The Book of Dave

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Will Self is a satirist and therefore a moralist and therefore a practitioner of a much needed but nearly extinct literary form. It is not hard to understand why. Morality has become the province of religious fundamentalists of all stripes as well as their political allies, joined together even as they oppose one other by a literal-mindedness that leaves no room for self-examination, doubt, or irony. Satire, meanwhile, has been dilutedjust another form of comedy in the postmodern consumerscaperarely practiced and even more rarely heard amid the din of popular humorists whose work is often mistakenly thought to be satirical, for example, the light fare of Dave Barry and David Sedaris and The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” column. The film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) is immensely funny, but Sacha Baron Cohen and his fictional persona, clueless Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, are more like Benny Hill than Lenny Bruce: rudely hilarious much of the time but only sporadically satirical. Interestingly enough, it was around the time that Lenny Bruce’s brand of stand-up satire began running afoul of the law that novelist Philip Roth realized just how difficult it would be to write novels any longer, especially satirical ones. As Roth explained in 1960,The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine? Dwight David Eisenhower?

At a time when reality was rapidly becoming unwitting self-satire and when Orwellian caricature was already becoming political reality, the satirical novelist could either give up or try as best he or she could to exceed an age whose own excesses have become the everyday fare of a media-saturated society. The Rabelaisian excesses of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) are well suited to that novel’s postmodern political satire, but more often in the work of Coover and his contemporaries, the satirist’s toolsparody, pastiche, farce, burlesque, ridiculeserve either more narrowly literary ends or more broadly philosophical ones. Satire requires a different orientation and a much higher level of dismay and disgust, as in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) or Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964). In Britain, curiously enough, the success of the archly irreverent television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) helped make satire a pleasant diversion, lacking the bite of works such as Lindsay Anderson’s film If (1968).

The reduced role that satire has come to play since the late 1970’s makes Will Self’s writing (fiction and nonfiction alike) all the more remarkable and welcome. No other writer has practiced the art of excess so persistently, so perfectly, and so perversely as Self, except for the late writer Stanley Elkin, who always treated his characters and their obsessions with a degree of sympathy and respect rarely if ever found in Self’s hyperacerbic work, where revulsion rules. Surprisingly for a writer who thrives on excess, as subject and as style, Self (unlike Elkin) is often more successful in short burstsessays, short stories, and novellas, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) and Cock and Bull (1992), especiallythan over the long haul, as with the disastrous Great Apes (1997). How the Dead Live (2000) is the chief exception...

(This entire section contains 1818 words.)

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because for it Self devised a central character (based on his mother) whose revulsion exceeds his own. Self’s novelThe Book of Dave is not quite that good, but it comes close in large part because Self hitches his freewheeling satirical imagination not only to an especially timely conceit but also to a carefully defined yet still expansive structure.

The Book of Dave is a tale of two Londons and two times. Eight chapters set in the present (1987-2003) alternate with eight others set in the future (510-524 a.d., that is “After Dave,” or more specifically, after the discovery of “The Book of Dave”). The novel moves back and forth not only between the two narratives and therefore the two times (present and future) but between present and past as well within each narrative. Against the tight structure of the two interwoven stories, with the later one reflecting the earlier in funhouse mirror fashion, there is the sprawl not only of years but of intertextual echoes and antecedents. The Book of Dave is made in its protagonist’s and its author’s images, crosscutting its two narratives the way Dave, a cabbie agonistes, cuts back and forth across London and Self cuts back and forth across an array of utopian and apocalyptic texts, including Walter J. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1962), Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Alisdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1894-1895), and Richard Jeffries’ little-read After London (1885).

Self’s main character is doomed, not by planetary catastrophe but by his character, indeed by his very name, for Self dealt with Dave, or rather Daves, before in “Dave Too” (from 1998’s Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys). That Dave is “so amorphous, so shapeless, so incoherent” as to constitute “a kind of Ur-Dave” a sign of the Daveness, Davidity, and Davitude spreading throughout the land. The new Dave, Dave Rudman, is less amorphous, more grotesque:He was a large man with broad shoulders rounded by occupational hunching. He had the standard issue potbelly of the sedentary forty-year-old. . . . His features were handsome enough and taken at a glance they gave an impression of strength and sensuality. . . . Sadly, up close this wavered, then dissolved. His dark eyes were too bulbous and too close set. When he took off his cap he revealed that his hair . . . was gone, leaving behind a lumpy skull, full of depressions and queer mounds. Where his hairline used to be were several rows of little craters. . . . Dave Rudman’s face was disorganized by pain, his features driven apart from one another by an antagonism so powerful that it pitted ear against eye, cheek against nose, chin against the world. Five days’ stubble gave him a cartoon muzzle.

