Published in Time Out Istanbul

September 2006

Will Self’s new novel is a dark vision of a sinister future ruled by an angry cabbie. Vanessa Able reads on…

It’s 523 in the year of our Dave, and London has drowned. All that remains is the island of Ham, formerly the elevated suburb of Hampstead Hill, inhabited by a small community and its Motos under the stern jurisdiction of the Driver. Daddies and mummies live on separate sides of the evian, and children spend half the week with each; the changeover being strictly enforced on WED and SUN. The PCO rules the islands of Ing according to the sacred Book, penned before MadeinChina by the all-knowing Dave, and fervently adhered to by the most Dävine of Hamsters.

This snapshot of Will Self’s dystopian post-flood England (Ing), takes place 500 years after a natural disaster that puts most of the country under water. The ancestors of the survivors live under the rule of the Book of Dave, a seething rant written by a racist and misogynist London cab driver, addressed to his forcibly estranged son during a nervous breakdown in the year 2000. The book, which was buried in a fit of madness in his ex-wife’s back garden in Hampstead, is recovered after the flood and interpreted as a sacred manuscript and list of commandments by which to order society. ‘The Book of Dave’ swings between these two narratives of the present and the future.

Inspired by various post-apocalyptic visions such as JG Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World’, Self’s tongue is firmly in cheek as he creates a race whose common language Mokni, preferred by laymen to the more sophisticated and formal Arpee. Mokni falls somewhere between the phrases of Beowulf, James Joyce, cockney and the new idioms of text messaging, as Hamsters greet each other with a salutary “Ware 2, guv?” the reply to which is always “2 Nu Lundun”. Initially, it requires reading out loud, as the Hamsters also teach themselves to read the mysterious ciphers of their sacred Book:

“ Iss nó nó, iss no-t no-t. Ve Búk iz awl in Arpee, C. Vese wurds wiv ough in em – vair trikki. Sumtyms vair off sahnds lyke coff, uvvatyms vair ow sahnds lyke plow…”

Self takes the kind of thinly disguised swing at received religion that might have earned him condemnation at the stake in less tolerant times: in one interview with the Telegraph, he alludes to an interest in the studies of biblical archaeology and textual exegesis in Israel that have demonstrated a lack of historical evidence for a large portion of the Old Testament. His sincere and unyielding take on the world of the Hamsters, and their accidental devotion to the haphazard precepts of a long-dead man in declining mental health, is brilliant in its poignant parody of fundamentalism.

To boot, this Orwellian satire is reinforced with some interesting psychoanalysis: Dave, the counterfeit god and real-life taxi-driver, is also father to an estranged son of a woman with whom he had a one-night stand followed by a shambled marriage. His breakdown comes as a result of finding himself at the bottom of a heap of Freudian male complexes, including the humiliation of the cuckold, the dishonour of the undermined breadwinner, and, most tragically, the painful uncertainty of fatherhood.

The grievances Dave suffers at the hands of his wife are repaid in a distant future where ‘dads’, feeding off his chronicled anger, subjugate their womenfolk, who hide their bodies under ‘cloakyfings’ and are banned from any interaction with men apart from the necessities of reproduction. The lives of Hamster women progress in three stages: the adolescent ‘opares’ live with the daddies and perform childcare duties for them until they reach childbearing age themselves, at which point they become ‘mummies’. A woman too old to have children is a ‘boiler’, and women without children are, of course, ‘lezzas’.

What saves the book from becoming just another dark prophecy of the miseries of humankind is that Self doesn’t allow the story to lapse into a complete godless anarchy: in fact there are many very beautiful passages depicting the characters during moments of true spiritual epiphany outside of the enforced doctrines. The heroes in the story are the figures who form new ideas through the questioning of old ones. They quickly inspire others and acquire followings, whilst simultaneously being persecuted as ‘flyers’ or heretics.

These flyers are usually personalities who have been imbued with more than a fair whack of ‘mummyself’, a kind of feminine softness, or intuition, that the children of Ing learn from their mothers during the precious half-week that they are allowed to see them. In fact mummyself is a form of salvation from the main destructive force in the book, the unhappiness of insecurity, or the insecurity of unhappiness: summarized by Self in describing the tributaries of a mighty “river of masculine unknowing.”

Notorious for his verbal dexterity and artful parodies, Will Self has garnered quite a reputation as a journalist and author in the UK in recent years. ‘With ‘The Book of Dave’ he delivers further proof of his contemporary mastermind; a brilliance that works not only in the harder, more academic realms of literature, language and satire, but also in the softer areas of his own mummyself.

The Book of Dave is published by Penguin.