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Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
No misery here — this memoir will have you giggling for pages at a time
It's amazing that it's taken so long for Geoff Dyer to write a memoir. Most of his wide-ranging, thought-provoking and entertaining books are as much about him as what they're supposed to be about — whether he's visiting war memorials (The Missing of the Somme), watching Where Eagles Dare (' Broadsword Calling Danny Boy ') or failing to write a book about DH Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage). Perhaps this man with 'a willingness to share and display all the psychological nooks and naked crannies of my life' thought there was nothing more of himself to cover. But of course there is, and after a book about endings (The Last Days of Roger Federer) comes a book about beginnings: Dyer's own. Where did this smart, funny man come from? The short answer is . . . Cheltenham, and Homework covers Dyer's childhood and adolescence there. (The long answer is . . . read the book, or at least this review, and find out.) On the face of it Dyer's upbringing was nothing special: he was born in 1958, an only child to a lower-middle-class family, and his youth was filled with 1960s and 1970s cultural touchstones, from Eagle and Beezer comics to The Generation Game and Stingray on television. But it's the way Dyer tells his story of 'England, my England' that sets it apart. He riffs on everything he remembers, from the never-used front room of his childhood home — 'because of its unused-ness there was no point in staying in it (nothing to do there) and so its strange negative power was reinforced' — to the footbaths in swimming pools that were 'intended to prevent the spread of verrucas but it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that this was where we caught them'. The era is evoked not just by the events and objects but by the language we no longer use. 'What's a homo?' Dyer asks a knowledgeable schoolfriend. 'It's a double spastic,' comes the reply. A good memoir needs to be both particular and universal, which Dyer achieves by applying his idiosyncratic world view to experiences many of us will recognise. This means his characteristic blend of frivolity and profundity — he is 'most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback' — enables him to go from a funny anecdote about his inept diving skills to a reflection on how we construct our lives around things we choose not to do as much as what we do. His ability to entertain can seem effortless. When he works up a routine about his childhood love for sugar — 'And the extraordinary thing? It did us no harm!' — and then develops it into a rant about how the 'slop' served at school dinners was even worse than the slop served at home, I was more or less constantly giggling for pages at a time. (The closest thing I've read to this is Don Paterson's equally brilliant memoir Toy Fights — which Dyer mentions in Homework. It's a weird meta moment, like seeing a character on EastEnders watching Coronation Street.) But Dyer also makes us think about things. Looking at old family snaps, he observes that a photo doesn't spur memory — 'the photograph is memory. If I remember the weather of my childhood as perpetually sunny that is because photographs were only taken on days when the light was deemed sufficient.' The recent past always seems strange because of its proximity, and selective memory feeds unhelpful nostalgia, but it's hard not to feel something's been lost when Dyer remembers the joy of buying books from the corner shop (or Virginia Woolf novels in Woolworths!). Homework is also about how we differ from our parents and the points at which our lives diverge. For Dyer this was passing the 11-plus — 'the most momentous event of my life . . . Everything else that has happened could not have happened were it not for that'. It took him to grammar school and then to Oxford — away from Cheltenham, away from his mum and dad. The moment when part of our life becomes 'incommunicable' to our parents is always a minor tragedy for them, always essential for us. Dyer's father at first seems more fully explored than his mother. He's a 'passionate creosoter', a reluctant allotment tenant, a man of extreme reticence (not a quality passed on to his son) and miserliness for whom 'the idea of indulgence or pleasure played no part in his make-up . . . He never invested himself wholeheartedly in anything except saving money.' But then Dyer's mother comes to the fore late in the book, with an extraordinarily moving account of an aspect of her life that 'even mentioning is a betrayal'; it curtailed her ambitions and showed how the strangest, most innocent things can become destructive obsessions. If you've read Dyer before then you'll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven't, it's the perfect place to start, because you don't need to be interested in any of Dyer's obsessions (tennis, jazz, Russian cinema) to enjoy it. You just need to be interested in great writing, in the eccentricities of people, or in life. That should cover pretty much everyone.
