The Book of Dave

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These echo the talking cow that Douglas Adams regaled his readers with in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The present-day story is full of brutally honest descriptions of unsympathetic characters, foolish decisions and bad luck. e. England) whereby men and women lead separate lives but share childcare in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Dave, which is regarded as a sacred text, but which is evidently the book written by Dave Rudman and buried in a Hampstead garden some two thousand years earlier.

There's a glossary at the back of the book to help you become accustomed to the language and it does make reading the first chapter a little slow. But Will Self kept the focus quite personal, and created a strange and convincing world for it, without the need to drown everything in elaborate detail. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. To be fair, the lack of quotation marks isn't nearly as limiting as you'd think – I soon barely noticed them not being there – and while the regularly flicking back to the glossary is hard work at first, as the book progresses you find yourself needing to do it less and less (so long as you're not getting distracted while you're reading that is).Dave challenges our assumptions about the boundaries between human and machine intelligence, while captivating readers with a tightly plotted narrative full of unexpected twists. London cabbie Dave Rudman is gotten with troubles marital and otherwise, he's squibbed a manifesto of 'knowledge' for his estranged son though the book reads rife with misogynistic malevolence withal the 'runs and points' of a cabbie's Knowledge/London town. A rant against religion and society, a historical detective story set in the far future, and a tribute to the sometimes fraught relations between father and son, The Book of Dave take on grand themes in a grand manner and clearly positions Will Self in the pantheon of Britain’s contemporary greats. The first is, through its preoccupation with fractured families and feuding tribes, to remind people that through our intolerant, dissatisfied culture where everything is immediate and people are comparatively greedier and more self-obsessed, children are being given the wrong message with regards to both the sanctity of marriage and human relationships in general. It's certainly not an easy book to read to begin with and you have to work quite hard to understand some of the language used in the future chapters as it is a mixture of phonetic Cockney, taxi-driver terminology and the language adopted by the imaginary society that have embraced Dave's doctrine.

The future world, or London at least, is governed from this book—the last remaining edict of civilisation. Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012, and Shark. The present-day characters speak a phonetic cockney that frequently has to be read aloud (at least in your head) to understand it. But it is Will's fault that he cribbed (read: ransacked) Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, which I couldn't get through. This book felt somewhat moralistic and at times utterly dry and overly ambitious, especially considering how flaccid the ending was.And that language has normal words: Words like “drivers” then “motos”, “toyist”, “queers”, “screen”, “MadeinChina”, “lawyer”, “lettuce”, “intercom”, “irony”, “fare”, “flying”. Despite discovering that Carl is actually Cal's son, Dave slowly recovers his sanity and, during a stay in hospital, forms a relationship with Phyllis Vance, the mother of Steve, another patient. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. This album has components of all those authors, but then again, a person can read hundreds of authors influence into a text if he looks hard enough.

As someone with a terrible mind for storing plot detail, this book places no onus upon the reader to keep on top of the terminology since much of it is a mere bonus and indulgence.

The central spine of the story is that Dave Rudman – a London cabbie in the midst of marital, personal and nervous breakdown – committed an inchoate polemic to indelible metal-paged print.