Will Self

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The Book Of Dave – USA publication

October 17, 2006

Will Self - The Book Of Dave

The Book Of Dave will be published in the USA on November 28th by Bloomsbury USA. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

From Publishers Weekly
[Starred Review] Self, the provocative British raconteur who used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to map London (How the Dead Live, 2000) is taking another literary shot across his home city’s bow. In his gleaming new puzzlebook, Self creates a dystopian future London, ruled by a cynosure of priests, lawyers and the monarchy. He invents Arpee, the musical language they speak that is based on a sacred text, The Book of Dave, which also serves, satirically, as the society’s moral and legal foundation. And who is this deity named Dave? An embittered London cabbie from the distant past – the year 2000. As the book opens, the kingdom of Ingerland is ruled by the elite and ruthless PCO. (Self is riffing on the Public Carriage Office, London’s transit authority.) People live according to The Book of Dave, which was recovered after a great flood wiped out London in the MadeinChina era. Flashing back more than 500 years, cabbie Dave Rudman types out his idiosyncratic, misogynist, bile-tinged fantasies while in a fit of antidepressant-induced psychosis and battling over the custody of his child, Carl. His screed becomes both a blueprint for a harsh childrearing climate (mummies and daddies living apart, with the kids splitting time between them) and a full-blown cosmology.

As Self moves between eras, he divides the book between Dave’s story and the story of the great Flying (slang in the future for “heresy”). The latter involves the appearance of the Geezer (prophet) on the island of Ham (Hampshire) in 508 A.D. (after the “purported discovery of the Book of Dave”), who claims to have found a second Book of Dave annulling the “tiresome strictures” of the first. He is imprisoned by the PCO and mangled beyond recognition, but, 14 years later, his son, Carl Davish, travels from Ham to New London, determined to create a less cruel world that responds to the “mummyself” within. Self’s invention of a future language (including dialect Mokni, which combines cabby slang, cockney and the Esperanto of graffiti – and, yes, a dictionary is provided) is wickedly brilliant, with surprising moments of childlike purity punctuating the lexicon’s crude surface (a “fuckoffgaff” is a “lawyerly place,” while “wooly” means sheep). Self is endlessly talented, and in crossbreeding a fantasy novel with a scorching satire of contemporary mores, he’s created a beautiful monster of the future that feeds on the neurotic present – and its parents.

From Booklist
[Starred Review] This searing satire maps the unraveling of London cabbie Dave Rudman’s life – and the resulting Book of Dave he prints on metal pages and buries in his former backyard after his ex-wife cuts off visitations with his son. Meanwhile, sometime in the twenty-sixth century or beyond (dating of the period is pegged to “the purported discovery of The Book of Dave”), England has entered a second Dark Age; the country, now called Ing, is broken apart by rising seas and spiritually bankrupted by the twisted teachings of Dave, which mix mad misogynistic dictates with the legendary knowledge of London streets (“the runs and the points”) that the city’s cabdrivers must internalize. On the former heights of Hampstead, now known as the isle of Ham, villagers live side by side with the gentle motos – walrus-like creatures who talk like lisping human children, products of twenty-first-century genetic engineering.

As present-day Rudman slowly reclaims his life, the future sons of Ham seek out Dave’s rumored second book – the one recanting his earlier ravings and giving mummies and daddies permission to love each other again. But as Dave’s ex prophetically muses, “everyday life was made up of a series of small botched actions, which, although instantly forgotten, nonetheless ruined everything.” This is as rousing an indictment of organized religion – and especially fundamentalism – as readers are likely to encounter in the post-9/11 canon. (Frank Sennett)

Haydn’s Nasal Polyp

September 29, 2006

I’ve been toying with a short story of this title for years, ever since hearing — or thinking I heard — a Radio 3 announcer say, with predictably risible stuffiness: “During the winter of 1772, Haydn, then resident in London, found himself unable to compose, so troubled was he by a nasal polyp.” There was something about the notion of Haydn’s nasal polyp — rather like Flaubert’s parrot, or Lenin’s brain, or Churchill’s black dog — that seemed almost purpose-built for a story title. Not that I really wanted to write anything serious about Haydn: this was going to be more a piss-take of that particular strain in contemporary letters, perhaps exemplified by the titles above, that seeks out profundity by yoking a mundane, or curious, thing — parrot, brain, polyp — to a great name.