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Homework by Geoff Dyer review – coming of age in 70s England
Droll, erudite, digressive, self-deprecating, laid-back rather than standup in his humour – the Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakable. In his new book he says he's 'most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback, an educationally enhanced version of something that still [comes] under the broad conversational church-pub known as banter'. You can hear the banter in the title of his 2003 book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. Banter's trickier with a childhood memoir. If you were relatively happy growing up, as he was, in Cheltenham, the only child of parents who loved him, and you want to be honest about your upbringing, then you can't muck about too much. Dyer's humour has never precluded seriousness – about jazz, film, photographs, paintings, DH Lawrence and much besides. But as the title suggests, Homework is a duty in earnest, a task he's compelled (if only by himself) to complete. As a book about beginnings, it's also chronological, moving from infancy at the end of the 50s to his arrival at Oxford as an undergraduate. Straight-line narration isn't Dyeresque: telling the story of the early years means breaking with the late style he used so winningly in his 2002 book about endings, The Last Days of Roger Federer, which was arranged in numbered sections. A nonfiction Bildungsroman is more of a challenge. It's a while before he hits his stride. To outsiders Cheltenham sounds posh, but the end-of-terrace house he grew up in was a modest two-up, two-down. His father worked as an aircraft engineer; he'd been in India during the war but after that his only trip was on a coach to France in his 70s. He had no time for royals or religion and hated spending money: if petrol was needed for the car, a sky-blue Vauxhall Victor, he'd only half-fill the tank. Life meant the allotment and submission to his lot. 'I was home-schooled in notions of acceptance I later found entirely unacceptable,' Dyer says, rejecting the 'subsistence existentialism', to which his mother also adhered. Born on a farm in Shropshire, she'd have liked to be a seamstress but worked in the school canteen and as a cleaner. Toy soldiers, conker fights, fizzy drinks, Wall's ice-creams, chicken-in-a-basket pub lunches, swimming lessons (plus verrucas), trips in the family car to see relations, programmes on the black-and-white telly: his recall of period detail and brand names is exceptional. Perhaps it's an only-child thing or that the re-discovery of two boxes of small, semi-educational cards (the kind that came with tea and cigarette packets) has helped him access his past. As a boy he was an avid collector and as a writer he's the same: back then he'd be completing a card sequence or building an Airfix model, now it's 'the process of compiling and organising the work you are holding in your hand.' As he documents childhood minutiae, Dyer moves slowly. With half the book gone he's still finishing primary school. Then comes the 11-plus, which he passes ('the most momentous event in my life, not simply up to that point but for its duration') and embarks on the path that will separate him from his parents. The clash he describes, between a boy's growing desire to be 'with it' and his parents' dour commitment to 'go without', is one all boomers will recognise, especially those of us brought up in the provinces. He quotes the poet Tony Harrison on how 'books, books, books' create a chasm. His parents were tolerant of him as a 'less than nice adolescent' but what he thought, felt and experienced became increasingly 'incommunicable' to them. He is, he says, 'a grammar‑school boy through and through to the core of my being'. He means it proudly. As a high achiever at school, he wasn't much of a rebel and has few dramas or traumas to report. There's a scary ride on his racing bike and the occasional near fight, but more often it's the teenage boredom of having 'nowhere to go' and the problem of how to meet girls. His collecting urge moves on to Athena posters and LPs. Then things pick up – and the humour does too. He has sex (in those days, for a boy, a matter of 'resistance overcome by negotiation and sleight of hand'), becomes a boozer ('men with huge guts were almost role models'), and gets a Saturday job in a shop selling Airfix kits ('I became a born-again modeller'). More eventfully, he's part of a crowd that goes on a post-pub rampage; through ill-fortune – his shoe-print is found on one of the cars they clambered over – he's the only culprit charged and fined, an episode that leaves him feeling the shame of a loser who, on the verge of going to Oxford, has let his parents down. Here and there he holds stuff back, like the nickname he was given at school ('I hated mine so much that I won't even repeat it here') or the reason he was taken to the GP about problems with his 'toy-oy', his father's name for the penis. But he doesn't spare himself embarrassment, whether it's failure to inherit his father's craft skills (he describes himself as a 'wildly impatient, cost-cutting, tantrum-prone bodger') or the night he locks his parents out of the house after a heated row. 