Books & Poetry

9.57am: Kennington Road
‘What have we got here, then? Not a lot. Extremely bad traffic. People bailing out, wondering what the problem is. Hmm…

‘There was one main cabbie who helped me with “The Book of Dave”. It became quite an emotional experience for him. There were some things about the character I eventually created that were very like his life without my realising; it was as if I’d divined it. He’s as far from the cabbie stereotype as you can imagine, although he does come from an East End cabbie dynasty. People will read the novel in the trade. It’s a very literate profession. What they’ll make of it I don’t know.

‘Dave has two main roles in the book. One is to be this repository of knowledge about London. You know, if it was destroyed, who would rebuild it? So it’s about his cognitive life, about the fact that he’s a unique beast who knows so much. But he’s also this other modern and emblematic figure, the “loser dad”, as the redtops would coin it; an angry, emotionally deracinated man. There seemed to me to be a productive synergy between those two aspects of his character.’ Feature continues

‘I’d never lived south of the river, but when I remarried about ten years ago my wife was in Brixton and it was a compromise. My ex and my kids were in Shepherd’s Bush; but I’m not a big fan of west London. I’m happy in Stockwell. You can walk from my house into Soho in 35 minutes.

[Observes traffic] ‘My route’s turned out to be a complete turkey, hasn’t it?’

10.12am: Waterloo
‘Ah, we’re in book territory now. When Cal Devenish [for whom Dave’s wife, Michelle, leaves him] is hunting for his daughter, he stops and talks to some dossers just in front of the Old Vic. Dear Sally Greene [Old Vic chief exec], who we love so much… I remember her saying the first thing she did when she got hold of the Old Vic was to kick all the dossers out.

‘There’s something weird going on here psychogeographically, with the IMAX sitting on top of the old bullring. Some juju going on there, man. There’s a prison in Waterloo Station. It’s for illegal immigrants who’ve just been hauled off the Eurostar. It’s next to the men’s loos.

‘A lot of key Dave stuff happens along the river: he goes to see David Blaine in his box around where the GLA building is. I wanted to capture London at a very transitional phase. There’d been this huge burst of building at the end of the ’90s and it was all solidifying at that point.’

10.16am: Kingsway
‘This is the oldest underpass in Britain. There’s a secret tunnel running alongside it. Kingsway was one of the first bits of internal London town planning in the ’20s, where they wiped out the old rookery that spread from Seven Dials over towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It must have looked Dickensian. And they replaced it with this – a purpose-built road for cars with its own underpass.’

10.19am: Russell Square
‘What always strikes me about Russell Square is the Virginia Woolf bar in the Russell Square Hotel – a great place for a schizophrenic breakdown, which I’ve had a few of, I must say. And Senate House, which is the closest thing to Romania in central London. You always think Ceausescu’s about to come out and do something grim.

‘Just over there is Gower Street, where I had my eyes operated on when I was seven. I’ve got a wall eye, but it was correctable, so you only noticed it in the old days when I was really stoned.’

10.23am: Euston
‘There’s bad feng shui around here. Have you ever seen photos of Euston Arch [fantastic Doric monument that once marked the entrance to the station, designed by Sir Philip Hardwick in the 1830s and demolished in 1962]? Euston was the greatest of the London termini. When they fucked up the façade in the ’60s it destroyed this whole quartier. There’s a general attempt now to turn stations into interiors rather than treat them as the liminal spaces they are.’

‘The Book of Dave’ is published by Viking at 17.99.