My story (I’m definitely going to write it) will focus on the effects of the polyp on Haydn’s sense of his own musicality. I think it will revisit some of the torments I visited on Simon Dykes in my story Chest (collected in Grey Area). Anyway, I wrote it on a Post-it note, this title, and stuck it on my wall, as is my wont. It’s now been there for years, unremarked on by anyone until Ian Rankin came to film a short interview with me for a documentary he’d been making on Stephenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde.

On seeing the projected short-story title, Rankin expostulated: “Haydn’s nasal polyp! That’s uncanny! Why have you got it written up on your wall?” I explained, and he told me in turn that he and his crew had just been to the Hunterian Museum (named after the celebrated anatomist and surgeon, John Hunter), where they had been told the story of Haydn’s nasal polyp by the curator. For, it transpired, Hunter, as well as being the real-life model for Dr Jekyll, was also called upon to operate on the offending polyp.

I offer this to you all as an example of the merest literary coincidence.

The Gesture. A new short story

August 20, 2006

The Gesture

It was one of those things that married people come to loathe about their spouses with a deep and passionate intensity, along with the timbre of their coughs, their tipsy giggles, the particular, guilty creaks with which they ascend the stairs. In Holly’s case, it was the dismissive flick of thumb and index finger, with which Brion indicated that the subject was closed. That he wasn’t going to come out with them to lunch – and that he didn’t wish to talk to her anymore.

Holly knew that it was involuntary on his part; that Brion’s gesture was a hand-me-down from his headmaster father. Presumably, she thought, Michael McCluskey had inherited it as well, and so the flick went back, for generation after generation, until in the dim, distant past there was a primordial McCluskey in a bothy in Connemara, so dismissing his own, importunate cow of a wife.

“He’s tired,” she tried to forgive her husband as she corralled their twins into the hire car. “This is his one holiday of the year – otherwise he works flat-out. Why shouldn’t he stay behind?” Why indeed? The Tuscan sky was a flawless blue, a tasty bouquet of thyme and rosemary was blowing in from the fields. The loungers by the pool were well-padded. Brion had a good book. And yet… “It’s out of character – his bloody, pushy character! These are exactly the sort of people he usually wants to suck up to. Socio-networking he calls it. The jerk.”

She wrenched the steering wheel of the big Renault and it reversed with a sudden lurch, almost clipping the gatepost. The twins howled with delight, the car’s power steering howled in protest, as Holly wrenched the wheel the other way, and they shot off up the track to the main road, loose stones drumming on the undercarriage. She pictured the sweat-damp swirls of fair hair on Brion’s high forehead. She pictured his hooded, grey-blue eyes. But she felt no forgiveness: only resentment, as acidic and uncomfortable as heartburn.

Holly got lost on the switchback roads, and further confused by the inadequate map. In the little hilltop, medieval towns, the honeyed stone porticos taunted her with their ancient indifference, while the inhabitants bamboozled her with their directions. By the time she reached Monte Felacco, almost an hour late, she was close to crying, while the twins were, as always, bickering with each other. She pulled to a halt and swivelling round let fly with slaps of tongue and hand.

For a moment their two, non-identical – but for all that absurdly similar – faces, were frozen with shock. Holly thought she’d gone too far – that they were about to burst into tears. But at 11 they were too old for that now. Instead, the boy, Peter, muttered derisively “Really, Mum.” Just as his father would’ve done. Then they both got out of the car and sauntered off to find their friends.

Holly redid her sweat-smeared makeup in the rearview. Her white, lace-trimmed smock blouse was last season’s. “My face,” she lacerated herself “is last bloody millennium’s.” Melissa and her posse of smart friends made Holly feel frumpy and inadequate in London – in Tuscany they were bound to be a nightmare. She knew they all hung out together for a month every summer in this idyllic, hilltop compound. Each family with its own perfect villa, the ivied ruins of an exquisite, ancient palazzo looming over the huge swimming pool.

Melissa’s friends were movie people and successful novelists. They were as at home in LA as they were in Tuscany. None of the women had little jobs like hers – they were all beautifully groomed powerhouses. None of the men would even deign to look at her – let alone engage her in conversation. If it wasn’t for the fact that Melissa had children the same age as the twins, Holly would’ve cancelled. If only Brion had been there, he may have been a pushy jerk – but there was no denying he was a charming one, always perfectly at ease. “Bloody Brion!” Holly thought for the thousandth time. Then broke off, because Melissa was standing by the car with a glass of prosecco in her outstretched hand.

