Chameleon by Robert Dessaix review – a dazzlingly beautiful mix of sex, travel and intimacy

The Guardian

27-02-2025

One of Australia's finest writers of memoir and nonfiction, Robert Dessaix, returns with another journey into his past. His writing is highly regarded, particularly 2005's Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, and this new book, Chameleon, is a similarly artful mix of biography and travelogue: a dazzlingly beautiful reading experience, tightly focused on sexuality and travel.
Dessaix writes with a fun, free-wheeling, excited energy and it's infectious. 'Even today, at 80,' he writes, 'I sense a failure on my part to see life as an endeavour rather than a frolic, an endless outing with friends'. He threads together memories from across a long life – he was born in Sydney in 1944, and currently lives in Hobart with his partner, Peter Timms – while always remaining rooted in the present.
At the core of this work is the question of what it is to be an authentic, real man: 'At every point in my life, what passersby would see, if they cared to stop and take a look, was some sort of shadow play about being a man: a sensitive man in particular, a man with feelings. Behind the screen the puppets were up to all sorts of tricks.' The motif of puppets returns again and again: a rich concept for Dessaix that speaks to his conception of how we perform our identities, 'this pantomime of masculinity … Even this morning, when I popped into the grocer's, the show, I noticed, was still running. I have never been the man I seemed to be.'
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From his position, late in his life, Dessaix does not bemoan this performance – as he writes: 'I don't suppose anyone ends up exactly as he or she hoped to be.'
In musing on this question, Dessaix examines characters as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia, John Cheever and Aldo Busi, as well as a range of books and fictional characters like Andre Gide's The Immoralist, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe (from The Sportswriter) and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom (from Ulysses). It was illuminating to read about the impact of fiction – both writers and their words – on a life. It's something we often see in memoirs, of course, but Dessaix's way of looping around and around his literary and fictional heroes sheds so much light, both on these figures and on Dessaix himself.
For Dessaix, visiting Morocco in the early 1960s for the first time was a life-changing event. 'What did happen in Morocco […] – without fanfare, not in a rush – was this: something in me began to shrink into the shadows while something else was sparking into life in the light. Shyly, I turned to face it. This was the real start of a gentle, sweet debauchery, I suppose.' This 'slow turning' is into a full recognition of his self: his masculinity and his sexuality.
Dessaix's writing has its greatest depth and richness when he talks about homosexual sex in the Arab world. He is ebullient on the impact of experiences, of all kinds of intimacy, in places like Morocco or Tunisia (particularly Morocco: 'Skin me and that's what you will see: Morocco.'). He never writes explicitly about the kinds of sexual encounters he has; it's more about the sort of permission and acceptance he finds in those places.
Describing a huge swath of territory, 'a burnt-yellow belt that stretches (in my head) from Morocco to India and then, these days, a whole lifetime later, down into the pullulating green of Java and Sulawesi', Dessaix writes: 'What is liberating about the attitude to sex in this zone is that you may take pleasure in sexual intimacy without feeling any need to change your identity.' Despite describing an experience that contradicts our present understanding of restrictions on homosexuality in the Arab world, this distance between sex and identity is what Dessaix finds so attractive and informs how he wants to live his life.
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Dessaix proclaims that he wants these sexual partners to be his 'brothers'. To him, it's not an exploitative relationship; he mentions Edward Said's concept of 'orientalism', but thinks it irrelevant, despite clearly describing a privileged touristic experience. He always has the ability to escape – as a visitor, one can come and go as one pleases. Having the mobility of being able to head for the deserts of north Africa 'whenever my own life is killing me' did make me feel uneasy about the power dynamics Dessaix describes, despite how liberating they were for him.
But it's the humour and energy of his writing style that most propelled me through these pages. At times it's pure whimsy: 'Even at 10 I knew hair made promises,' he writes of a boyhood crush. He can evoke past crushes with a rare poignancy: 'Getting these letters from Ahmed was oddly like smoking: I was always pining for the next one, often thinking of little else, yet each letter, to be absolutely honest, was a faint – wispily faint – disappointment.' His writing is sophisticated and funny, and Chameleon is a rich and entertaining education on a man's life; a detailed map of the literature, ideas, and places that shaped him.
Chameleon by Robert Dessaix is published by Text Publishing