Excessive Candour
Poles of the Knowledge

Few American SF readers who come to this new novel by Will Self are likely to be as familiar with the Will Self Machine that wrote it as Will Self might expect. What Self might hope for would be an awareness—one he has slowly and properly earned in the UK, where he began his career 15 years ago as a transgressive enfant terrible whose huge adultoid vocabulary and highly public obsession with the language and gear and metaphysical tosh-tosh of drug culture struck his confreres kind of numb—that he does not write bling. Unfortunately, perhaps, this does not go without saying, certainly not in a novel so blaringly Self-made but borrowed.

Indeed, the first thing SF readers are likely to note about The Book of Dave will be the quite astonishing generical familiarity of almost every aspect of Self's large enterprise: the two mise en scenes (early 21st-century London, and the Ruined Earth archipelago that has succeeded it 500 years hence) ravenously echo, and eat out our memories of, numerous earlier SF texts with similar settings; the seamy dystopian Britain depicted in the contemporary sequences, and echoed in the archipelago bits, reads like a bravura intensification of earlier Brit liturgies of self-laceration, like Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (1962) and lots of his non-SF fallen-Catholic work as well; likewise the scatological misanthropy of its main protagonist; and likewise the various estranged dictions the book is told through (none fortunately as radical as the genuine synatactical transforms that make A Clockwork Orange so demanding). The Book of Dave comes to us festooned with labels, like a steamer trunk.

The first segment of the book is set in Ham (what was once the East London borough of Tower Hamlets), which is one island in the archipelago that is all that remains of Southern England. Prior versions of this archipelago surface variously in Richard Jefferies' After London; Or, Wild England (1885), which has the greatest opening sentence of almost any book ever; in Richard Cowper's The Road to Corlay (1978); in the stories Christopher Priest collected as The Dream Archipelago (1999); and elsewhere.

We meet young Carl Dévúsh, whom we will identify very quickly as the default hero of the sort of story we suspect we're about to read: the adolescent Hero With a Thousand Faces who is doomed to challenge the old ways, to go across the river (in this case the narrow but swollen sea) into new Territory (labyrinthine subaqueous London itself) where he will find out the truth of things and return to the land of his Fathers (by now we'll know that his Dad was the John the Baptist of the Son) in the guise of King or Messiah or maybe Victim; but the first thing we notice is the language. Specific changes in vocabulary (the sun has become the foglamp) nudhz sentences otherwise couched in normal 21st-century English, the transparent underlying narrative diction of the whole. But then he opens his mouth and this is what he says:

—Thass rì, Carl cooed, Runti, tym fer yer slorta, yeah? Ve Acks partë ul B eer vis tariff or ve nex, n Eye gott tayk yer bak 2 ve manna.

I transliterate: "That's right, Runti, time for your slaughter, yeah? The Hack's party will be here this tariff [each day is divided into three parts] or next, and I got to take you back to the manor."

We have been here before ... perhaps

We will soon discover that this diction, which is called Mockney in the text and which is rendered throughout in a phonetic very much like text messaging, echoes the actual mock-Cockney logorrhea generated by Dave himself, who is a contemporary London cab driver, and speaks in a genuine contemporary London voice; but before the reader progresses into the next chapter, where Dave is actually introduced, it will have become pretty clear that—whatever his reasons for doing so—Self has arrived here at an effect very similar to the one Russell Hoban created in Riddley Walker (1981) in order to convey a very similar estrangement. Other SF novels to enact conspicuously cognate transforms include Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn (1994) and Chris Wilson's The Wurd (1995).

[These are all British examples, but one American writer precedes them all, George Herriman, author of the transcendent Krazy Kat between 1917 and 1944. A brand-new and highly recommended collection of some of his hard-to-obtain strips—Krazy & Ignatz: "Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheeks in Powdered Beauty": Compounding the Complete Full-Page Comic Strips, 1937-38 (Fantatagraphic Books, 2006)—demonstrates the point. On 19 September 1937, we find Krazy Kat in a snit of worry, for she has learned that scientists are trying to smash the atom, which seems intolerbly cruel to her. Luckily, Ignatz Mouse is able to convince her that it doesn't hurt the atom one iota to be smashed. "Oh, I'm so gled," says Krazy, in a diction estranged from Yiddish. "I had a ida that in a l'il wile the woil would be full of l'il adams, all grippils." From here to Hoban's "Littl Shynin Man the Addom" may be a long and winding road up the century, but it shines.]

All of which seems to be leading to the judgment that in The Book of Dave Will Self has reinvented the wheel. Again.

Certainly there are problems with The Book of Dave. From the Thousand Faces to the Dream Archipelago, from specially-abled estrangement dictions to misanthropy riffs, from pre-Ruins artefacts that take the place of religion to Christian/Moslemesque clerics repoisoning the new world with their hatred of the body and the sex and the woman and the new and the free, we have been here before. Except not quite.

A powerful and incisive rant

Over and above its exuberant refusal to give us a break, what saves The Book of Dave is almost certainly Dave himself: Dave and the two-timing structure of the book. I am not a native myself, though I've lived in London for almost 40 years now, and can only assert within that limitation my sense that everything about Dave Rudman I recognized seemed beautifully caught, and that the larger moiety I did not recognize from first hand seemed true. As a young man in the 1980s he falls into cab driving in the way that young men can; the immensely detailed London he learns—in the form of the mental map of London called the Knowledge, which all legal cabbies must master—is as chthonic and veined, as rudimentary and as unendingly fractal, as the London of Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd; he falls into a bad marriage with a woman who is not evil in any cartoon fashion, but—in terms instantly recognizeble—one of the mutilated who fill the million flats; the recounting of the aftermath of their divorce—leaving her with the child and Dave in a state of rage and anguish caused by the insane British child custody laws—should be deeply familiar to anyone resident in London. Dave's London is a seethe, a map, a magpie maestoso maggotty splurge of hatred and love and stuff; and it is the first half of a topology.

The second half is, of course, the archipelago world 500 years hence, which has constructed itself around the Book of Dave, a long self-serving but powerful and incisive rant Dave Rudman has composed and buried in his ex-wife's garden, where it is discovered centuries later. Like the Knowledge—which is less an actual map than a ratking grammar of route instructions, memorization of which allows one to go from anywhere to anywhere within the vast maze of London—Dave's Book is a vade mecum, and duly becomes the Way of Life. The two poles of the novel are two iterations of its Knowledge. Their interactions—by means of which Self generates a remarkable pattern of parodic interfacings, and quite a few good jokes—comprise the true action of The Book of Dave.

At points, maybe, when we learn that the social structure of Ham is in fact a literalization of the consequences of a typical divorce decree in the London of 2000—with mummies and dads permanently separated except for rutting, and their children doing mandatory Changeover from one parent to another every few days—we feel maybe that topology has become a pun. Or vaudeville.

But the whole of The Book of Dave is far more than the sum of its borrowed parts, far more telling than the bad joke it sometimes resembles, far less cartoonish in its underlying melancholia about the human condition. It is a shuttlecock between Book and booked, through which the light comes through. It is a dire lamp illuminative of our condition now, a speculum of things to come. Juggle The Book of Dave in the mind's eye. Toss it in the air and watch it shine.