The Book of Dave A Novel
by Will Self
Bloomsbury USA, 416 pp., $24.95
The chief charm, and perhaps the major fault, of this remarkable novel is its casual inventiveness. On the one hand, The Book of Dave conjures two fascinating worlds out of clever allusions to and elaborations of literary tropes, religious ideas, and the effluvia of common culture. This absorbs the reader and sustains the book for awhile. On the other hand, the author undermines the profound questions his satire poses by ending the book too conventionally and almost dismissively, leaving most of the characters in cardboard. At times the reader wants to defend the book from the author who has so ably won the reader's loyalty.
The Book of Dave is the English writer Will Self's fifth novel, and among his most ambitious and imaginative. Critically acclaimed, as well as controversial, in Britain, Self deliberately tries to unsettle the reader by presenting grotesque but vaguely parallel worlds. Previous novels, for instance, involved a man and woman who swapped sexual organs, an artist who finds himself in a world dominated by apes, and a woman who dies and moves to a community of the dead in the London suburbs. Self sustains these stories, which essentially rest on one or a few off-kilter notions, by the sheer force of his relentless prose and the provocative ideas it constantly raises. Finally, like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, Self combines low and high culture into a polymorphous carnival of words and ideas. The reader is sometimes breathless just trying to take it all in.
All of this characterizes The Book of Dave. The novel concerns the descent into madness of Dave Rudman, a bitter London cabbie in an acrimonious custody battle with his ex-wife. Fueled by depression, medication, and dementia, Dave pens a ranting manifesto that includes his encyclopedic knowledge of London's streets as well as a plan for society based on "fair" divorce: Mummies and daddies live apart and share their children equally during the week. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife's backyard, and, after an environmental cataclysm floods most of Britain, the rediscovered volume becomes the holy book of a new society. Some 500 years "After Dave," or "A.D.," a young boy named Carl and his teacher try to find Carl's father, a prophet who was exiled as a heretic. Self shuttles between the two storylines, in which two occasionally mirroring plots unfold.
This fantastic premise is pregnant with potential, satirical and otherwise. Self exploits the potential cleverly in some places and profoundly in others. For instance, the people of the new world speak a dialect of English--Mockni--which Self spins from cockney, the Esperanto of pop commercial culture, and sheer imagination. This is both an appropriate innovation for an author who complains that he runs out of words and a sly rebuke to critics who complain that his prose is verbose and overwrought. Moreover, Mockni is amusing. "Woolly" is the word for sheep; "bubbery" that for a tweed or rough woolen cloth; "boiler" means grandmother; and a "queer" is a man without children. It's a challenge at first, but Self provides a dictionary at the back of the book.
More profoundly, though, 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. These themes appear in the context of two failed relationships between fathers and sons. In the story of Dave himself, Self weaves the inevitable failures of the cabbie's misbegotten marriage into the fabric of postmodern English society. Dave's London revels in the antagonisms, inadequacies, selfishness, and loneliness that the end of an age has laid bare. No religion or social order shields the characters from the emptying effect Dave's divorce has on all involved, especially Dave and his son Carl. Dave's descent into madness ultimately seems a graphic dissection of a father insisting on how much his son matters to him, even as he loses him, in a world where little matters very much.
The second story takes place in the dystopia of Ing, which is governed by the PCO--i.e., the Public Carriage Office of London. The PCO has imposed Dave's intolerant, misogynistic, rigid dogma upon the people, punishing any deviation as "flying" (heresy). Cruel "drivers" (priests) in black robes bearing the sign of the wheel jealously protect the power of the PCO. This is an obvious and tired riff on the familiar religions (with particular references to Catholicism and Islam), and, left at that, it would be rather boring. The interesting ideas appear when Self characterizes the spiritual or religious sentiments that the PCO represses: Carl's longing for meaning and knowledge, his sense of separation from "davine" orthodoxy, and the pain of children forced to live between--and really without--parents.
In the background is the story of Carl's father, a prophet who preached that the strictures of the PCO could be abandoned in favor of a liberating doctrine of living life as best as one can according to love instead of rules. To a certain extent, this part of the book recapitulates the essential tension in religion between the prophet and the priest. The one preaches an exciting message of religious fervor while the other must maintain a church that organizes, disciplines, and ameliorates the lives of people on a daily basis. The dynamic has reappeared throughout Christian history, from St. Anthony's flight into the desert to Luther's Reformation to the contemporary debate between the orthodox and the progressive in the mainstream denominations.
These serious ideas emerge from the fun and fascination of interpreting Self's allusive vision. Indeed, the book does not compel this commentary at all; one mark of The Book of Dave's sophistication is the room it leaves for readers to fill its gaps with their own impressions. Self's ideas and imaginings tumble out willy-nilly, trundling through the text with refreshing discretion. This presentation is charming, but a book that emanates from and lives on ideas must ultimately do them justice, and here Self stumbles. In the last portion things suddenly fall into place and postmodern dystopia portrayed earlier evaporates amid several dei ex machinis. Self finally seems to urge upon us that we should just tend to our gardens like Voltaire's Candide. But after all the social dysfunction traced here, this is unsatisfying and shortchanges the complex portrait of intellectual and social life that Self paints.
It is usually shallow to object to the "message" of a novel. But the intellectual shortcoming of The Book of Dave derives ultimately from insufficient attention to literary qualities. Self has declared, "I have great difficulty with plot and I have never got on with character, and have always found them very artificial and essentially romantic. . . . I have largely written about ideas." He is right. Aside from Dave himself, most of Self's characters remain abstract roles rather than complex persons. As a consequence Self's ideas often seem naked and unguarded. But they are most rich when enmeshed in the pathos of the story's personalities.
Self's sheer skill and creativity with the English language and the book's bubbling fount of ideas take the novel quite far. But when it ends, the reader finds himself rather stranded. This doesn't unsettle the reader; it merely disappoints.
Daniel Sullivan is a writer in Chicago.