I really wanted to like this book, but couldn't make it past the made up language. I suppose I can give it another try later; after all, I loved Clockwork Orange. ( )

This book is a bit weird. No wait, a lot weird. And hard going in places due to half of it being written phonetically in a dialect derived from cockney. Two sets of stories take it in turns throughout the book, though neither is told in strictly chronological future. One is contemporary, following the life of taxi driver Dave, as he careers through a doomed marriage, and slowly but surely goes off the rails. The other is a post-apocalyptic future, with a religion which seems oddly familiar somehow. Gradually as each story unfolds we watch as people struggle to rebuild their lives, but will they succeed?

It took me a while to get into this, but once I did I was fairly hooked and really enjoyed it. Although I found it perhaps a little too male in perspective, with very little seen through the eyes of female characters. Cautiously recommended. ( )

Hard to get into but amazing in the breadth of imagination. ( )

I enjoyed this book overall. It's a sad statement on what survives of humanity many generations into the future -- religious fanaticism and oppression live on and thrive, while rational rules for good living crumble into dust and are lost. It's an interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre, too -- what would happen if humanity's progress was set back by a disaster, and what was left to cling to as society re-formed itself was a book containing the delusional ravings of a mentally ill cab driver in the 2000s going through a particularly rough time in his life?My biggest complaint with this book, and the reason why I gave it three stars instead of four, is that it's just too darn slangy. I mean, I've watched British TV shows, and I've even been to England once -- I'm not ignorant about this sort of thing. And yet, the book was so imbued with London slang that even I was distracted by it and found myself skimming over words, making up my own definitions in my head. (Heck, I actually found the future sections, written in a phonetic Cockney dialect, to be a little easier to understand than some of the present-day parts.) There's a small glossary included in the back, which isn't mentioned at all at the beginning, so I didn't know it was there until I finished the book. Still, a few words went over my head, and they either weren't defined in that glossary anyway or were but were defined with words I also wasn't familiar with (and I have a degree in English -- I'm not dense or anything).But ultimately, while the slang was a bit distracting, it was still an entertaining read, and you could glean enough about what those words might mean to be able to skim past them without getting lost. I'd still recommend this book, but I wish they'd hired an editor for the American edition to ensure that they defined all of the slang that could use defining (or else just tone it down a bit -- c'mon, I've been to London, and I didn't hear anyone speaking in that dense of a slanguage). ( )

I found The Book of Dave, Will Self’s 6th novel, a difficult read at times, and almost gave up (much to my disgust) a couple of chapters in, as I found the dialect-rich prose that parts of the novel are written in a struggle to follow. Ultimately though, I persevered, and once I had got to grips with ‘mockni’ (a language based on a combination of slang, text-speak and cockney), found a witty, scathing and an all too frighteningly possible vision of the future of humanity.

The eponymous Dave is a taxi driver, living in turn of the millennium London and battling his estranged wife for contact with his son. Dave is flawed - misogynistic, racist, homophobic – and obsessed with The Knowledge, viewing London as a series of runs and points, his cab being the only place he feels at ease. As he slips further in to depression, Dave begins writing the Book, a treatise on how relationships between men, women and children should be governed. He then buries the Book in the back garden of his wife’s new home for his son to find.

Interspersed with the ‘Dave’ chapters are those set at some indeterminate time in the future, after the UK has been submerged by water and exists as a series of islands. Dave’s Book has been found and developed in to a religion – Davinity – and this new code decrees that men and women live separately, with children spending part of the week with the women and then at ‘Changeover’ moving across to the homes of the men. Questioning the Book is punished through torture and exile. The lead character in these sections, Carl, is conscious of the iniquity of the Book’s teachings and begins a quest to discover what happened to his absent father, said to have discovered a second, more compassionate Book and tried to enlighten his compatriots as to its contents.

Whilst on the surface the characters in the novel appear to be disagreeable, there is actually deep emotional warmth to them and as a reader I found myself rooting for the anti heroes throughout. The complexity and cross-referring of the storylines is cleverly handled – at times you can see direct correlations between the events of ‘now’ and the future, at others the unveiling is a slow-burn process. If you’re a fan of Will Self and his erudite vocabulary then this is the book for you, but it is not, I suspect, the best introduction to his works.

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