The Book of Dave
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First edition
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| Author | Will Self |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
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Publication date
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1 June 2006 |
| Media type | Print Paperback |
| Pages | 495 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 64313267 |
The Book of Dave is a 2006 novel by English author Will Self.
The Book of Dave 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 dogmatic, cruel, and misogynistic religion that takes hold in the remnants of southern England and London following catastrophic flooding. The future portions of the novel are set from 523 AD (After Dave).
The book alternates between Dave's original experience and that of the future devotees of the religion inspired by his writings. Much of the dialogue in The Book of Dave is written in Mokni, an invented dialect of English derived from Cockney, taxi-drivers' and Dave's own usage, text-messaging, and vocabulary peculiar to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For example, an unmarried woman is an "opare" (au pair); Dave called Muslim women's concealing garments "cloakyfings"—his adherents use the word for women's outerwear in general. Spellings are phonetic and can be opaque, making the book particularly difficult for those unfamiliar with the speech of England and London: "bugsbunny" for rabbit is easy enough, but "beefansemis" for an architectural style is less clear—it presumably comes from "[Eliza]bethan semi[-detached house]s." A glossary is provided.
The book resembles, in part, Riddley Walker, a 1981 novel by Russell Hoban for which Self provided an introduction to the new 2002 edition.
According to the author himself, writing in The Guardian in 2007, he was inspired to write the book after having read The Bible Unearthed, a text that shows how archaeological discoveries imply that large elements of the Old Testament have no basis in historical reality whatsoever. He writes that he intended to suggest imaginatively the notion he received from Finkelstein and Silberman's book, namely that revealed religion is a necessary function of state formation, and that the content of this or that holy book is irrelevant, compared to what people make of it. At the same time, reports of increased raisings of the Thames Barrier had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis.
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