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A bizarre but gripping story about a taxi driver who accidentally founds a religion in the distant future.

I’d never read any Will Self books before, but I’ve often heard him speak on the radio or TV, so I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. The Book of Dave is funny, savage, depressing, satirical and often touching. It’s also incredibly bizarre, and rather hard work, for reasons that I’ll explain later. The plot is set in two time periods. In present day London, taxi driver Dave Rudman is separated from his wife and prevented by a restraining order from seeing his son Carl. He is angry and depressed, and evidently on the verge of a breakdown. In the far future, we meet the inhabitants of Ham, a small, rural settlement. It’s obvious from the description and the maps at the start of the book that some great catastrophe has resulted in the flooding of most of Britain, and only the highest ground remains above the water.

We start off in the future, which requires a lot of work because the inhabitants of Ham (‘Hamsters’) speak ‘Mockney’ which is phonetically rendered. Their language is also peppered with taxi driving terms: the sky is known as the windscreen, the day divided into ‘tariffs’, and they greet each other with a cheery “Ware2Guv?”. After a while, it gets easier to read, but the first couple of Ham chapters are rather slow going. I don’t want to give anything away, because there are some fantastic Planet of the Apes style revelations in the book, but it seems that Dave the taxi driver — in the depths of a mental breakdown — has written a furious rant against the world, and a vision of how he thinks things should be. He buries the book for his son, only for it to be found in the future, where it becomes a holy book of sorts, founding a religion. Meanwhile, when his madness passes, he realises that what he has written is crazy, misogynistic rubbish, and he writes another book, setting things straight for Carl. This book is also discovered in the future, spawning a religious conflict between the orthodox ‘Dävine’ cult and the heretics or ‘Flyers’ who believe that the gentler teachings of the second book are the true Way of Dave.

The way that this plays out — with the explanations for events and customs in the future only being found a few chapters later in the present — is fascinating and gripping, but the tortuous chronology can make it hard to keep things straight in your mind. Within both time periods, events are often described out of their proper temporal order. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of the events in Ham as the future, because their society has reverted to an agrarian, feudal system that wouldn’t be out of place in any time period from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century.

The Book of Dave is one of those books that haunts you slightly after reading it — it stays with you. I also fondly imagine that Will Self spent a few happy hours with a large map of Britain, drawing around contour lines with red felt-tip pen to decide the shape of the ‘Ing Archipelago’. That might not be so funny in a hundred years or so, but I’m happy to say that ‘Brum’ survives.