The Book of Dave

The Book of Dave is a 2006 novel by English writer Will Self. Its central figure is Dave Rudman, a London taxi driver struggling with anger and mental illness. After a bitter divorce from his wife Michelle, who he believes is unfairly denying him access to their son Carl, Dave writes a book. Printed on metal plates, it contains his tirades against women and his views on fathers' custody rights, mixed with his knowledge of London's streets—the "Knowledge" required of all cabbies. He buries this book in a Hampstead garden.

Centuries later, after catastrophic flooding has submerged much of southern England, the book is unearthed. It becomes the holy text of a rigid, cruel, and misogynistic religion practiced on the island of Ham, which is actually the unflooded high ground of Hampstead Heath. The novel alternates between Dave's contemporary life and the future society of his followers. Much of the dialogue in the future sections is written in Mokni, an invented dialect blending Cockney, taxi-driver slang, text-messaging, and late-20th-century vocabulary. For instance, an unmarried woman is called an "opare" (from "au pair"), and "cloakyfings" (Dave's term for Muslim women's garments) becomes the general word for women's outerwear. Spellings are phonetic and often obscure: "bugsbunny" clearly means rabbit, but "beefan semis" (from "beef and semis") is harder to decipher. The book includes a glossary.

The novel was partly inspired by *The Bible Unearthed*, which argues that archaeological evidence undermines much of the Old Testament's historical basis. Self has said he wanted to explore the idea that revealed religion is a necessary part of state formation, and that what people make of a holy book matters more than its actual content. He was also prompted by reports of increased Thames Barrier raises, leading him to imagine a flood that would make detailed archival knowledge useless for reconstructing London. *The Book of Dave* parodies modern religion and blind faith. For example, the Hamsters (inhabitants of Ham) treat passages from the Knowledge as sacred hymns, and Dave's personal rituals—like "changeover," the exchange of children between separated parents—become legal requirements. Self has noted this challenges the assumption that something should be followed simply because it is written in an old book.