Dave’s pain and seething resentment derive from his failed marriage, which Dave in turn blames on his baldness and the botched hair transplant, with hair harvested from his groin, that left him with a headful of pubic hairs and (compounding the comedy) with paying out “five times as much to get the crinkle-cut hair removed as he’d paid to have it inserted.” Dave’s crown of pubic thorns is only the most visible sign of his many pratfalls. For the depression caused by his marital woes, Dave is prescribed a drug that causes a long-undiagnosed psychotic reaction that in turn causes Dave to vent his rage against Michelle, the fares he drives, the Public Carriage Office (PCO) that governs London transit (including taxis)indeed against everything and everyone in the book. Then, influenced by his Jewish aunt’s conversion to Mormonism, Dave has the book printed on metal plates that he then clandestinely buries in Michelle’s yard for his son Carl to someday find and read. Helped by Dr. Zack Busner (a recurring character in Self’s fiction) and a new girlfriend, Dave regains his equilibrium, gives up cabbing, repents his earlier rage, and writes an “Epistle to his Son” in which he renounces the hate-filled Book and advises Carl to love everyone and everything. Then, just before he can commit suicide, Dave is murderedthe last nail in the Chaplinesque Dave’s comic coffin.

Dave’s personal holocaust is followed (chronologically, not narratively) by a much larger global catastrophe that leaves much of England under water, but not Hampstead, where Dave’s book is found and becomes the basis for a new religion. (Here Self, revising Karl Marx, suggests that history occurs twice, the first time as personal history, the second as worldwide farce.) Self’s satire of the Davinanity that sweeps the land, or what little of it remains above water, is so devastating because it manages to be only as absurd as it is familiar, with the parallels to actual religions as numerous and identifiable as Self’s allusions to utopian and apocalyptic fictions. Dave is God, the government is a theocracy, the PCO is the established church, “Drivers” are priests, “flyers” are heretics, “fares” are souls, “tariffs” are hours, the sexes are rigorously separated into “dads” and either young “opares” or older “mums,” fathers’ rights are strictly enforced, sexual abuse of women is permissible, everything bad is “chellish” (after Michelle), and the inhabitants of the now island backwater of Hampstead are Hamsters who speak Mockni (a mix of Cockney and text messaging), not Arpee (RP: Received Pronunciation), the two hilariously juxtaposed in the following catechismal exchange between Driver and Hamsters:Thanks, Dave, for picking us up! 4 pikkin uz up, the dads who remembered the correct response dutifully intoned. And for not dropping us off. Anfer nó droppinus dahn.

Against the PCO’s authority and its Old Testament ethos are Geezers like Symun Devush who, like the later Dave, espouse a gospel of love. For his crime of grievous flying (heresy), Symun is taken to New London, broken on the wheel, and has his tongue cut out. He is then sent back to Ham where he lives alone as the Beastlyman, unrecognized by his London disciple, Antonë Böm, or by his young son, Carl. Accompanied by Böm, Carl travels to New London in search of his lost father, whom he discovers only when he returns to Ham, where he learns that the Beastlyman he had feared, but who is now dead, was his father. When Carl interprets his quest and his role (as the Lost Boy to Symun’s Dave) hermeneutically, according to Davinanity, his girlfriend Salli, who had been repeatedly raped while he was away, quickly puts him in his place: “U! U aynt no Loss Boy! . . . Ure a wanka juss lyke enni uvva dadjuss lyke ve dads wot nokked me up.”

Mother Nature might feel the same way were Will Self less the city satirist, more the country sentimentalist. Yet, The Book of Dave is, for all its characteristically Self-ish stylistic pyrotechnics and satirical inventiveness, sadder and less Self-centered than many of its author’s earlier works. The inanities Self had mercilessly lampooned before may have been fatal for a husband here (Cock and Bull), a tramp there (1993’s My Idea of Fun). The consequences of global warming, however, seem to have had a sobering effect on Self himself, whose acid satire allows characters, present and future, to be hoisted, and made absurd, by their own petards.