design faults and a book

It all went a bit pear-shaped when I was checking out the language class options for next time around. I was drawn into another topic area entirely, related to my artists' writing sessions which ended early in 2018.

For the rest of 2018, I've decided to join a creative writing session at another nearby pub. My design fault was to attempt to add some sort of book reviewing meetup. It all went wrong, of course. The planned book review sessions were at the same time as the creative writing.

No worries, I thought, I'll find a different reviewer session.

That I did.

I found the replacement group on Wednesday, enrolled and then discovered that its next session was Thursday, the very next day. They were to review a book by Will Self. I could have skipped the session, but that's not the way to do it.

I'll happily listen to Will Self prognosticating, often from Radio 4 or in a Guardian-style lecture. I've read one of his shorter writings, 'The design faults of the Volvo 760', which is about motor car and lifestyle faults. I'd originally read it as part of one of those Penguin binge-boxes, where it was amongst 70 individually bound short stories.

I downloaded the selected book to review from Kindle.

The Book of Dave.

Not 30 pages, this one, oh no, 500 pages plus a glossary. Kindle estimated 9h30 to read it. I knew I wouldn't do it justice in my available time before the next evening's session at the pub.

That was even before I started it.

Self had decided to invent a new post apocalyptic language to write in for about half of the book. The first chapter starts as a cross between an extended mockney and text-speak. The story is partly about religion, filtered through the mind of a raging and mad misogynistic London taxi-driver. After being dumped by his wife, he writes a rant, has it printed on metal pages which he then buries it in a garden.

This rant, Dave's rules, are discovered after a great dystopian flood and with the mixed terminology of cockney, taxi driving, The Knowledge and SMS-texting become the basis of a new governance and religion.

The storyline is split into various threads, with the future set some 527 years After Dave, during which a small remaining island of what was once Hampstead (Ham) goes about its Moto (part-sentient animal) farming business, somewhat to the sarf uv Nú Lundun. Many scenes are framed through Dave's mind which boils with an intense anger, whether through his presence, or through the effect of his inadvertent messages to the future.

I could go on with the story, which I assembled by reading 2-3 pages every 20 or so, such that I'd have a general idea of the book, its style and general messaging, ahead of our get together.

As luck would have it, I was not alone in finding this book difficult to read. There were around a dozen of us around the raucous table in the pub. Two had finished the book legitimately. A couple more had managed around a third. I felt like I'd managed to be up there with the 'most read' despite my (disclosed) unconventional approach.

Will Self may have created a Dävinanity and plenty of clever word play, but the voice of his character is so unremittingly shouty and bleak (a rude man, that Dave Rudman), that it is hard to see how the religion would form around it.

But I suppose that is one of Self's points.

He opens the book with a quote from Edward Thomas: I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers – as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

Then much later he applies the other bookend with a rail about religion: After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until, speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self-murderers – they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit.

There's no doubt that Self can write, nor that he can think; he writes about London well and with humour. There's the little section about the huge hotels on the A4 - so large they could check in the other smaller hotels, or the section about Edgeware Road and the plate glass windows of Maroush... Arabs supping fruit juices and smoking shishas. I can't help thinking that as a single novel this may need to be read in small instalments and not as I attempted.

Someone asked me: Will I go back and fill in the 20 page gaps? Probably not, it's work on me is done.

And meanwhile, our noisy but otherworld vocabulary weary group of a dozen and a floppy dog veered away from Will Self and onto other matters.