“I’m so glad I caught you before you came down to the villa.” She launched straight in after an exchange of cheeks and kisses. “There’s something I absolutely have to tell you before we eat.” She flicked back her great mane of grey, corkscrew curls – which, with her youthful, almost gamine face, made her startlingly beautiful, like some mythical queen. She linked a gym-toned arm in Holly’s and they strolled together. “Jessica Albie is here this summer, with her husband Xavier Suarez. Of course, you know who they are… ” Holly did: she a fashion designer, he a film director. ” … And, well, I wouldn’t mention this – because they sort of fudge it, by pretending one’s a year older than the other – but, well, since you’ve got twins, I thought you might make the mistake of asking about them, which might be awkward.”
“Them?” Holly queried.
“Their twins, I mean.” Melissa gave Holly’s arm a squeeze.
“Awkward?” Holly was feeling very confused “Why?”
“Because, well, to put it bluntly: they’ve got different fathers.”
“Different fathers?” Holly laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“I assure you I’m not,” Melissa continued as they strolled down a stone-flagged path, between glossy cypresses. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but Jessica had half the men in London before she finally settled on Xavier. Settled just in time, because a few months later she gave birth to these twin boys – ”
“Non-identical, right?”
“Oh,” Melissa laughed again “as non-identical as could be. I mean, clearly not the fruit of the same man’s loins.”
“B-but, how can that be?”
“Come on, Holly, don’t be naive,” another squeeze of the arm, “sperm can swim about in the uterine canal for anything up to three days. It’s not impossible that some other fellow’s different little fellows might dive in there during that time.”

Holly struggled to picture the biological processes involved in this, but gave up: “You’re telling me that one of her eggs was, that it – ”
“It divided, and each half was fertilised with the sperm of two different men. So that in the fullness of time she gave birth to twins with different fathers! Anyway,” Melissa shrugged off this bizarre revelation as if it were any old piece of tittle-tattle, “I thought I’d better warn you. Now come on, everyone’s down on the terrace waiting.”

Lunch went far better than Holly could ever have dreamed. Perhaps it was the large quantities of prosecco – which everyone swilled as if it were elegant 7up. Perhaps it was the exquisite octopus risotto that Xavier Suarez had cooked after – as he informed Holly – “Marinading those suckers in their own ink for two nights.” Or maybe it was the majestic sweep of the view from the hill, across the rolling countryside, with its chiaroscuro of tawny and umber shades, and its jewel-like villages. A view that made one realise that those Renaissance landscapes were, in fact, almost photo-real.

However, on balance, Holly thought that the reason she felt so at ease with Melissa’s ineffably stylish friends was the secret that had been vouchsafed her. Without it the chillily pretty, stick-thin Jessica Albie would have been grossly intimidating; while with the secret inside her, Holly was free to look upon her as a strange freak, within whose own pinched insides the most peculiar marinading had taken place: doubly alien, tentacular, fingers, detaching from a protoplasmic ball. As for Suarez, whose bear-like bulk and grizzled muzzle already suggested some noble beast of the woods, Holly couldn’t forbear from visualising great horns, arcing up from his brows as he browsed on his insalata verde.

Even if the other members of this smart set – a glossy magazine editor, her actor boyfriend, a brace of architects, and an absurdly famous and flamboyantly gay musician – had been inclined towards intimidating Holly, they couldn’t have. For the focus of the whole luncheon – the entire afternoon even – were the Suarez boys. They didn’t just bicker, they kicked and punched each other. They didn’t just play harmless tricks – they smashed the windscreen of the musician’s brand-new 4wd Porsche. They didn’t only pee in the swimming pool, they also – and it was Holly’s daughter who informed the assembled company of this latest outrage – “Did a number two!”

The others expressed sympathy to Jessica and Xavier, offered up tales of their own offspring’s outrageous doings, ventured diagnoses of fashionable new disorders. All in all, everyone had the happy experience of witnessing child behaviour that made them feel deeply smug about their own parenting. Except for the gay musician that is – but then, he was deeply smug all the time.

And Holly – Holly had the double pleasure of being in on the secret. Of being able to read the way Xavier always took the side of Antonio, his own, small, Hispanic doppelganger at a deeper, more sinister level. As for the other Suarez boy, Ferdie, what could’ve been more pathetic than the sight of his mother, taking him aside from the party, time after time, and admonishing him with the same, utterly chilly indifference? Ferdie didn’t resemble her in any way at all – anymore than he looked like his nominal father. Holly couldn’t forbear from peering into his pale face more and more as the afternoon wore on, as if in its pale, unformed contours, she could discern the answer to a half-remembered riddle which had troubled her for years.

