The Book of Dave

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007)

The Book of Dave is a 2006 novel by English author Will Self. The book is inspired, in part, by Riddley Walker, a novel by Russell Hoban^[1] for which Self provided an introduction^[2].

It tells the story of an angry and mentally-ill London Taxi driver named Dave Rudman, who writes and has printed on metal a book of his rantings against women and thoughts on custody rights for fathers. These stem from his anger with his ex-wife, Michelle, who he believes is unfairly keeping him from his son. Equally influential in Dave's book is The Knowledge -- the intimate familiarity with the city of London required of its cabbies.

Dave buries the book, which is discovered centuries later and used as the sacred text for a misogynistic religion that takes hold in the remnants of southern England and London following catastrophic flooding. The future portions of the book are set over 500 years after its discovery. No real indication of how long the book sat undiscovered is given.

The book alternates between Dave's experience and that of the future devotees of the religion inspired by him. Much of dialogue in The Book of Dave is written in Mockney, a dialect of English derived from Cockney, "The Knowledge," text-messaging, and vocabulary peculiar to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For example, the generic term for a hot meal is "curry" and for breakfast, "starbucks." Spellings are often idiosyncratic, but a glossary is provided.

The Book of Dave can be considered to be a parody of modern religion especially with regard to blind faith. For example, the "Hamsters," the inhabitants of the island of Ham (actually the higher, unflooded part of Hampstead Heath), believe that certain verses out of the book are sacred "hymns", where in fact they are just excerpts from the Knowledge. Additionally, aspects of Dave's life are ritualised into legal requirements: such as "changeover", the act of custodial exchange of children, and parents being forced to live apart even though they would be happy living together. "This challenges the assumption of whether people should follow something just because it is written in an old book" - Will Self.