Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
And you say that, with The Book of Dave, Will Self actually acknowledged his debt to Hoban.
That’s right and a similar logic is at play in the conceit behind this novel. I have to say I am not a huge Will Self fan. I always want to like him a bit more than I end up liking him. But I think there is a genius idea in this book. Again it is a post-apocalyptic scenario. I think there was flooding from global warming. But what I find very funny about his central conceit is that you have this misogynistic taxi-driver called Dave who rants away and his kids have been taken into custody. He is like one of those cabbies we have all had who sound off these ignorant, opinionated views as you are stuck in the back as a captive audience. And, in the book, Dave writes out his rant on metal so it survives in the post-apocalyptic world.
And it is found, a bit like a Dead Sea scroll, and society has organised itself around these mad opinions. So, essentially, it is a big satire on religion, the way in which religious authorities seek to impose absolute meaning on ancient texts even though society is drastically different from the context in which those texts were written. So he is sticking two fingers up to fundamentalists of any creed really! It's a hilarious idea and one that rightly pokes fun at how religious dogma, conjoined with ignorance and fear, will always seek to impose a fixed meaning on something all writers know to be true – the impossibility of single interpretation and the inherent instability of all textual meaning.
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Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
