At the moment I am reading Will Self’s latest novel The Book of Dave. I have been reading it for a long time now, because I am finding it hard work. Since I started reading it I must have read at least half a dozen other books and I am only about a third of the way through.

The reviews made it sound intriguing and when I first opened it (in August!) I started by reading the glossary and looking at the maps on the inner covers. They actually made me laugh and I thought that was a good sign, but when I got to the actual text it was a struggle.

To be honest, I was expecting that having read Great Apes. That was confusing at the beginning until you understood the situation but then it exploded with meaning, providing a weird but wonderful commentary on human society by comparison with an ape society.

Dave alternates between episodes set more or less now and episodes set at least 500 years in the future after most of the UK is under water, and the book starts with one of those future episodes. With a lot of serious science fiction which deals with society as much as with technology, the first job is to understand the structures of the society so you can understand the context for the actions – its the same here, but with the added difficulty of the language.

Much of the dialogue is a mutated version of cockney and all written phonetically with all sorts of diacritical marks. The sort of thing which made me give up on Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange.

Anyway, I had more or less given up somewhere around page 150 and had not touched the book for weeks until last night when I decided to give it one last chance. Somehow it all started to fit into place a bit more, and in one of the current day segments there was some of that brilliant use of words which typify Self’s books – In describing a teenage boy at the dinner table he referred to the smell of hormones and “pre-emptive aftershave”.

It looks like I now stand a chance of finishing the thing and even of getting the rewards of getting a fresh perspective on today’s society by seeing it re-interpreted. Whats more I will get the bonus of looking forward to re-reading it so I can read the early chapters with a greater understanding. Its not for the faint-hearted though.