The Book of Dave

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The pair do not meet for another seven months until a heavily pregnant Michelle arrives at Dave's flat. At the same time, reports of increased raisings of the Thames Barrier had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis.

The capital of London itself has split into an archipelago, and the narrative becomes a bewildering adventure and religious pilgrimage not unlike a certain Gormenghast trilogy, and the complex nature of their quest makes the mythology and its lingo an integral part of its understanding. Dave Vitty, aka Radio 1’s Comedy Dave, has worked his way from the backrooms of BBC radio to the biggest breakfast show on the airwaves and has a story to tell.The primitive brutality of the primeval civilisation holds a clear mirror to the situation in Iraq (hinted in the second chapter) and that the causation of war and strife is all predicated upon documents as unverifiable as the next.

Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions.Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Additionally, aspects of Dave's life are ritualised into legal requirements: such as "changeover", the act of custodial exchange of children, and parents being forced to live apart even though they would be happy living together. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. Self has written with an often ironic or misanthropic detachment in the past, which makes his moments of genuine redemption or visceral emotion harder to pick up on.

There are themes of the abuse of animals and nature, the seeping corruption of technology, the dangerous foundationless intransigence of religion and – in its ultimate message, the meaning of fatherhood.Fearing Carl will never know him, Dave pens a gripping text—part memoir, part philosophical treatise, and part handbook of London street coordinates—that captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life.

Despite discovering that Carl is actually Cal's son, Dave slowly recovers his sanity and, during a stay in hospital, forms a relationship with Phyllis Vance, the mother of Steve, another patient. But if not, then I wouldn’t recommend it because you just won’t enjoy it – you’ll struggle, and the book will take its toll. Before they can receive their license they must know every street and the route between every street in a 6 mile radius of Charing Cross station (that's about 113 square miles) - and they need to be able to describe the best route to take dependent on the traffic conditions In addition they have to know all the points of interest and important landmarks along the route!Dave sort of redeems himself at the end, but the notebooks he fills with crazy rantings during his episodes of mental collapse, are buried and then found 500 years later, when they are taken as Gospel. The novel is set in an unspecified time in the future and tells the story of an isolated community living in a world that has become largely uninhabitable; they are utterly focused on creating a fully self-aware AI system known as ‘Dave’. He has written five collections of shorter fiction and three novellas: The Quantity Theory of Insanity; Grey Area; License to Hug; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo; Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys; Dr. The future story has something of the feel of the film Galaxy Quest, where a distant civilisation have mistaken the transmissions of a Star Trek like TV show for a documentary and have modelled their entire civilisation and technology on its fictions. I should stress that English is not my mother tongue and since I live in the country where English is a foreign language I’m not too familiar with slang and modern double meanings etc.