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It’s late June, Wimbledon’s upon us, and Geoff Dyer is talking about his tennis injuries.

Geoff Dyer is always talking about his tennis injuries. It’s one of his endearing features. But when I saw he had a book forthcoming with ‘last days’ and ‘endings’ in the title – and blurbed, what’s more, as ‘a summation of [his] passions’ – I feared perhaps he might be on his way out.

His publisher assured me this was not so: at least, no more than the rest of us. In fact, The Last Days… finds the 60-something flâneur on fine (not to say ‘sprightly’) form.

He begins, with typically Dyerish mischief, at ‘The End’ – ‘the last track on the Doors’ first album’ (you can almost hear him wondering whether he’d prefer ‘The End’ wasn’t indeed the Doors’ last live song ever) – and the next ten (micro-)chapters take in Bob Dylan, Venice Beach, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, George Best, retirement, Gillian Slovo, the Olympics, TC Boyle, football, and Martin Scorsese. Even Andy bloody Murray (the ‘mumble-core Hamlet’) gets a look in before poor Roger Federer.

But Geoff Dyer has established Views about his books being ‘about’ something (he was supposed to write a book ‘about’ tennis about ten years ago…). Likewise on subtitles/straplines. So Dyer afficionados won’t be at all surprised to find that while he gets to Federer eventually (kind of; not really), notionally abetted by the constraints of lockdown, mainly this is a book about – or from the viewpoint of – ‘my own experience of the changes wrought by ageing.’

There are all the lates: the late fame of Jean Rhys; first encountering the music of Gillian Welch ‘embarrassingly late – after David Cameron, even’; De Chirico’s late ‘phase’ (most of his life); fans leaving the stadium early and so missing a late reversal; Tennyson seemingly always late in his – or someone else’s – day.

And unfinisheds: Turner’s paintings (in the view of some of his contemporaries); Bjorn Borg’s failed comebacks; giving up on Anthony PJohn Berger, owell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (e.g.) before you waste too much of your own time on it.

And then the lasts: Nietzsche’s horrendous final years; Custer’s ‘stand’; Mohicans, tangos in Paris, songs; James Last (only kidding); the psycho-social trauma of the last train on London nights out; one-final-heist films; and the last set in a tennis match, a sport in which famously the last point is the only one that really matters.

And in his own line of work? Dyer has lately got into late Beethoven, but ‘I deliberately left late [Henry] James – let alone what one scholar calls “late late James” – for later, and now it’s too late.’ He ‘worries’ – of course – he might have left this book too late. John Coltrane, he notes, died so fast that he had no time for ‘late’. (Now that I think of it, we never do get to the ‘late’-ness of dead people being ‘late’.)

So this is classic (late) Dyer, a writer whose ranging (‘rangy’?) intellect was, mercifully, prevented from ‘progressing’ beyond the stage of voracious undergrad, and who is, as a result, as likely to quote the script of Heat as Raymond Williams. All his more-enthusiastically-ridden hobby horses are present as per – John Berger, WWII, DH Lawrence, jazz, drugs, Tarkovsky, Burning Man, Rebecca West – and as Dyer goes from Al Pacino to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Chuck Yeager in as many, or fewer, sentences (Mike Tyson is directly compared to Philip Larkin), you’re never entirely sure if this is brilliant exegesis or a bored and over-clever grammar-school boy taking the piss. Who else but Dyer would call the too-heavy impact of skunk ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk effect’?

This is half the fun, of course – and more so for the author, one suspects. No doubt he isn’t kidding when he says he believes David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film to be ‘the great literary achievement of our time.’ But for all the gems of bona fine criticism, either artistic (the ‘idyllic quality’ of the post-apocalyptic movie; third-rate statuary as ‘one of the rewards of achieving nationhood’), or social (the contrary grandiosity of asking an American lady to ‘call me Geoff’; the frantic desire of even the most artsy crowd to hit the bar), Dyer’s business is always scrupulously conducted with one eye on ‘the trusty old ponce-ometer’, from the unabashed dad-puns (‘it’s my neck that’s been the Achilles heel’) to the faux-chippy digs (that Pete Sampras shared with the grass on which he played an ‘incapacity for epistemological enquiry’). ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous,’ he ends his first section, ‘if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously.’ There is no question mark, NB.

With all the contrivances and call-backs and shameless segues – whether conveniently reading Peter Akroyd’s biography of Turner on a train, or embarking on a ‘quasi-Pharaonic’ scheme of pilfering shampoo from hotels – it would be difficult, it occurs to me, to spoof Geoff Dyer at much less than a full book’s length. And there’s always a moment – often a couple – where even the keenest Dyerist must fear that he’s begun to get high on the smell of his own farts (here it’s William Basinkski’s avant-garde music, loo roll, and 9/11)… but then he pulls it back, with a delighted grin, and you’re almost-grudgingly impressed.

Still, if you’re not a fan of the perambulatory style and what, elsewhere, were termed his ‘Anglo-English attitudes’, then The Last Days of Roger Federer is probably not for you. It’s been suggested that the book is 84,600 words long (I didn’t – couldn’t – count them), which happens to be the number of seconds in a (Groundhog) day. And given quite how many nods there are to things Dyer’s written whole other volumes about – or ‘about’ – previously (he openly names at least two of them), one can hardly be blamed for seeing Dyer’s books themselves – from sentence-structure to the Gesamtwerk level – as a cheerful, ironist’s homage to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Eternal Recurrence’. The ‘Eternal Reference’, perhaps.

On which… References, attributions, and the like pose obvious production difficulties in the audiosphere (George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was completely unlistenable); but epigraphs and footnotes are key Dyer accoutrements, and for these to be respectively unadvertised (essentially ‘inaudible’) and out of place a) sounds most odd, and b) restricts the sheer divagatory Dyerishness of the whole project.

