The Book of Dave
Encyclopedia
Content
The Book of Dave tells the story of an angry and mentally-ill London taxiHackney carriage
A hackney or hackney carriage is a carriage or automobile for hire...
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
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
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
Cockney
The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...
, taxi-drivers' and Dave's own usages, text-messaging, and vocabulary peculiar to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For example, an unmarried woman is an "opare" (au pair
Au pair
An au pair is a domestic assistant from a foreign country working for, and living as part of, a host family. Typically, au pairs take on a share of the family's responsibility for childcare as well as some housework, and receive a small monetary allowance for personal use...
); 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 "Elizabethan semi[-detached house]s". A glossary is provided.
Genesis and style
The book resembles, in part, Riddley WalkerRiddley Walker
Riddley Walker is a science fiction novel by Russell Hoban, first published in 1980. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel in 1982, as well as an Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award in 1983...
, a 1981 novel by Russell Hoban
Russell Hoban
Russell Conwell Hoban is an American writer, now living in England, of fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magic realism, poetry, and children's books-Biography:...
for which Self provided an introduction to the new 2002 edition.
According to the author himself, writing in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
in 2007, he was inspired to write the book after having read The Bible Unearthed
The Bible Unearthed
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts is a 2001 book about the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins of the Hebrew Bible...
, 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
Israel Finkelstein
Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist and academic. He is currently the Jacob M. Alkow Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze Age and Iron Ages at Tel Aviv University and is also the co-director of excavations at Megiddo in northern Israel...
and Silberman
Neil Asher Silberman
Neil Asher Silberman is an archaeologist and historian with a special interest in history, archaeology, public interpretation and heritage policy. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and was trained in Near Eastern archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...
'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
Thames Barrier
The Thames Barrier is the world's second-largest movable flood barrier and is located downstream of central London. Its purpose is to prevent London from being flooded by exceptionally high tides and storm surges moving up from the sea...
had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis.
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
Hampstead Heath
Hampstead Heath is a large, ancient London park, covering . This grassy public space sits astride a sandy ridge, one of the highest points in London, running from Hampstead to Highgate, which rests on a band of London clay...
), 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
Plot summary
Contemporary narrative:Dave Rudman, a London taxi-driver, has a casual sexual encounter with a young woman named Michelle Brodie. The pair do not meet for another seven months until a heavily-pregnant Michelle arrives at Dave's flat. They marry, and Michelle gives birth to a boy, Carl, but the marriage is unsuccessful, and Michelle eventually files for divorce, after which she resumes an earlier relationship with the television producer Cal Devenish. Dave descends into depression and increasingly unstable behaviour, and Michelle forbids him contact with their son, Carl. Dave writes a book that consists partly of an account of cab-driving in London, and partly of a misogynistic rant against the alleged unfairness of divorce and child access legislation. He has a single copy of the book printed on metal plates and buries it in the garden of the house in Hampstead where Michelle lives with Cal and Carl.
Dave suffers a breakdown, and comes under the care of the psychiatrist Anthony Bohm. Despite discovering that Carl is actually Cal's son, Dave slowly recovers his sanity and, during a stay in hospital, forms a relationship with Phyllis Vance, the mother of Steve, another patient. Dave regrets the content of his book, and attempts to dig it up from the Hampstead garden, but fails. Dave moves into Phyllis's cottage on the fringes of outer London and, under her guidance, writes a second book that repudiates the content of the first, and recommends a life based on tolerance and freedom. He mails the new book to Carl, but shortly afterwards is confronted at the cottage by loan sharks to whom he is heavily indebted. Dave brandishes a shotgun but is fatally injured in a struggle with the men, who arrange the scene to make the death look like suicide – an arrangement that is readily believed by Phyllis and the police. Carl and Cal then place Dave's second book in a metal film canister and bury it in their garden.
Future narrative:
On the isolated island of Ham, a tiny community ekes out an existence from the land, assisted by semi-intelligent pig-like creatures known as 'motos' that are unique to the island. The community lives according to the severely-enforced religion of the country (known as 'Ing') whereby men and women lead separate lives but share childcare in accordance with the dictates of the 'Book of Dave', which is regarded as a sacred text, but which is evidently the book written by Dave Rudman and buried in a Hampstead garden some two thousand years earlier. A young male 'Hamster', Symun Devush, explores a forbidden area of the island and emerges claiming that he has discovered a second Book of Dave that repudiates the tenets of the first. Although Symun's revelations are popular, and he is lauded throughout the country as a prophet, religious authorities from the reconstructed city of New London send a deposition that arrests Symun on a charge of heresy (or 'flying') and transports him to New London, where he is physically and mentally broken, his tongue torn out, and returned to live in isolation on the desolate outcrop of land known as Nimar, not far from Ham.
Before being arrested, Symun conceives a son, Carl, who becomes an object of interest to Antone Böm, an exiled heretic. Böm believes that the second book of Dave discovered by Symun may be buried on the island, but his search for the book is a failure. Carl and Böm travel to New London in order to determine the fate of Symun and the second book but, soon after their arrival, the pair are arrested and sentenced to death. They escape, and discover Symun's fate on Nimar. Upon returning to Nimar, however, they find that Symun has died, and that his belongings include no second book but only a metal container filled with rotten debris. They return to Ham, where another delegation from New London is brutalizing the population and slaughtering the motos. As one of the Hamsters rebels against the slaughter, Carl and Böm reveal themselves.