‘Sitting the 11-plus was the most momentous event of my life'

Spectator

28-05-2025

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.'s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don't know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes.
Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal exegesis of Stalker, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece). He skilfully dismantles conventional boundaries between the subject and the self, between artist and critic, forever restlessly inquiring into the nature of literary form and identity… Basically, Geoff Dyer went and did it. He got there first: modest, funny, clever, inventive. He is the deracinated writer's deracinated writer.
And now he's done it again with Homework, which is a memoir about growing up in post-war England and is exactly the kind of memoir just about anyone who grew up in post-war England might want to write. Born in 1958 and brought up in Cheltenham, Dyer's was an archetypal mid-to-late-20th-century English childhood. Two up, two down? Check. Outside toilet? Check. Mum a dinner lady? Check. Dad a manual worker? Check. Odd and interesting aunts and uncles? Check. Fond memories of playing war with your friends on the estate? Check. And Airfix models, comics, bubblegum cards, conkers, the little drinks cabinet with drinks that no one drank, Robinson Crusoe on the telly, the corner shops, the tinkers and blade sharpeners who used to come to the door, verrucas, the buzzer in the doctor's surgery, Action Man, heaped spoons of sugar in your tea and coffee? Check, check, check, check.