not too bad! - Rated 
I found this book at first to be very surreal and difficult to get into. It is really a book of halves. The first chapter beginning in the future and the 2nd in the past and the book continues alternating the chapters in this way. Self is as articulate as usual however I found the future chapters hard to make much sense of at all despite the fact they were well written I found no humour in those chapters. However the rest of the book was fine with Self's usual black humour including some funny moments in the psychiatric hospital. The one potential confusing thing about the book is that it's stated AD 500 something (being the time of the supposed discovery of the book) yet AD 500 is well in the past in reality yet in the book it's claimed this is in the future. I think the book would've worked more had this been explained better... due to the length and laborious future chapters I doubt i'll read the book again even though I enjoyed the rest of it.
If you can crack the Mokni, it's worth a read - Rated 
If you can crack the initially daunting code of "mokni" with fills the 'future' half of this book, this is a very worthwhile read and has a great deal worthwhile to say, obliquely, about the nature of religion and modern culture. However unlike other reviewers I don't think it's Will Self's strongest work. If anything he may even be mellowing with age, as this book in parts is more played for laughs than for shock value. A great premise and worth a read for sure.
A flawed epic - Rated
Alot of gushing praise for this book that i feel is slightly undeserved as the central premise is slightly obvious, man writes book, in the future book is mistaken for religious text and becomes a religion. The phonetic language in the future made the 'future' chapters largely intelligible definitely read the translations at the back of the book before you begin!
Another problem with the book is that is filled with 80% hate and 20% redemption, completely pessimistic view on the future and Dave Rudman's perspective is negative, racist and jarring. This is all well and good but where is the balance? Do people really need to read about how crap London is? and then find out that in the future, guess what if nothing is done it will be even worse! (who wants to think like that?!)
Yes the book is well written and the use of language is original, but the outlook is so pessimistic as to discourage a second read.
So hard to understand - Rated 
I can see I'm in the minority but i really really didn't enjoy this book. The mocked up and phonetic sounding language was excruciating to read and unfortunately i just couldn't get used to it - which was a shame as it continues throughout the use of the book. You never got to find out more about the Hams and generally, I didn't find it a gripping read although I think the concept was a really good one and has led me to apply it to religions of today!
Organised religion is absurd and the postnuclear family is grim - Rated
The Book of Dave opens in unfamiliar territory: a bizarre, apparently post-apocolyptic colony of the far future, described in Stanley Unwin pidgin English-cum-text speak mixed with EastEnders/Jade Goody mockney using references which can only be made sense of by gradually piecing them together from their context (and/or reference to the Arpee/English lexicon at the back of the book). It takes you a few pages to adjust to this new paradigm but once achieved, the opening chapter describes an isolated island, 'Ham', within the flooded environs of what used to be the capital. Ham's population share a symbiotic relationship with 'Motos' - some kind of hog/innocent child/taxi hybrid. The Hamsters are ruled and, from time visited, by totalitarian external authorities from London to whom they owe obeisance, who ensure that tithes are paid and that the colony is observing the official religious ordnances prescribed by, and interpreted from, the writings of the prophet Dave, written five centuries earlier (around 2002). But who was this prophet?
After a random, rash sexual liaison with a fare, disaffected London cabbie Dave Rudman finds himself locked in an unhappy marriage, becoming increasingly isolated from his wife, his friends and finally separated by restraining order from his son Carl. Some time during this inexorable descent to a nervous breakdown via disaffection, depression and drug abuse Dave writes a quasi religious manifesto, transcribed from a conflated, spewing stream of his jaded life - lawyers, restraining orders, the parental reconciliation self-help group, the Public Carriage Office and final demands - all are melded within a framework of cabbing and The Knowledge hardwired via his hippocampus.
The story then alternates back and forth between these two asynchronous narratives, each mirroring the other with the 21st century characters all having their Dävine counterparts projected forward 500 years. Whilst one backtracks over the circumstances of Dave's life leading up to his nervous collapse and the burying of his first Book, the other illustrates how these writings have been disinterred, [mis]interpreted and enforced as a religion over the intervening time, developing into a civilisation where Jeremy Kyle meets Lord of the Flies rendered in Jabberwocky. In fact the future society of Ham reminded me a lot of 'Daily Mail Island' - an imaginary reality TV series from the brilliant Radio Times spoof website 'TV Go Home'. The premise of this show was that a bunch of people were thrown together in a captive environment with no contact with civilisation other than through the pages of the Daily Mail.
As Dave starts to recuperate and realise just how sick he has been, he is encouraged to write a second book - an Epistle to Carl the 'Lost Boy' - refuting the deluded loneliness and bigotry of the first. As this is happening, so in the future the religious doctrines established from the first book are being similarly questioned: Symun is the first 'Flyer' (heretic) who, in a moment of epiphany, claims to have been exposed to this second book of Dave. He is followed by his son, Carl, a messianic 'Gaffer' figure who, with the help of a Teacher (whose 21st century counterpart is a psychiatrist), has similar reservations about how the Dävinic religion has been misinterpreted and turns against the authorities and adherents of the first book.
The blurring of these two incongruous worlds is brilliantly handled by Self with his usual clever playfulness with the English language - the jarring-but-perfect metaphor, the free invention of portmanteau words. Thrown in at the deep end in Ham you are initially at a total loss surrounded as you are by babel, but subsequent chapters start, subtly and brilliantly, to throw light upon the strange Arpee terms and you begin to see how cleverly the mundane references of Dave's life have become ingrained in the religion and culture of Nu Lundun which, like Self's London, is as unremittingly ugly and tawdry, iniquitous and grotesque as Jonson's or Hogarth's.
|
