\nDave is a cab driver in London. He ends up in a semi-accidental marriage that slowly goes downhill and becomes more and more miserable, until the couple separate and Dave cannot meet his son any more. This leads to a severe depression and Dave suffers a nervous breakdown. During that period he feels compelled to write a book containing his most important thoughts about the world – most of them strongly coloured by his broken marriage and by cabbie lore.\n<\/p>\n
\nHundreds of years later in a post-apocalyptic England (flooded rather than nuked, unlike most post-apocalyptic visions) the book is found and taken as gospel. The entire world is organised around Dave’s misogynistic ravings about men living separately from women and children being in shared custody, and women being evil bitches. That, and the Knowledge<\/a>. The symbol of the religion is the Wheel, the priests are called Drivers, and driving terms have permeated all parts of the language.\n<\/p>\n \nThe book cuts between these two stories.\n<\/p>\n \nThe future story is a satire of religion – a book of dubious provenance is taken as god’s literal truth, and interpreted by men both literally and figuratively. Rules that made sense in a specific situation hundreds of years ago are applied to everything. As a satire it was very straightforward, unsubtle and not particularly interesting.\n<\/p>\n \nThe degeneration of society and the devolution of language get a lot of attention from the author. Terms half-understood are applied to only remotely related concepts: all trousers are called jeans, and all lamps are called lectrics. Some of these are quite obvious, whereas others are so obscure that Self has felt it necessary to include a glossary at the end. (Which sort of brings to mind cheap Tolkien knockoffs with made-up languages.) The future world speaks mokni (a derivation of Cockney) which the author spells phonetically.\n<\/p>\n \n– Owzabaht Dave, Mummi, vairs ee? \nThe premise was interesting and the writing too, but the book as a whole was not my kind of book.\n<\/p>\n \nIt’s a rather depressing read. I do not like books about miserably failing marriages and quarrelling couples. And the future, with its society crippled and brutalised by stupid rules, offers little hope either.\n<\/p>\n \nI also felt that I never really got a clear picture of what that future is like. And the transition, the emergence of a world where a religion is born from a single copy of a single book and then proceeds to conquer the entirety of England, is hard to envisage and hard to believe.\n<\/p>\n \nIn the early chapters one has the joy of seeing the connections between the now and the future, and guessing at what will happen in Dave’s life to make him leave such a dismal legacy. But after the initial direction has been set, the rest never goes anywhere much, and the book becomes a bit tedious. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker<\/i> was, in my opinion, a better realisation of the degenerated-future, degenerated-language idea.\n<\/p>\n \nAmazon UK<\/a>, Amazon US<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dave is a cab driver in London. He ends up in a semi-accidental marriage that slowly goes downhill and becomes more and more miserable, until the couple separate and Dave cannot meet his son any more. This leads to a severe depression and Dave suffers a nervous breakdown. During that period he feels compelled to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n– Ees sittin infruntuv uz, luv, but we carn C im coz ees invizzibull.
\n– But ee can C uz, carn ee, Mummi?
\n– O yeah, mi luv, ee can C uz, ee sees uz in iz mirra.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n