The Book of Dave

Published on October 1, 2007

Subtitled "A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future" Will Self's latest book is set in London, but chapters swing back and forth between two different time zones.

In the recent past Dave Rudman, a cabbie, is driving himself mad at the wheel, fuelled by fury towards his estranged wife. When he's denied access to their son his impotent rage slowly turns to psychotic hatred against the world - and especially women - rage which he pours into a book to be read one day by his son.

Five centuries in the future, after a catastrophic flood has left much of London and the rest of the country submerged, a grim, primitive society organised according to a strict religious code has emerged. The discovery of the "Book of Dave" has spawned Davinanity, under which men live separately from the "polluting" presence of women, and children spend half the week with their fathers and half with their mothers.

Out of this darned clever conceit - a civilisation created in the image of the archetypally bigoted London cabbie - Self develops a satire that skewers masculine resentment and organised religion.

Dave claws his way back to sanity through a relationship with a single mother and her disabled son. He writes a different book, "a new Epistle to the Son, which told the lad to respect men and women both ... that we make our own choices in life and that blaming others is not an option".

In the world of the future, a rumour spreads that a second book exists and hope dawns when two characters set out on a quest to find it.

Unfortunately, Self is just too intellectually dogged and humourless in pursuit of his themes, making the book a pretty gruelling read for the most part.

As he locked on to subjects that ranged from the casual misogyny of Dave's mates to the thirst for political power that lies at the heart of religion, this reader felt his attention being ground down rather than engaged.

Stalin's Ghost

By Martin Cruz Smith

Published by MacMillan

Available at Asia Books

Senior Investigator Arkady Renko is on the trail in Moscow again but this time he's out of step with an emerging new Russia ruled by money, power and patriotic fervour.

Detectives Isakov and Urman, ex-special ops heroes from the wars in Chechnya, have taken over the more important murder cases, while the world-weary Renko has been sidelined by his unfriendly boss into finding out what's behind rumoured sightings of Stalin in the Metro.

Even worse, as he trudges through the snow he sifts the overwhelming evidence that his girlfriend Eva is having an affair with Isakov.

In the Metro, Renko discovers that the ruthless Isakov is at the head of a new political force called the Russian Patriot Party, which is staging the sightings to whip up nationalistic hysteria in the hope of winning power.

Uncertain whether he's driven by justice or jealousy, Renko agrees to meet a reporter who claims he has evidence that Isakov's heroic war story conceals a sinister truth, but arrives to find the hack smeared beneath a snowplough.

The stoical investigator plods on but then gets stopped in his tracks by a bullet to the head. At this point a comatose dream takes us back to his childhood, revealing a tyrannical father who was a close confidant of Stalin and a mother who committed suicide - demons that are meant to connect Renko's inner struggle with that of the wider picture in Russia.

But this interruption to a plot that had been slowly building tension through the understated reaction of our hero to the threats surrounding him feels contrived and the author doesn't seem to know how to get things back on track.

The last third of the book is a disappointing collection of implausible coincidences and clichéd characters.