Review
The Book of Dave is set in one place and
two different time periods; the place is London, the time
periods are the present day and 500 years in the future. In the present day, Dave
Rudman becomes an emotional wreck when his wife leaves him for
another man, taking his son with him. Fuelled by a psychotic
mania he writes a rambling, vitriolic book - part diary, part
personal history, part London cab driver arcana and part
misogynistic rant. He buries the resulting tome in his wife's backyard in the
up market suburb of Hamstead Heath.
500 years later, global warming has reduced London to a series of
small islands, one of which is the Isle of Ham occupied by the
Hamsters who, discovering the buried
Book of Dave, embrace
it as a holy text to be adhered to with cultish rigidity. Thus...
Beyond the Book
Will Self is the author of a number of short-story collections
including
The Quantity
Theory of Insanity (winner of the
1992 Geoffrey Faber award),
Grey Area
and
Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough
Boys. He is also the author of
six novels including
Cock and Bull,
My Idea of Fun,
Great Apes,
How the Dead Live
(shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of
the Year 2000) and
The Book of Dave.
His next book,
The Butt, will be
published in the UK in April 2008.
Together with photographer David
Gamble, he produced
Perfidious Man,
a sideways look at...