Holly stayed far later than she’d planned. It was almost dark when she had finally said her thankyous and goodbyes, tracked down her own twins – who were smoking in a barn – and kicked them back into the Renault. She accepted a basket of porcini from Melissa and bestowed two kisses on her with genuine warmth. “We’ve had a fantastic day,” she said “haven’t we kids?” And they dutifully intoned: “Ye-es.” “You must come over to where we’re staying,” Holly continued “and bring the Suarezes with you too, I’m sure Brion would love to meet them. If only he hadn’t been laid up with this bloody sunburn today.”

When she issued the invitation, Holly meant it. However, within seconds she mentally withdrew it. For, as she shifted into gear, and purely automatically looked in the rearview mirror, the last thing she saw on Monte Felacco was this: Jessica Albie telling off her freakish eight-year-old yet again. This time Ferdie had clearly had enough, and he was dismissing his mother with a familiar gesture, a peculiar flick of his thumb and index finger. Holly’s resentment of that morning flooded back – now with the strength of a tsunami.

No, the Suarezes wouldn’t be visiting the McCluskeys in their, far less salubrious villa. In fact, Holly wasn’t sure she’d even be returning there herself. Jessica Albie had had half the men in London, and the thought of ever sharing a bed again with one of her leftovers, made Holly sick to her stomach.

A cuff round the, er, hands

July 27, 2006

At Marrocco’s on the front at Hove there is a queue of ice-cream malcontents, of whom we are five: my friend the photographer Polly Borland and I, together with three of our children. A bank of sea mist that’s been hovering offshore all afternoon is beginning to dip and sway in towards us; ahead of it comes a premonition of immemorial dankness, a Dickensian pong. I shouldn’t be surprised if, when it lifted, a prison hulk were revealed, its rotting spars piercing the shoreline of Worthing.

I used to come here in puberty, scampering along the Celesteville esplanade, then up the tiled stairs to the salt-water swimming baths at the King Alfred Leisure Centre. “No Petting” the signs said on the poolside — an injunction they no longer make. “No chance” I would wearily, sebaceously acknowledge. No sex in my life then, only Player’s Navy Cut and barley wine, rasp and head spin.

There’s a kerfuffle inside the ice-cream bar, followed by the arcade-game sirens of converging police cars coming towards us. Two estate cars pull up with the bilious chequerboard of the Sussex Constabulary spread across their flanks. One, two, three … eight cops in all debouch and ram their way into Marrocco’s. Polly — purely on an ice-cream errand, checking flavours and such — follows on after them. Then comes back again in high dudgeon.

“They’ve bloody handcuffed them!” She expostulates in the rain-on-galvanised-iron accents of her native Melbourne. “Two 13-year-old kids and they’ve bloody handcuffed them! I had to say: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ I had to — but they didn’t pay me any mind.” I find this a little hard to credit; personally, if I were Sir Ian Blair himself I’d stop and pay attention to Polly, who is a formidable presence. I’ve been on assignments with her in the ghettos of South Central LA and never seen her bat an eyelid.

Naturally, Mrs Daily Mail is ahead of us in the queue and rounds on Polly: “They won’t do it again, then,” she opines. “This’ll teach them a lesson.”

“Madame,” I rejoin “are you able to see into the future?” She ignores this, but continues instead: “I’m glad the police have cuffed them, I wish they’d handcuff the little bleeders who steal off my girl at school, that’ll teach them a lesson as well.”

And doubtless she would’ve gone on, had she not become aware that I was passionately ignoring her. There are some people who won’t rest easy until either they’re in their graves — or a lot of other people are.

Then the cops came out, one each side of the two handcuffed malefactors. The kids were bat-eared, T-shirted; Polly had another go at the cops. One of the kids turned and said: “That’s just what I’ve been telling them, but they wouldn’t listen.” Then he was squashed down into one of the cars. The queue collectively tut-tutted — some for the kids, some for the cops. And now comes the most pathetic detail: once Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were safely in the meat wagon, one of the cops came back and fetched their BMXs, which were propped up by the doorway. He walked off carrying them in either hand, then put them in the boot of the car, as if he were a uniformed dad; which I suppose in a way, he was.

Book of Dave winners

July 13, 2006

Congratulations to the winners of our Book of Dave competition: Elizabeth Wright, Cheshire; Richard Doe, Oxford; Matthew Eyre, Derbyshire; Andy Howes, Herts; Leo Evans-Doran, Cambridge; Rik James, Surrey; Sheila Bonas, Leicester; Spencer Elliott, Kent; Matt Smith, Hants; and John Foyle, Somerset.

