Where to Guv? And so it begins and it will challenge you and if you have not lived in London or had anything to do with it most of this will go over your head. It put me in mind of Riddley Walker that other dystopian, post-apocalytic masterpiece, both in terms of language and feel.

Not an easy read at times and forbiddingly long for fiction but it does have something that most books lack. It takes on a massive set of subjects and conquers most of them easily. I liked the to-ing and fro-ing in time and I came to quite like old Dave, warts and all.

It is such an English book and reminds me of both why I loved and left England about how poetic and cruel they are as a race and how such amazing possibilities and such repression live side by side in a mutually self hating way.

If this thoroughly depressing book was the news instead of what I read in the UK Papers then I would think that things had improved over there, but instead I find that England today is far worse than any author can imagine and todays news make Dave look like a winner.

If you are English and haven't read this then you need a damn good spanking by Miss Stern

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Any time a book requires a glossary to read, I'm automatically less interested. This book appears to be an updated version of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Miller. There only interesting thing is how he makes the "current day" dialog almost as incomprehensible as the "post-apocolyptic" dialog. Couldn't finish it. ( )

"The past has become our future and in the future lie all our yesterdays."

The Book of Dave the author ponders what would happen if in 500 years from now, English society was shaped by the rantings of a 21st-century London taxi driver. The book is therefore told in two distinct parts with one being the present and the other being the distant future.

Dave Rudman is a brutish lout who when other went on to university decided to follow in the family footsteps and become a London black cab driver privately cursing his fares and virtually everyone else, particularly blacks, Jews and Arabs. Dave is not handsome either yet one day is invited upstairs by one of his fares, a beautiful woman to have sex. Seven months later, a heavily pregnant Michelle turns up on Dave's doorstep and tells him that he is the father of her unborn child. Dave decides to do the decent thing and marries her.

The marriage unsurprisingly is a disaster interspersed with many verbal and physical battles leading Dave in his frustration to also becoming abusive towards their young son. Dave and Michelle divorce and Dave fights for but is refused partial custody of his son after he attacks his ex-wife and is hit with a restraining order. Dave ultimately has something of a breakdown and is hospitalized. In one of his more lucid moments he decides to write a book for his son telling him who is to blame for his misfortune and is heavily influenced both by his limited experience with women. He has his book printed onto metal plates and buries it in Michelle's garden in the hope that his son will unearth it sometime in the future thus learning what sort of man is father was.

Several hundred years later an apocalyptic flood has destroyed Britain and Dave's book has become taken as gospel leading to the creation a harsh, crude and tyrannical society. In his book Dave decrees that men and women should live separately, except when mating, with children spending exactly half a week with each parent. His followers speak their own language, Arpee, a variant of English that reflects Dave’s own preoccupations, priests are called “Drivers,” souls are called “fares." Anything holy is referred to as “dävine,” anything evil is “chellish” (from Michelle). The future portion of the book revolves around a son trying to find out about his father who had been hauled away by the "Drivers".

This is my first Self book that I've read and I must admit that I initially struggled with the futuristic language element. So much so that I contemplated giving up on it. However, once I got a feel for it and did not have to keep referring to the partial dictionary at the back I found the whole tale rather enjoyable if totally unbelievable. An interesting diversion. ( )

This was a complex and gripping book about family, madness, love and religion, with a new vocabulary to get used to from the beginning. At first, I wasn't sure I liked the book, but the story soon caught my interest and I wanted to learn more about Dave and the future inhabitants of Ham. ( )

Like David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas, Will Self has Russell Hoban's (shorter and in some ways more compelling) Riddley Walker to thank for the idea of expressing a regressive dystopian future in a kind of wacked phonetic dialect. Whether that's a good game or a bad one, I leave to others--he does it rigorously and creatively at least. And he also succeeds in creating his own vivid picture of a post-apoco-diluvian Britain. I'm sure the social satire in the contemporary sections is deft too, but I didn't care enough to spend as much time there. I did become more engaged with the narrative (at least the future sections) than I'd thought I would from its unpromising description, which made it sound too much like a one-trick book. It's still not going on my Favorite Speculative Fiction shelf, but it gets an honorable mention. ( )