'Presenting myself in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the last 30 years,' he says, but he takes care with others. Some of the names here have been changed. What does make him feel guilty of betrayal ('nothing has ever been more painful for me to write about') is telling the story of his mother's horrendous birthmark, which stretched from her left shoulder to her left hand; surgery in her 20s removed it up to the elbow but she couldn't bear a second operation to remove the rest. Dyer leaves this revelation until late on in the book but as he says, sympathetically, it explains so much about his mother: her privacy, powerlessness and lack of self-worth. His portrayal of his father is no less affectionate: his feeling of being 'hard done by' was wearisome and 'yes, he was unbelievably tight but he was also and always, at the deepest level, honourable'. Dyer worries that the book will read 'like the biography of someone who went on to become a minor British painter best known for seascapes'' or 'the memoir of a forgotten jazz man'. He wouldn't want it to be just another Gloucestershire childhood memoir, either, in the shadow of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie or Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills. What lifts it beyond routine reminiscence (and makes the excess of cigarette cards and Airfix kits more bearable) is its evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms while still recovering from the privations of the 1930s and 40s. The grown-up, cosmopolitan Dyer doesn't miss the place yet he does, intensely: 'England, my England: that has felt mine more than ever, since I've been living where I've always dreamed of being, in California, where I'll never feel at home.' Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Telegraph
Why I swapped a two-hour flight to Sardinia for a two-day journey by train and ferry
The sea glittered as we cruised into Naples; Ischia to port, Capri to starboard and the camel-humped profile of Mount Vesuvius ahead. We sat on deck in the spring sunshine and considered our good fortune. We weren't on an expensive cruise but an overnight ferry from Sardinia. When DH Lawrence made a similar journey with his wife in 1921 there were cattle on deck and the crowing of cockerels woke them in their cramped four-berth quarters. By contrast, our quiet twin cabin, high above sea level, had an en-suite shower and a large window. The cost of the 15-hour crossing, including accommodation, Wi-Fi, four-course evening meal with wine and continental breakfast, was just £160 for two. Being early April, a time of year that many Italians still call 'winter', there were fewer than 200 passengers on board the ship – Grimaldi Lines' Europa Palace – with capacity for nearly 2,000. I was travelling back from Sardinia to the UK after a week's holiday with friends. For over two decades now I've chosen not to fly; preferring slower travel. It had taken me 22 hours by train and ferry to reach Sardinia, which I had spread out over two days. Although sleeper trains are having a renaissance across Europe, I prefer to travel by day then check into a hotel for a good night's rest and the chance of some sightseeing before continuing the journey. On day one, a Saturday, I travelled on the Eurostar to Paris, leaving at lunchtime, before taking a first-class seat on the top deck of a high-speed TGV for three hours to Marseille, and arriving at my hotel, the Mercure Centre Vieux Port, just after 9pm. On Sunday morning, I walked to the vibrant old port, not to catch a ferry – that wasn't until the evening – but to sightsee. A glorious food market was setting up and tour boats were heading out to the nearby Frioul archipelago. I hiked to the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde, for views over the city, to the islands and Château d'If. Later, I swam in the bracing sea and enjoyed a cold beer at a buzzy outdoor cafe in the fishing neighbourhood of Vallon des Auffes. Then it was an hour's afternoon train (£15) along the craggy limestone coast to the port of Toulon, where I took an overnight ferry – £80, including cabin, Wi-Fi and breakfast – to Sardinia. First stop was Ajaccio in Corsica, where dawn rays gilded snow-capped mountains. The only other English voices I heard on board came from a couple from Harrogate who were taking their camper-van to Sardinia for a three-week island tour. Sixteen hours after departing Toulon, we arrived in the northwestern Sardinian port