Back to the bleak future of a London cabbie
Dave Rudman is a London cab driver. He's short on cash, worn out from his job, and very angry. His ex-wife, Michelle, has obtained a legal injunction to prevent him from seeing his son, Carl. As he battles traffic, chats with customers, and gets stiffed on tips, his mind grows gradually more clouded with rage. He starts writing.
In a fit of insanity he pours his thoughts, his memories, and his activities out on paper. The result is part memoir, part cab-driving manual, part misogynistic rant. One night he violates Michelle's restraining order to bury the book in her garden.
Centuries later The Book of Dave is discovered and becomes the sacred text of a new religion that dominates every aspect of life in Ing (as England is now called). Standard cab routes ("on left Homerton High Street, forward Urswick Road") are recited in liturgy.
"Rearview" is a term of address for important officials. Time is measured in cab driver shifts. And marriage and family have been redesigned in an eerie echo of the lives of divorced couples with joint custody: married couples are required to live apart, and the children live with each parent by turn according to a strict schedule. Life and thought in this society is overseen by high priests called Drivers, who instruct their flocks in the teachings that will lead to the creation of the earthly paradise of New London.
In the hands of many writers, this premise would come to nothing more than a long string of laughs with all the literary depth of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It is a tribute to the talent of Will Self ( " Sweet Smell of Psychosis, " " The Quantity Theory of Insanity " ) that " The Book of Dave " is much more. Ing is as grim and real as Orwell's "Airstrip One " and as densely textured as Kim Stanley Robinson's " Mars. "
And like Orwell's dystopia, Ing has its own dissenters. Young Carl Dévúsh resents and questions the regimentation of life, particularly the sharp division of children's lives into "mummytime" and "daddytime." He and his teacher Antonë Böm become known as heretics, and take the dangerous, unprecedented step of trying to escape their community in the remote hope of finding others like them.
Chapter by chapter we turn back and forth between far-distant Ing and the London of the present, alternating between young Carl's blind quest for freedom and Dave Rudman's equally blind steps that lead him from his youth to middle age, a shattered marriage, and madness.
This alternation of chapter and setting illustrates with appalling clarity how Dave Rudman's misfortunes and psychoses, recorded and discovered in the far distant future, become the basis of a brutal culture. The Book of Dave is a compelling argument for the absurdity often inherent in religion and the dangers of elevating any human to a cult figure.
But even more profoundly, it's a meditation on the unfairness, on the contingency, of life. Dave in London, like Carl in Ing, wants nothing more than to be free. That's why Dave became a cab driver: "He loved everything to do with driving. Driving made him feel free." Being a cab driver led to picking up the passenger who became his wife, which led to his disaster of a marriage, and led to premature aches and pains and being perpetually short of money. This view of life is best summed up by Michelle when she learns Dave is in a mental hospital: "everyday life was made up of a series of small, botched actions, which, although instantly forgotten, nonetheless ruined everything."
"The Book of Dave" is thoroughly bleak, and satisfying in the uncompromising completeness of its vision.