Worse, Richard Burnip appears to have no idea what Geoff Dyer sounds like. Granted, narrators are not here to do impersonations; but this one hasn’t caught the author’s calm, sardonic voice at all. There is no grin. My guess is that he’s never read a Dyer book before, or even seen The Great JM Coetzee Joke. The result is all-too sincere, loud, and urgent – like Jorah Mormont doing Health & Safety ads.

But such is life – and while it lasts, both on and off the court, Geoff Dyer ‘still love[s] everything about tennis.’ And if ‘ultimately, tennis, like life itself, is just a wet T-shirt contest in the pouring rain, signifying nothing,’ then ‘I’m glad I’m old, old enough to not mind staying in, sitting round here revising this book, remembering all this old poetry, watching the latest compilations of Roger’s best dropshots on YouTube…’

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For Perspective 

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For The Critic

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It is traditionally ‘not done’ to review books in terms of what they’re not. And yet: this book is not a novel. It says it is on the front cover; but it isn’t. And Martin Amis makes it clear it’s not, repeatedly, within the 500+ pages – almost as often, in fact, as he claims the opposite.

Nor is it – contra subtitle – a book on ‘how to write’. Nobody wants an Amis book on how to write (cf. his critical non-fiction [sic]); and if they did, they’d not be looking for the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (I kid you not). And yet the book incorporates long memos, guidelines and what feel like half-recycled lecture notes, for which the kindest thing that can be said is that they should have all been excised some drafts ago.

Lastly, it isn’t principally about his lifelong, close relationship with Christopher Hitchens – despite the UK jacket’s clear suggestion otherwise.

No. What Inside Story is, is a rather baggy assemblage (a footnote nods approvingly to Don Quixote) of loving reminiscence, tough self-examination, hero-worship, historical enquiry, quotation, a 2015 New Yorker article on the German migrant-crisis, and, yes, some scattered writing tips. With footnotes. And a 13-page index.

Aware that he himself has not exactly lived the life of, say, a Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, or even Rushdie, Amis employs the framework of three other, personally-relevant and occasionally-connected literary lives (and deaths): Saul Bellow (d. 2005) as supplementary father figure; Philip Larkin (d. 1985) as potential actual father; and Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) as brother in arms, in literature, and all but in the sack(?) – their stories (and all the rest of it) threaded together by the amiable conceit that Amis is chatting to some young, aspiring novelist.

Supporting roles are filled by his (de)formative, years-long para-sexual relationship with ‘Phoebe Phelps’ (a classic Amisite character name, that); his significantly more-benevolent stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard; his wayward, needy father; and then the long-familiar coterie of boozy-lunchmates (Conquest, Fenton, Clive James), influences (Nabokov is named on page one, and then a further 42 times after that), and all the Big Things Amis is apparently incapable of not dwelling on (the Holocaust; the Gulag; and – of course – now 9/11).

No doubt he’s changed a few names. And moved things round a bit to suit. Sometimes he’s written himself into the third person. But so what? In his own words, ‘At least Mystic Meg [went] to the trouble of making it all up.’ This ‘novel’ thing is a distraction – and a pity too, since, taken in isolation (which probably no Amis book can have been for years), Inside Story is for the most part a compelling, if rather florid, memoir.

That’s not the only distraction, either.

The book opens with a strange, present-tense discussion of the looming 2016 US election (feat. ‘the Great Pretender’), and of Brexit, which he is comfortable Remain will win. Whatever effect this is supposed to have (scrupulous honesty?), the eye is trained from the beginning on how much else has badly aged here. Lunches that involve ‘potted shrimps’ and ‘oatcake’. Someone being ‘a pill’. ‘Gaspers’. Talk of ‘rugby football’, and girlfriends called ‘Doris’. These days, mind, Amis attends pilates sessions, smokes e-cigarettes, and eats ‘a softboiled egg’ for breakfast. The man the critics once identified as ‘Amis fils‘, the enfant terrible of modern English letters, is – one suddenly realises – old.

Accordingly perhaps, this ‘novel’ is lighter on the more aggressive flourishes of Amis prose style. But (fans rest assured) for every diamond-tipped incision such as ‘childsong [being] like a ventilation of happiness’, there’s still ‘the lime, the gold, the rose’ of – can you guess? – traffic lights; a train ‘now slaked of motion’ (i.e. stationary); and AN Other finance bloke who at once starts using words like ‘bonce’ and ‘gaff’. Amis snorts that you wouldn’t put a janitor called ‘Art Hitman’ in a novel; but has, himself, a US thriller writer called ‘Jed Slot’. He laments that no-one, still, writes well on sex, and then describes ‘her musky, smiley, gauzy, rumpy, nipply presence’.

Despite all this, Inside Story somehow emerges as an engrossing and courageous (slice of) autobiography. And thankfully – if tragically, and via a lot of other deaths – it ultimately returns to him and Hitchens. Amis heartbrokenly extracts some positives from this great personal and public loss, almost a decade past. The reader, though, now sits through the whole thing again – that slow, appalling diminution – and hopes, quite pointlessly, that Hitch won’t die. The book is worth it for that bit alone.
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Postscript: Needless to say, Inside Story comes pre-greeted with much industry fanfare; but only the PR teams will claim that this is Martin Amis’s best work. A more laymanly bemusement as to what, specifically, it is about, may be reflected in the fact that, at time of writing, the ‘novel’ is riding high as Amazon’s #1 Best Seller… in ‘Terrorism & Freedom Fighters Biographies’.

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For – in an abbreviated form – The Oldie

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For theartsdesk

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For The Atlantic Affairs