of Porto Torres at midday, and I headed to my guesthouse, Affittacamere da Priscilla. Rosa was my host, with whom I practised Italian. She told me how to find the best nearby beach, Balai, and I was soon flopped on white sand lapped by a gin-clear sea. The next morning it was just a ten-minute walk to the train station for a three-hour ride (£17) through the verdant heart of Sardinia to Cagliari, where I met up with my friends. Six of us enjoyed a week of spring sun and eating and drinking by the beach. Away from our sea-view villa, we wandered around the hilly capital, Cagliari; up marble steps to the bastion that DH Lawrence somehow found 'dreary' and to the city's archaeological museum with its fascinating Bronze and Iron Age sculptures and figurines. We ambled through narrow streets, and at the cathedral – which Lawrence describes as 'baroque and sausagey' – I climbed 80 steps to the top of the bell tower for views across rooftops to briny, flamingo-dotted lakes and the sea. Occasionally there was the scent of orange blossom. We dined al fresco at a restaurant – Impasto – in a square shaded by ficus trees. For the long journey back to the UK, my friend Sue joined me. We joked about the number of animals we might take. There is the option of up to ten pets per passenger on Grimaldi Lines. Dog owners exercise pooches on the top deck, where staff in high-vis vests mop up puddles of urine. There's also a small swimming pool (for humans, presumably) but, being early in the season, it was empty. Less than an hour after the ferry docked in Naples, we were sitting on the restaurant terrace of Hotel San Francesco al Monte with morning coffee and a Vesuvius view. We nosed around the former monastery, where there were strange cave-like tunnels and a meeting room set as if for the Last Supper. There was still a full afternoon to explore the city, so we walked down through the Spanish quarter, its narrow lanes overhung with washing. We stepped into doorways as cars squeezed past and ate at a little pizzeria as Vespas and pedestrians brushed by. In the old town, we hoped to see the veiled Christ sculpture at Cappella Sansevero but it was fully booked. The orange trees and painted tiles of the Santa Chiara cloister provided consolation. The daringly modern facade of the 15th-century church of Gesù Nuovo astounded me. The next morning, before breakfast, I took a funicular up to Morghen, near the hulking presence of St Elmo's castle. I walked back to the hotel, down wide paved steps, a view of Vesuvius framed by graffiti-daubed buildings, a street cleaner sweeping away beer bottles from night-time revellers. Then we took a taxi to Naples Central station for our plush Frecciarossa train to Milan, which reached speeds of 185mph. In first class a steward trundled down the aisle with an espresso machine dispensing caffeine shots to a mostly business-suited clientele heading to Rome. There were views of snow-topped Apennine mountains, the chalky blue Tiber and rolling countryside with cypresses and hilltop villages. We passed under Florence without stopping and before long we arrived at Milan Central. Over 400 miles had whizzed past in four hours and 40 minutes; the train was just one minute late. In DH Lawrence's day, the Italian railway was 'infinitely more miserable' than the British. The opposite seems true today. Our connection to Lugano was waiting. At Chiasso, Swiss border guards walked through the train. Six hours after leaving Naples, we arrived in Lugano, in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, Ticino. Continental Park Hotel was a handy five-minute walk from the station with views of lakes and mountains. The next day we had a leisurely breakfast and a stroll in Tassino Park, neighbouring the hotel and full of blossoms. Mountains were wreathed in mist and morning sun sparkled on the lake. At midday we left on a train to Basel. The route took us along the shores of Lake Lucerne, where yachts sailed with a backdrop of Alpine peaks. In buttercup-spattered meadows, cows wearing bells grazed. Soon, I imagine, they will be herded up to high summertime pastures. The route didn't have the drama of the Bernina and Glacier Expresses, with their viaducts, altitude and inclines, but it was gently beautiful, as well as being faster and more straightforward. At Basel, we changed for a train to Frankfurt. It left 25 minutes late. So much for Swiss punctuality. I went to the buffet car. It was predictably expensive – CHF28 (about £26) for a (large) glass of wine with some antipasti – so I opted for a small bottle of beer (£5). We reached Frankfurt six hours after leaving Lugano. Here we took a local train to a small town, Hofheim, to visit old friends. Two days later we continued our journey: a comfortable three-hour train ride from Frankfurt to Brussels followed by the Eurostar to London. Sardinia itself was glorious, but