Forest Gate-gate

June 29, 2006

For once I’m tending more towards conspiracy rather than cock-up. Mostly I view conspiracy theorists as the anoraks of the secularised world — seeking for shadowy, omnipotent forces to revere in a postlapsarian world of disturbing chaos. But the recent debacle in Forest Gate, whereby 200 armed, chemically suited policemen stormed a house and maimed an innocent man — who just happened to be a Muslim — have got me thinking.

A couple of days after the shooting, when it became apparent that the “hot” intelligence the Met had trumpeted was nothing more than hearsay, I ran into Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, outside his office in Soho. After some acquaintance-style chitchat, I averred that the whole Forest Gate debacle smacked to high-heaven of the kind of inter-agency conflict bruited about by John Le Carré in his Cold War thrillers, and that I wouldn’t be surprised if MI5 had set the coppers up. Far from disabusing me of this, Ian all but concurred: “Funnily enough,” he said “Francis Wheen was making precisely the same point just now in our editorial meeting.”

Now, a fortnight since, the fact that these two men have been released without charge, and that the police clearly did cock up (even if their actions were the result of someone else’s conspiracy), is steadily being buried beneath a lava flow of bureaucratic “inquiry”: the truth entombed, only to be accessible millennia hence by the disputatious political archaeologists of a future era.

That the Met, MI6, MI5 and heaven knows what other shadowy “security agencies” (what a choice euphemism this remains), should be engaged in a turf war, using the terrorist threat as a weapon with which to smite each other, should come as no surprise. There’s an easy comfort — much cleaved to at all levels of society — that this kind of carry-on imploded along with the collapse of the Berlin Wall; after all, with no enemy to defect to, how could all those spooks and plods exercise their undoubted capacity for treachery? But this is nonsense, the whole farrago of the Kelly suicide — and its aftermath — exposed the extent to which the political class try to ride the bucking bronco of “intelligence”, ever fearful that the damn nag will toss them off.

Ever since 9/11 we’ve been admonished that there is a real, present and even grotesque threat to the welfare of each and every one of us. The police and the powers-that-be regularly inform us that this or that terrorist threat has been thwarted, and that for sound “operational” reasons we cannot be allowed to know the details. Yet when we get to actually hear about this Bin Laden-busting, it almost always turns out to have been a cock-up. Now, with the end of the Blair regime in sight, there’s little reason for those cloak ‘n dagger horseys to go on being bridled. With the knives already out for “Sir” Ian Blair at the Met, can it be long before a fair few are plunged between the “Sir” Paul Smith-suited shoulders of our un-beloved leader?

Watch this space.

Will Self, 29 June 2006

The Starship Lack-of-Enterprise

June 16, 2006

At 42 the Calls – a proto-boutique hotel in Leeds, which I’ve been frequenting for a decade or more on book tours – I am upgraded to a suite. And what a suite! This is no aircraft hangar, like the suite-with-gymnasium at the Hotel de Vin in Brum, but a charming collection of rooms: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, tastefully rendered in white plaster and featuring low, rough-hewn wooden beams. However, the sitting room is dominated by an oval black table, complete with six high-backed chairs, and a wide-screen interactive television. It’s as if Anne Hathaway’s cottage had been impregnated by the Starship Enterprise and produced bastard offspring, all interior and no surface.

The interactive television is the focus of my attention because I have to file some copy late that evening, after I’ve given my reading at the local Waterstone’s. The receptionist assured me on the phone that morning, when I called from London to enquire, that this gizmo would enable me to send and receive email. I took her at her word, and didn’t hump along my laptop, because the following day I was intent on some major hill walking in the Peak District.

Late that evening I settled down on the bridge of the Starship Wattle and Daub, and started faffing around with the interactive TV. The approved list of email servers didn’t include my own, when I logged on to the web and plugged in its URL, the dratted interactive TV didn’t respond either. Nice Tim, the manager, had already been up once to sort out the infrared keyboard — which wasn’t working — now he came back up to faff alongside me. Suddenly I noticed we’d been faffing for over an hour and it was past 11pm. “Jesus!” I keened, like a fishwife who’s lost her husband and five sons off Dogger Bank, I’ll never manage to get to my bed in time to be up at 6.30 at this rate!”

