Latest news with #GeoffDyer
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
‘Sitting the 11-plus was the most momentous event of my life'
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.
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
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Childhood in the 1960s? Here's why it was positively Victorian
Whoever said 'there's nowhere more remote than the recent past' will reiterate the apothegm a thousand times after reading Homework, Geoff Dyer's buoyant autobiography, about his coming-of-age in the backwoods of Gloucestershire. Born in 1958, Dyer grew up in a Britain where world wars were living memories. Buildings were pocked with shrapnel and weed-choked bomb-sites abounded. Everyone had grandfathers who'd fought on the Somme, or uncles who hadn't come back from Burma. Playgrounds were filled with noisy boys shooting each other with toy guns. Childhood could be rather feral, with packs of children running about unsupervised in the alleys and roads; but then there was little motor traffic in the early 1960s. Few families could afford a Triumph Herald or Ford Anglia. Much of Homework is a nostalgia trip. Dyer waxes lyrical, for instance, about eating Peach Melba and Raspberry Ripple puddings, or procuring from the corner shop an Aero or Milky Way ('the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite'). It's shocking, looking back, how much white sugar people consumed. 'I loved sugar on and in everything,' says Dyer, remembering the cereals, fizzy drinks and jam. Like red meat and full cream, it was considered 'a source of pleasure and nutrition' not the harbinger of obesity and diabetes it is in the 21st century. We weren't health conscious, you see. We also had terrible teeth. Toothache, mouth ulcers and abscesses were prevalent, and dentists more than happy to be paid by the filling. All adults smoked, everyone 'never not coughing'. Sweet cigarettes were on sale to children: the packs contained educational cards about the Birds of Britain or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Going for a jog or to the gym was unheard of, and you never saw people drinking bottled water – nor did anyone die in the street or office of dehydration. Regarding exercise, there were heavily chlorinated public baths, but all they were good for was catching a verruca. In general, food was so bad, it must have been done on purpose. Think of the watery stews, lumpy gravy and roasted gristle; the 'evaporated carrots and swamp-boiled cabbage'. The height of gastronomic sophistication was chicken-in-the-basket in pub carparks. If I may add my own memory here, in South Wales we had scampi-in-the-basket. My mother thought she was Elizabeth David when serving Heinz Spaghetti Hoops. Dyer says he was a sickly child, prone to eczema, warts and chesty colds. He had his tonsils and adenoids out – you never hear those procedures mentioned now. Appointments with the doctor or consultant happened instantly, after a quick phone call. With the population some 20 million smaller, the NHS was efficient and unburdened, able to dish out free ointments, tablets, bandages, injections and operations. When Dyer's mother needed a disfiguring mole removing, she was seen at once by Sir Archibald McIndoe, the leading plastic surgeon. Dyer makes other areas of life sound positively Victorian. Streets were visited by tinkers, blade sharpeners, coalmen and ice-cream vans. Houses contained front-rooms that were never used. There was the brown furniture, like big wardrobes, now unsellable in junk shops. Cocktail cabinets contained unopened bottles of Babycham. 'Dead flies showed up blackly in the opaque glass bowl that hung under the light.' What an odd society we were. We used disgusting handkerchiefs rather than disposable tissues; underarm deodorant was yet unknown, particularly for men; children's entertainment was mostly Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's string puppets; and neighbours with mental health issues or other afflictions were openly abused in terms my editors cannot print. Dyer's father was anxious that black immigrants didn't move next door: 'It would lower the value of the house.' Adults did say and think these things, egged on by sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part. But for all that Dyer quotes Housman – 'The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again' – and lovingly describes the Kodachrome colours in the family photograph album, Homework spends too long with characters such as his father Jack (1919–2011), who must have been the most boring man in England. Dyer Sr creosoted fences, and toiled on an allotment. 'It was a source of pride,' Geoff writes, 'that he wore a jacket and tie to work', as well as on the beach. Jack didn't like books: 'His refusal even to consider reading as something to do was so steadfast as to seem almost principled.' Nor did he like films, or beer in pubs. He partook of two glasses of wine a year. And as for music, he 'would quite happily have gone through life never hearing a note'. Jack's chief pleasure, as his son recalls, was in not spending money. Two words were often on his lips, a contemptuous exclamation: 'How much?' According to a relative, 'he was so mean, even if he had a mouth full of gum boils, he still wouldn't give you one.' He fretted over the 'unavoidable expenses' of running a car: petrol, brake lights, tyres. When it was parked, he removed the rotor arm from the engine to deter thieves. 'Central heating had been invented,' Dyer writes, 'but was not installed in any house that we knew of.' Everything had to be repaired, patched up, bought cheaply. Perhaps this was the spirit of post-war rationing: abundance meant profligacy. Yet Geoff recalls the problem as more than this: Jack was like 'a very slow hard-to-identify puncture', leaking all the fun out of things. Geoff's reaction was to do well at school, pass exams, get to university and get away. Along the journey, we see him having clumsy sex – 'She let me undo her bikini top and feel her t-ts' – and getting drunk on cider and Cinzano. Homework ends with his parents' deaths, both in 2011, by which time Dyer is in his fifties and has long since become a pie-hot writer. He publishes whatever he wants, travels wherever he fancies, secures everything from fellowships to journalism gigs. He has written four novels, and today he's writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Bully for him. For though I liked the parts of this memoir that sketch the same territory and era through which I travelled, in the end the rest isn't about very much. That loosened bikini is about it for narrative excitement. There are no sentences to savour in Homework, no perceptions to give you pause or make you gasp. In the total absence of swagger – perhaps this is why Dyer is such a success with committees: he's a safe pair of hands – we're given Barthes or Sontag reincarnated as someone incredibly ordinary. Then again, as regards his father, is Dyer a chip off the old block? There's a strange scene at the end of the book, which goes unexplored, where our author by chance meets an old schoolfriend in Cheltenham, and begins chatting about who is still alive, who has croaked. Yet Dyer must rush away: 'I had one of those cut-price train-specific tickets.' As his parents' sole beneficiary, Dyer was left what, I wondered? It would have been interesting to know the size of his inheritance, after all the descriptions of frantic hoarding – literally, of banknotes under the mattress. One thing I hate: reticent autobiographies.
Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Geoff Dyer: my 60s childhood of Airfix, verrucas and schoolboy larks
The novelist, essayist and inveterate traveller Geoff Dyer has written on everything from the history of the Somme to sex in hotels, tennis to DH Lawrence, often blending fiction and non-fiction with eccentric, freewheeling results. Over the past 30 years the 66-year-old has gained a reputation as an intellectual dandy. One critic, employing the most Dyeresque phrasing, wrote: 'No one is better than Geoff Dyer at not writing about what he is writing about.' It was Dyer's wife, the art curator Rebecca Wilson, who suggested the subject of his latest book. Wilson, who comes from a 'more straightforward upper-middle-class family', thought it would be interesting to hear Dyer's account of growing up. He was, by contrast, the only child of a sheet metal worker and