it was the travel there and back that was the adventure. You don't often say that about flying. How to do it The total cost for my journey from Banbury to Sardinia and back was approximately £500, including ferries, first-class trains and some meals. This relatively bargain price was mostly thanks to a 'four-day-in-a-month' flexi-pass from InterRail. I paid just £202 for a first-class pass (compared to £170 for second), meaning comfortable wider seats for train travel of up to 24 hours a day if I wished. Eurostar first class includes preferential check-in and a meal service with wine. Travel to and from your UK home station is included with an InterRail global pass. Seat reservations are mandatory on some trains – generally the faster ones – and add to the cost (Eurostar first-class reservations cost about £35 each way). On days where I was only making inexpensive train trips (Marseille to Toulon and Porto Torres to Cagliari), I paid for these separately to avoid using a pass day. Reservations for InterRail pass holders on Eurostar can sell out several days or weeks in advance during peak season.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Who was the real DH Lawrence?
'Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind,' writes DH Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover – a sentence that sums up the attitudes towards sex in early-20th-century Britain that he rebelled against. Both Lady Chatterley (first published privately in Italy in 1928) and 1915's The Rainbow were the subjects of obscenity trials in the UK, and the explicit nature of Lawrence's writing earned him the moniker 'the pornographer'. But 30 years after his death from tuberculosis in 1930, he became a totem of sexual liberation when Lady Chatterley was published unexpurgated for the first time in Britain. Following the model of BBC Radio 4's Three Faces of WH Auden, which aired in 2023, Three Faces of DH Lawrence is a three-part series that considers the key themes of Lawrence's work: sex, nature and class. Presenter Michael Symmons Roberts interviews academics in the UK and in Italy, where Lawrence lived for much of his self-imposed exile from Britain, including some whose parents knew the author in Florence at the time he was writing Lady Chatterley. Beginning with sex, Roberts draws out the contradictions inherent in Lawrence's personal life and his work. Was he a misogynist or was he empowering women? How was it that a puritanical monogamist created a series of paintings considered so indecent they were seized by the police? Is his writing 'the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country', as one critic called it, or, in the view of EM Forster, the work of 'the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation'? Three Faces of DH Lawrence immerses you in the world of one of the 20th century's greatest and most notorious writers, tracing the sociopolitical developments that impacted his work, its writing and its reception. But it never quite offers a sense of the real man behind the controversy. Three Faces of DH Lawrence BBC Radio 4 [See also: The English rebel] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Irish Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Kneecap should be commended rather than condemned
Artists excel in the art of controversy. Art has a duty to challenge societal norms and beliefs. It should make us think and spark public discourse. Occasionally, this lands artists in hot water, as DH Lawrence, Francis Bacon and Sinéad O'Connor all discovered. Now, it is the turn of Kneecap . The Irish-speaking rap group from Belfast attracted widespread condemnation in the UK for their actions at some of their recent gigs. At the end of their show at the Coachella music and arts festival on April 18th, messages appeared on the screens behind the band, including 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people' and 'F**k Israel; free Palestine'. Counter-terrorism police in London are now investigating videos of incidents at two gigs in London. Predictably, Kneecap's support for Palestine and their alleged violent words against Tory politicians have been unanimously denounced by everyone on the political spectrum in Westminster, from Labour's prime minister Keir Starmer to the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, including the SNP first minister of Scotland John Swinney. READ MORE The fallout has been considerable. Several of their gigs have already been cancelled, including three in Germany, and the British government has called on the organisers of Glastonbury to 'think carefully' about allowing a planned appearance by the band to go ahead. They are being punished for their words, which is a reminder of the weight of language, but also the moral responsibility that comes with it. The three musicians found fame when their semi-fictionalised film Kneecap was released in 2024 to international critical acclaim, winning a British Academy of Film Award in February 2025. Apart from the music, the energy, the comedy and the drama, what the film is essentially about is the power of language to shape our identify. Our language defines who we are. