Much of the dialogue in The Book of Dave is written in Mokni, an invented dialect of English derived from Cockney, taxi-drivers' and Dave's own usage, text-messaging, and vocabulary peculiar to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. something about the whole Biting Nihilistic Satire school of lit I guess just feels very limited to me. But Will Self kept the focus quite personal, and created a strange and convincing world for it, without the need to drown everything in elaborate detail. Self has a supernatural empathetic capacity that he uses here to give life to those Londoners otherwise dismissed.

The fact is, there is a little of Dave in all of us, since he represents the worst of our excesses and the most intolerant of our personalities. As an example, burgerkine is a word used to describe cattle and cloakyfing is used to indicate a Muslim burka. Also, it is about an (anti)utopia built on a taxi driver's worldview, which should be reason enough to read it. Following the occasionally wild adventures from formation in a university studio to stratospheric heights after the success of ‘Tainted Love’, to their split and subsequent reunions – including selling out London’s O2 Arena in 2018 – the whole Soft Cell journey is told frankly and fondly. When cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife of five years deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, he is thrown into a tailspin of doubt and discontent.

Dave Rudman, the eponymous hero, is a typical Self character: over-weight, smelly, prejudiced and a poor husband, a poor father and a poor son. The chapters about Dave were very good, but the futuristic narrative, while funny for a chapter or two, was a slog, especially with the ridiculous Mockni dialogue. Didn’t know how to decipher what it says until the moment when I was out of sheer desperation start to read aloud imitating (how I thought) some illiterate Lundun bum (would speak). I think the same idea in many other hands could have easily been just silly and overdone, and would have ended up as just another of the hundreds of dystopia-type novels with their grand illusions.

I may pick it up at another time, but I've got so much on my to-read list already, it might be relagated to a dusty shelf somewhere. For example, the "Hamsters", the inhabitants of the island of Ham (actually the higher, unflooded part of Hampstead Heath), believe that certain verses out of the book are sacred "hymns", where in fact they are just excerpts from The Knowledge. I will try and read it a second time at some point, as I am sure I will get more from it with repeated readings, but this started off difficult and never really was comfortable (or completely enjoyable) reading. The book is maybe a little longer than it needs to be, and maybe a little bit more confusing than it needs to be.Mark Lawrence in his Broken Empire Series invented a far future world by simply melting all the glaciers in the aftermath of a “Day of a thousand suns” that the reader quickly associates with some kind of nuclear holocaust. Two stories based on one man, this book is long and depressing and then sort of softly gut-punches you at the end.