A little ‘Knowledge’

LONDON cabbie Dave Rudman, the hard-luck central character in Will Self’s satirical novel “The Book of Dave,” is an Everyman on a bender. After his ex-wife, Michelle, blocks access to their son, Carl, Dave succumbs to whiskey and self-pity. Fueled by money woes, fistfuls of antidepressants and a divorced fathers support group, he types out a misogynist tirade, structured around the famous “Knowledge” of London that cab drivers must commit to memory. In December 2001, he buries “The Book of Dave” in his ex-wife’s garden in Hampstead -- hoping his son will find it. It only comes to light 500 years later, however, inspiring the brutal cult of “Davinanity.”

Self’s novel alternates between two periods: the recent past (Dave’s miserable life) and the early 6th century AD (“After Dave”), a dark age following some kind of watery catastrophe. All of Dave’s rage and his psychosis make it into the pages of his Book, and none of his tenderness or attempts to do right. The Book he buries is a snapshot of himself at his worst. Fuming at his ex, he advocates the separation of the sexes -- the “mums” and “dads” -- after breeding, and strict adherence to joint custody of children.

Obediently, the people of Ham (formerly Hampstead), an outlying island in the archipelago that was once England, adhere to this gospel-according-to-Dave, greeting one another with the time-honored cabbie inquiry, “Where to, guv?” At midweek, they conduct “changeover,” when “mummytime,” with its cuddles, gives way to “daddytime,” with its clouts and sharp words. The mums do most of the primitive farm labor of Ham. The dads hand over the actual raising of children during daddytime to adolescent girls, the “opares.”

The technologies, conveniences and globalism of the 21st century are as incomprehensible to the shivering, half-starving Hamsters as the world of the Old Testament is to us (and even more so, since the Hamsters lack the intervening history). Some Hamsters try to circumvent the crueler aspects of Davinanity, but their rulers are fundamentalists, enforcing a literal interpretation of the Book.

We don’t expect delicacy from the author of “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” and the short story “Return to the Planet of the Humans,” and there’s little enough in the Ham sections of the novel. In just the opening pages, we get the sighting of a tongueless exile, the slaughter of a genetically engineered speaking animal called a moto, and an inquisition resulting in a sentence of exile and death for insurrection.

The cockney in which Dave wrote his Book is the “Mokni” of Ham, rendered more or less phonetically. So entrenched are the Hamsters in their Davespeak -- naming their children after characters in the Book, tracking the “foglamp” through the sky, watching opares dance in their “cloakyfings,” awaiting their “pizzaDlivree” from heaven -- that the first 90 pages of this book read like a cross between “Jabberwocky” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

It’s a devilishly catchy argot and once readers sink into it, they will find themselves wondering if the characters are traveling norf or souf.

The Hamsters regard Dave as their god, but in truth, he was a typical blighted mortal -- a big guy with a small penis, acne scars and rows of craters on his scalp from a failed hair implant, “as if a minuscule crop had been lifted.” Too easily, he resorts to his fists. He views his fares with disgust and condescension, running a withering internal critique that represents more or less what you’re afraid a cabbie might be thinking about you.

But something odd happens about halfway through Dave’s story line. We begin to empathize with him. And, although his class-conscious ex-wife has betrayed him in several ways, we empathize with her as well. It shouldn’t happen, given the author’s penchant for the grotesque and unlovable, but it does. A drizzle of syrup starts to sweeten the bitter brew. Dropping off his boy after a weekend visit, a lonely Dave “hobbled back to the flat for lamb dhansak and a yanked foreskin. His life, henceforth, would be meted out in takeaway tinfoil pannikins and crispy tissues. There was no one to call -- he’d made no investment in life beyond his wife and son; there were no relationships of trust or intimacy. These were interactions he’d only ever witnessed in the rounded oblong of his rearview mirror.”

Like Martin Amis, with whom he’s often compared, Self marries his verbal acrobatics to social critique, gamely taking on corporate culture, family law, London urban sprawl, religion, racial division and the received wisdom of women’s magazines and the pub. His male characters are more cartoonish than his females, who tend to be canny and self-serving. What’s new in “The Book of Dave” is that Dave doesn’t fall back on murderous fantasy, as so many of Self’s Poe-inspired characters tend to, but is overridden by shame and loss. Real pain trumps dreams of revenge.

To color-correct our rose-tinted appreciation of Dave, Self has to do something nasty -- very nasty -- to the Hamsters. Any reader who has gaily gone along with the redemptive undercurrent of Dave’s story will want to jab the author in the eye by the end of the novel. But the effect softens after the book is closed, like a reverse hangover. You’re left with the intoxication of Self’s wordplay and the clarity of his visions. *