Monday, September 24, 2007

Book 1: The Book of Dave, by Will Self

So, Tim and I have started what we’re calling The Dävine Book Club, in honor of our first book: Will Self’s masterpiece The Book of Dave.

I don’t quite remember how, but it came to pass that I got to pick the first book we would read. During the Summer, Idelber Avelar had mentioned meeting Will Self at a conference, and how much he had been impressed by his writing. Avelar is a literary critic extraordinaire, and after reading nothing but Latin-American Literature for the last 12 years, I was itching for something new. I researched Will Self’s work and decided that The Book of Dave sounded like the best-reviewed and most-fascinating of his works.

The novel alternates back and forth between a post-Deluge Ing (England) that has embraced Davananity, the religion of Dave, taken from metal plates found buried in the Forbidden Zone on the isle of Ham (modern-day Hampstead Heath), and the horribly tragic life of Dave Rudman, a mentally-ill (at times) Cockney taxi driver blessed with a perfect recall of the Knowledge. To be a taxi driver in London, one must memorize the entire city; this information is called The Knowledge, and in his mental illness and anger against his lying, adulterous, and frigid wife who lied-to-him-that-she-was-pregnant-with-his-child-after-a-one-night-stand-so-he-would-marry-her, he melds the Knowledge with his misogynistic rants into a new Gospel for a New London. He has the harangue engraved on silver plates and then buries them in his ex-wife’s backyard. At some unknown point in the future after a catastrophic flood, they are discovered, and a new religion emerges based on the cabbie’s diatribe. The masters of this religion create a feudal society that strictly enforces the Doctrines and Covenants of Dave. Comparisons with Middle Age Europe and Spain under the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición are obvious.

But what we have is a society set up around how a blue-collar Cockney divorced taxi driver thinks the world should be run (in the midst of his mental illness). Imagine how you wish the world could be, engrave it on plates, bury it on high ground, and some day it might come to pass. As I interpret it, it seems that the world today is just fine being run by societal consensus rather than a jaded and scorned individual.

There’s a key moment in the book when religious satire becomes clear. We are told that shortly after his divorce Dave starts going to a diner for food every day. He strikes up a friendship with a very devout Muslim. In talking about the Koran, Dave asks the Muslim man if he really takes seriously what “some bloke wrote a thousand years ago.” The man’s response shows Self’s satire of modern religion, because the man answers, coolly, “Not some bloke Dave, it was God,” ending the paragraph and the debate.

Self does some of the usual tricks you’d expect for a book about the future. There are different dialects of English: Arpee and Mokni (get it, mock Cockney?). The terms for everything are bits and pieces of late 20th/early 21st Century vernacular. Breakfast is “starbucks,” the Creation is the “MadeinChina,” and pigeons are “flying rats.” But, it’s not hokey. The accents are fun to read, and a glossary is provided to aid the uninitiated. I only wish I understood a bit more of British slang, because I often found myself not knowing what a word meant, and not finding it in the dictionary.

That’s the gist of it. But, to elaborate, Self’s book is a masterpiece of religious commentary and satire. He examines all the religions of the Book, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and especially Mormonism. Being a Mormon, I see his point crystally-clear. However, my belief in the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with it being a really old book, rather, it’s my faith after having prayed about its truthfulness. I could be totally wrong, but I don’t think that I am. And besides, like Socrates advocated, better to live the virtuous life than one of immorality and angst. The Book of Mormon works for me, just like the second Book of Dave would’ve worked for the Ham-sters had Symun been able to thwart the PCO.