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues, we define our identity always in dialogue, with our contemporaries but especially with our ancestors. Language is a strange alchemy, to be used judiciously. Words can be inspiring, heartening, bolstering, and they can also hurt. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of language of the 20th century, remarked that words don't just reflect meaning, they get things done. By saying something, we do something. Shouting the words 'shoot!' at the television screen when my team is playing football is harmless, and very different from the same words being uttered by the officer of a firing squad. The question is, are Kneecap fanatic supporters of a cause or executioners? Yelling 'up Hamas, up Hizbullah' at a live concert is a speech-act. These words are not just expressing a sentiment, they are a rallying call with the aim of encouraging people to act in support of a particular cause. Kneecap are using their words to try to persuade, convince or motivate their listeners in the audience to do something about the enduring brutality and crimes against humanity in Gaza. While all words have consequences, it would be wise to abstain from making rush comparisons between slogans shouted at a concert, and the infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech by Enoch Powell from April 1968; or Donald Trump's incendiary speech on January 6th, 2021, to a crowd of people intent to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC: 'We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country any more.' Lest we forget, Kneecap are artists in their late 20s and 30s. Trump was, at the time, president of the United States of America. [ Westminster never forgets its murdered MPs - which is why Kneecap's comments could not be overlooked Opens in new window ] However, one cannot help wondering at the ethics, and stupidity, of Kneecap's reported choice of words at a gig in November 2023: 'The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.' That's inexcusable. Even Taoiseach Micheál Martin has called on Kneecap to 'urgently clarify' these ill-judged comments. Kneecap's subsequent apology to the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox (who was killed in June 2016) and David Amess (who was killed in October 2021) is also a speech-act, of sorts. For philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is the essence of the human condition. Furthermore, action entails speech and speech entails action. Actions occur when we do something but, equally, action occurs via omissions when we fail to act. Paradoxically, by not doing something, we do something: severe neglect, or negligence, is the result of our failure to act. Consider what the Vatican did (not) do when faced with the evidence of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Similarly, an omission of words is also an action. To keep silent in the face of gross injustice is to be complicit in the wrongness. We have a moral duty to speak out against human rights violations. If there is one thing that is even worse than being silent, it's being silenced. By accusing anyone who is questioning the current policies of the Israeli government of anti-Semitism, the Israeli government is silencing all its critics, just as it has silenced foreign journalists covering the conflict in Gaza. Kneecap are also being silenced, but not by Israel. The fact that politicians in the UK are trying to influence who should be invited to play at festivals is pure and simple censorship. A long list of prominent musicians, including Christy Moore, have signed an open letter calling for 'artistic freedom of expression' and denouncing a 'concerted attempt to censor and de-platform Kneecap'. The day politicians decide what music we should hear is the day democracy dies. Exchanging words is always better than silence. Doing something about human rights violations is better than doing nothing. Their choice of word may have been crass, misguided, irresponsible and boorish, but at least Kneecap were using their art form to create a space for politics. What is happening in Gaza today is unspeakable, which is precisely why we need to speak about it. Denouncing a genocide is doing something and it's better than being silent. Kneecap are to be commended, not condemned – although I suggest they read Hannah Arendt on politics or Wittgenstein on philosophy of language before their next gig. Vittorio Bufacchi is Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork. He is the author of Why Cicero Matters (2023)
