The Book of Dave: in search of psycho-voltage

I've just finished reading Will Self's "The Book of Dave". In a nutshell, it's the story of Dave Rudman, an estranged, deranged and deluded London taxi driver who writes a cathartic, misogynistic thesis to his son. He buries the book, and centuries later it is discovered in a post-deluge age where it spawns a fanatical, fundamentalist religion.

Pretty much par for the course for Will Self, then, you might say. There are a staggering number of facets and ways to interpret this book. Readng a few reviews of the book, it is primarily seen as a biting satire of religions: the ease with which passing moods and memoirs of a few people in history can be magnified and mauled in the future. Self does this satire unnervingly well. Indeed, it strikes me that the more self-contained and fully-formed someone's thesis on life, the more extremist it probably is, because it will not have been honed and subjected to reasoning discourse. Had I written a long essay ten years ago entitled "People who will be first against the wall when I am king" (which, I assure you, I didn't) I can guarantee I'd now be mortified by it and desperate for it not to see the light of day. Of course, that makes this blog all the more worrying, because by the time I am mortified by it it will have been in the public realm for some time and there'll be no clawing it back.......

For me, though, the most striking quality of "The Book of Dave" is the way in which it creates two dramatically different versions of London. Few writers can have envisioned more different Londons than Self, as it his stock in trade, really. Yet the two (or more?) Londons here are so polarised: one is the personal, intimate memory-mapped city organised by the enlarged frontal lobe of a taxi driver's Knowlege; the other is a staggering landscape of an impersonal, dysfunctional authoritarian city-state painted with a big, hairy brush. The gradual swapping over of these two perspectives, so that we discover the personalities of the future and the authoritarian dysfunction of the present, is the real trick of this book. Thus it becomes a satire in the ancient classical tradition, as well as a homage to Dickensian social commentary on London.

A really interesting question for me is whether other cities or places could ever be such fertile territory. There are so many Londons, factual and fictional, but could there be so many Sheffields, England, or Bostons, Massachusetts, or Thursos, Scotland? I suspect that the big, old cities of the world, such as Barcelona, Moscow, Istanbul, could well compete with London on this, but not many others. I'd suggest that there are two crucial ingredients a place needs in order that it can exist more in the imagination than in the here and now:

it has to be physically too large for any visitor or inhabitant to ever feel they've really grasped its true extent (so any fiction within it is geographically plausible);

it needs a long enough, messy enough history that an equally long and messy future is assured (so any fiction is temporally plausible).

The taxi driver is one person whose geographical grasp of a huge city is likely to be better than most. You, like me, might be perplexed that taxi drivers in a medium-sized city like Sheffield often have a lesser knowledge of their patch than London cabbies, or even than many of their passengers. That it is so much less of a challenge probably makes it less worthy of knowing. On the other hand, we could speculate that a spatial Knowledge bigger than what is realistically knowable is what drives Dave Rudman mad.

In other words, a city so big that you can never really know it will drive you mad if you try, and knowing that it could drive you mad is what makes that city so different from smaller, knowable places. It has a kind of psychological voltage, which is what powers the imagination.

So, dearly beloved, we come to the bit where I pose a sustainability question. Received wisdom (and I often believe it myself) is that there is a natural size to settlements that lend themselves to being environmentally and socially sustainable. Too small, too dispersed and there are no economies of scale, not enough community. Too big, too dense and a settlement becomes unknowable, impersonal, antisocial, too hungry for natural resources.

But consider this: if that 'natural' size actually means a 'comfortable' size, might living in such a place reduce that psycho-voltage? Would the imagination and creativity of mankind suffer, and with it our ability to envision a sustainable future? Should we instead be seeking out the extremes - the teeming cities and the unending, open horizons, where unknowability fuels our minds? Is the unknown our friend, and comfort our enemy?

Happy New Year.

AW