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July 7th, 2006 by Eric K (Permalink)
Director: Will Self Year: 2005 Add Comments |
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Self. Devout student of suburban eschatology; haranguing harbinger of the middle-class apocalypse; perennial despairer of General Public opinion (© Rupert Murdoch), Will Self, England’s prize gloommonger returns to dig his cynical claws further under the nailbed of the manicured middle-classes. Coursing through previous you could almost hear the blood vessel in Self’s forehead pumping as he witnesses Modern Man’s mindless decent into a future of TV enemas of mind and colon. Like Great Apes and How the Dead Live, The Book of Dave envisages a dystopian future where the lamentable mores of nineties/noughties Britain have broken free of their fraying chains and run rampant about the Circus Maximus of modern society. But there is just the slightest chink of optimism peaking through this bleak vision; Self has found his own Orwellian proles in whom hope lies. So who are these saviours sent to rescue us from 78.54 years of chicken korma pizzas and ketchup-filled fries? None other than the humble, London cabbie: after all, a species, medically proven to have larger brains than the rest of us. Self has his Swiftian satirist cap on again as he rails against modern family structure, street-culture and Ken Livingstone’s transport policy. More so than Swift though, Self is a master of spoken language, twisting and perverting the careless, lazy slang of today into the ‘Mokni’ the inhabitants of this Nu London talk. ‘Old’ London, having been wiped out by a great flood, is now ruled by a cynosure of priests and lawyers taking their cue from a “sacred text” written pre-flood by schizophrenic and divorce-embittered cab-driver, Dave Rudman.
There are a lot of books in the world: over 370,000 published per year in the US and UK alone. And, although half of these are by Dan Brown, that still makes for a lot of authors and a lot of voices clamouring for individuality. So when I say that there is noone quite like Will Self writing fiction today it should not be sniffed at. The Newspeak-like language (a dictionary is included) of the future Ingerland-dwellers is a clever and witty creation that of course speaks volumes about Self’s opinion of the txt-msg generation and his hopes for its future if we continue as is. Similar things have been done this year with the yoof culture-aping patois of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani but Self’s novels seem to be getting more moralistic and (somewhat worryingly for those of us seeking further fuel for our cultural anger) optimistic as he ages. The Book of Dave has, at its heart, a moral message of the ultimately triumphant power of the love of a parent for his child and a faith in the common sense Knowledge of the working cabbie. A monstrous postulation for the future, then, but not one we need take up.
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