The view ahead through the windscreen

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Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes riding the Underground. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in texture, all about the privations of 1948. Brave New World is about the rise of cheap popular mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Will Self’s impressive new book presents, in a way, a pure portrait of the imagined future. Even though his future society is mostly extrapolated from a fragment of our society —- a most peculiar one — there is not much sense of satire being brought to bear on the present day. It’s only doubtfully a dystopia at all — indeed, much of the imagined future has an idyllic, even a pastoral air. And the whole tendency of the book is redemptive rather than catastrophic, where all the wrongs are wiped away in blood, and individual rage and trauma slowly worked out by the ritual oblations of an entire society.

The Book of Dave has an extraordinarily brilliant and engaging donnée, the revelation of which I hope made Self get up and run around the room. At the turn of the 21st century, a London taxi-driver called Dave is half-presiding over the collapse of his own life. His wife, Michelle, who never really loved him, has left him for an enormously richer and more glamorous man. She has taken Dave’s son, who won’t speak to him on their occasional visits — and in any case is he even Dave’s son?

Through this maelstrom of lying divorce lawyers, Turkish hit-men, Fathers-4-Justice and cheap tarts Dave sinks into madness, the habitually opinionated chatter of the London taxi-driver hardening, as in his talk, at least, he sets the world to rights.