Read more
Published 13 months ago by J. markey
Praise be to Dave!
Dave, a desperate London cabby rants about the misery of his life and collapsed marriage. These rants are miraculously regurgitated centuries later, evolving and corroding a mad,... Read more
Published 16 months ago by S. Elgood
It'll make you scratch your noggin.
I do find some of the reviews here puzzling, especially the comments regarding Mokni - surely it doesnt make the book THAT hard to understand? Read more
Published 18 months ago by Stephen Hudson
hard work
I made sure I finished this book as I don't like to be beaten and I hoped it would get easier, perhaps even a little jollier - It didn't! Read more
Published on 11 April 2010 by T. Peters
Hilarious concept, but a disappointing book
A hilarious concept, the blurb is brilliant and everyone I've described the book to thought it sounded great. But sadly that's where it ends. Read more
Published on 7 Nov 2009 by Sulkyblue
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