Tim invited me down to the office to use the computer there. He even said no one would mind if I smoked my Hoyo de Monterrey petit robusto. We went down, I logged on to my server and began typing my observations on the woeful progress of John “Castrate All Sex Offenders” Reid at the Home Office. And typed. And typed. And then, after about an hour, hit “send”, only to be told by the server that my “time had expired”. My copy had, naturally, been consigned to the ether. And no, I hadn’t saved it.

I moaned and spat expletives like a man whose testicles have been shot off in the front line of a bitter and yet strangely useless counter-insurgency operation. I considered — seriously, coldly, with great deliberation — laying waste to human civilisation, to a point at which it would take many thousands of years before technological advancement resulted in the re-emergence of electronic data transmission. I swore some more. I apologised to the night manager (it was by now that late) for my histrionics. Then, like Sisyphus, I put my weight to the plastic boulder, and began pushing it back up the hill with finger stroke after finger stroke.

Birmingham, Alabama

June 6, 2006

Every hotel room with a sufficiently big mirror reduces a man to the level of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. The urge to order up scotch, do nude kung-fu and smash the mirror is almost insurmountable. It takes iron self-control to watch News 24 and then attempt sleep. At the Hotel de Vin in Birmingham all the suites are named after famous vintages and there’s even a vinous tinge to the wall coverings and the furniture. Last time I stayed here, I arrived at about midnight, and the old geezer on the desk said: ‘We have upgraded you, Mr Self, to the Ruinart Suite.’ ‘Oh, that’s awfully nice of you,’ I replied. ‘Yes,’ he leant forward conspiratorially ‘it has a gym.’ And it did: three Tunturi machines, a wet room, a power shower. The bed itself was about ten foot square, and would’ve happily accommodated an Eastern European volleyball team, pumped up on steroids and ready for anything. The trouble was, I was utterly exhausted. Nevertheless, I bent to the will of Barton Fink, the God of hotel chains, and exercised all night long.

This time I haven’t been upgraded. I sliced the top of my toe off on the sharp bed leg while voyaging to the toilet. Burgundy blood dripped on to the winey carpet. On the television, community leaders in Forest Gate, East London, remark to Jeremy Paxman how astonishingly alienating it is to have large squads of armed policemen – some of them in chemical protections suits – smashing into neighbourhood houses. Mark my words: given the speed with which the IPCC has acted on the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, it will take about 150 years for the truth to emerge on this one.

Now on to Lichfield, birthplace of Dr Johnson. Who says England isn’t a fascinating place?

The Book of Dave competition

June 2, 2006

We have 10 signed copies of Will Self’s new novel to give away to celebrate the publication of The Book of Dave, courtesy of Penguin. Simply answer the following question:

Dave Roth was the name given to the cab driver in The Book of Dave in an early synopsis of the book, but which band did David Lee Roth used to be the lead singer of?

a) Van Halen
b) Van der Graaf Generator
c) Van Morrison

Email your answer with your name and address to chris.hall@will-self.com with the subject line “Book of Dave competition”. You must live in the UK to enter. Deadline for entries June 15.

The Book Of Dave – Guardian Review

May 30, 2006

M. John Harrison, 27th May 2006

“It’s hard not to put Riddley Walker at the centre of The Book of Dave, if only because, like Self’s novel, it is written in a constructed post-disaster dialect, with its own glossary. But the difference between the two men is anger, and how anger manages the comic sensibility. Typically, Hoban’s amused gaze hunts and pecks from place to place and, though it never settles anywhere for long, eventually assembles a sort of magpie nest of cultural items from which the possibility of humanity can hatch. Self is obsessive. His intellect swings across its subjects like a headlight, and, once it locks on, won’t let go until it’s seen what it wants us to see. There’s a great rationality – it’s almost as dismissive as J G Ballard’s or John Gray’s – and great rage, but is there any of the tenderness Hoban always achieves? Well, in a weird way, this time, there is. Michelle and Dave aren’t caricatures. They’ve messed up their lives, but they’re encouraged to stumble towards some sort of self-knowledge. This time even the psychologists – Zack Busner makes a predictable appearance – seem benign, and achieve something like a cure.”

Read the full review

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Elaine
Will Self's latest book Elaine will be published in hardback by Grove on September 5 2024 in the UK and September 17 2024 in the USA.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Will’s Previous Books

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Shark
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  Umbrella
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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
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  Walking To Hollywood
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The Butt
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  Grey Area
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Junk Mail
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  Great Apes
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Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
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  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
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The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
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  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
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The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
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  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
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Psycho Too
Psycho II
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  Liver
Liver
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How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
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  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
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Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
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  Dorian
Dorian
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Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
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  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
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Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
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  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
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