The Book of Dave

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The potential of rising sea-levels to make a future Atlantis out of London and East Anglia is an alluring concept.

I had to read The Book of Dave as part of my London in Literature course when I was studying creative writing at Roehampton University. Most obviously it is a satire on religious fundamentalism, and the cynicism of those who would corrupt it for their own advancement.While the contemporary passages conform to reader expectations of style and syntax, albeit of a literary fiction type, Self renders the future speech of Ing in a ferociously phonetic form of cockney speech patterns and accents. The present-day characters speak a phonetic cockney that frequently has to be read aloud (at least in your head) to understand it. Frustrated by his provincial surroundings growing up in 1970s Blackpool, Dave Ball initially saw an escape in rock ’n’ roll and had early ambitions to learn the guitar.

Ballard made sweltering crocodile-infested tropical lagoons out of flooded central London; Self sticks to a temperate climate where names change but animals and plants don’t, with oaks rebranded as crinkleleaf and great skuas renamed bonkergulls. Syz loses his friends and meets strange characters who send him on a quest to uncover the real truth behind Dave. As painful as the truth might seem, most of us are in our own little way just as responsible for social exclusion, religious discrimination or moral indifference.Now, in the wake of his dramatic resignation following the sensational EU referendum campaign, this new edition of the book that ‘got the world talking’ ( Daily Mail) revisits the real David Cameron, bringing the story of his premiership to its final chapter. Dave's narrative voice slips into dark, cynical, unspoken (italics actually) thoughts, which creep in quite often, showing us how cracked this guy really is. Also, it is about an (anti)utopia built on a taxi driver's worldview, which should be reason enough to read it.

While the fantasy element of the book is captivating, Self has structured the novel so that each chapter is approximately 30 pages in length, meaning the reader is forced to immerse his or herself in his world. Having led large restaurants in Manchester and Liverpool, he’s found fame on BBC’s Great British Menu. Sign up to hear about the latest books, brilliant competitions, fun activities, brand new resources for teachers and events happening near you as well as the latest World Book Day news and how you can celebrate reading all year round. The struggle of the reader sounding out the syllables of mockni is akin perhaps to the difficulty of decoding the middle-english of Chaucer’s Canterbury tales.Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012, and Shark.