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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 Perspective

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For Perspective

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For Perspective

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For Perspective magazine

Around the final Daniel Craig installment, there’s been inevitable talk of who should be the next James Bond. Well, I’ll tell you who it shouldn’t be, and that’s Matthew Goode.

Three years ago, Anthony Horowitz was hired to write Forever and a Day, the umpteenth licensed 007® novel since the death of – and ‘with original material by’ – the master himself. Horowitz’s second outing in fact, FaaD was almost universally well received, a neatly-threaded Double-O origin story for Bond (more assured even than Fleming’s own Casino Royale, perhaps), set ‘just five years after VE Day’, amid the depressed 1950s at home, the distant Korean War abroad, and the CIA starting to interfere in both Europe and SE Asia, its focus on the drugs trade.

Tonally, Horowitz pulls off an atomically-precise emulation of Fleming’s own prose pulse-quickening whenever he talks of wine, women, cars and, here, the Riviera. Content-wise, he is exceedingly familiar with the source material, and has some clever fun with both Bond’s weary tropes and Fleming’s biotrivia.

In short, the book’s a (retro) classic, and I’d strongly recommend it.

Alas, I cannot say the same for Matthew Goode’s recording.

Bond may have been an unblinking British patriot; but he had his creator’s knowledge of, and lust for, all things foreign and exotic – and would have known, for sure, how to pronounce them.

I suppose it’s possible that M might render ‘Scipio’ (bad guy) as ‘Sippio’, and ‘Carbone’ as ‘Car-bone’ (like Churchill mispronouncing ‘Narzis’?); but ‘Unione Siciliana’ is ‘Sichiliana’, surely? The very first restaurant Bond dines in (a real, Swedish one) should not be ‘Catellin’, but ‘Cattelin’. And Soviet cruiser captain Stolypin’s wife would have been ‘Irr-ma’, not ‘Urma’ as though born in Huddersfield.

It’s ‘Taube‘ not ‘Taub’ (German for ‘dove’, a plane, and – perfectly – a deaf person). And ‘Ravens-brook’ (sic) was a notorious concentration camp, not, say, a ringroad garden centre. Kompani Linge, a Norwegian SOE outfit, was named for its commander Martin Linge'(r)’, not, as Goode makes it sound, a prefab waitingroom on a charter airfield. All of this stuff is Google-able, obviously.

Closer to home, Bond’s Scottish housekeeper calls someone a ‘bawheid’ (not a ‘boar-hide’); and the school in Edinburgh is ‘Fett(i)s’, not ‘Fet’. Never has the battle/location in North Africa been called ‘Tobb-ruck’ – least of all by military types just after WW2!

Worst of all, though – the crime de la crime, you might say – is that M. Goode, apparently, cannot speak French.

I don’t mean Radio 3 Style Guide French: no-one expects ‘Paggghree’ or ‘fronnk(s)’. Just your basic Tricolore “pardonnez moi, madame…”.

It’s ‘Rue Fon-say‘ not ‘Rue Foncet[te]’. ‘Fives-Lille’ is not pronounced like the toffs’ handball sport.

‘Citroën’ is not the same as the French word for ‘lemon’. And there’s no Marseillaise pastis drink called ‘Rye-‘ anything.

There are no Ls in ‘Aiguilles Rouges’ (Bond’s parents died there, FFS: he would remember that). Goode’s stab at ‘Rochefoucauld’ sounds like he’s actually halfway through being stabbed. And don’t even ask about ‘Marré-quelle Fock’.

I don’t, admittedly, recall a case of canon Bond being undone by mispronunciation. But a) in this book he’s explicitly credited with ‘fluent French’, and b) brand names and other proper nouns were, famously, Fleming’s stock in trade. Duff notes like this are the equivalent of Bond stirring his drink with a McDonald’s straw.

Lastly – and I do feel unkind noting this – Goode has a slight (if well-masked) speech impediment. That thing that inverts Rs and Ws. So we get ‘hewoin’, ‘Hotel Negwesco’, ‘enemy tewitowy’, ‘twuly desiwable’, ‘neutwality’, ‘Bewetta’, ‘quite an opewator’, ‘Miwabelle‘, ‘Gweat Bwitain’, ‘secuwity’, and… ‘the Secwet Service’.

This could be brilliant for skewering the louche, adulterous, sadistic Ian Fleming. But as James Bond, the uber-man and fantasy projection (a concept openly addressed in FaaD)…? Well, once you’ve heard it, it’s a little hard to take him sewiously.

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For Perspective magazine

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For Perspective

Born in 1926, into Anglo-Welsh upper-middle comfort, James Humphry Morris was educated at Christ Church, Lancing, and Christ Church again, served in the dashing 9^th Queen’s Royal Lancers during WWII, climbed much of Everest and broke the news of Hillary and Tenzing’s successful 1953 ascent, uncovered Franco-Israeli collusion at Suez, and reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Not interested in public life, or really any steady form of employment, he became one of Britain’s greatest writers (of travel, journalism, history, and eventually a novel). And then, in 1972, he went to Morocco, emerging from the Casablanca surgery as ‘Jan’. Conundrum was published only two years later (the first under Morris’s new name), reissued several times, and subsequently hailed as one of the ‘100 Key Books of Our Time’.

In a memoir that’s somehow barely five hours long, she relates the realisation, aged three (under the piano), that she’d been born into the wrong body; summarises the long human fascination with (and indulgence of) the blurry boundaries of sex and gender; mentions suicide as almost a purely-factual alternative; and is disarmingly frank about her sexual reaction to architecture, being kissed by a cabbie, becoming her wife’s ‘sister-in-law’, and a hundred and one other extraordinary situations.

‘Few people understood it’, Morris admits (the Olympics gets a mention, NB), and she’s at pains to note those whose lives have been wrecked by such decisions. But by and large she says she had quite positive reactions. It’s hard not to suspect these findings must be cushioned by class and other kinds of self-sufficiency. A born free-thinker (though not a mere contrarian), it’s fairly clear that Morris keenly maintained, on several levels, her outsider status… and also that she could afford to.

During her lifetime, transsexualism has gone, practically speaking, from ‘virtual inconceivable’ to ‘nearly a commonplace’, and today’s gender activists will no doubt have views on her attitude towards the ‘trendy’ word ‘identity’, statements about the ‘androgenous condition’ disqualifying her from writing fiction, and views on men and women (‘I did not want to be good at reversing cars…’, e.g.) now – in her updated introduction – acknowledged as ‘preposterously obsolete’.

At her death last year, aged 94, Jan Morris had been a woman for more of her life than she was not. It took a while for me to twig Conundrum was read – quite unobtrusively, but still from start to finish – by a man.

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For Perspective magazine

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For The Spectator

— The Nelson Evening Mail, October 10 1906

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The Museum of Emotions in London has a game with yes/no answers.

Adolf Hitler fixed the Nazi Party registrations, to make it seem they had more members than they did.

The endnotes to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest comprise their own entire audiobook.

Vandals put lives at risk.

The ‘Blue Danube’ waltz is played on a radio station somewhere in the world every minute of the day and night.

The English county of Midsomer has the highest murder rate of any non-metropolitan area in the UK.

Barns are typically painted red because of nuclear fusion.

In France a few yards of silk can make a nobleman.

The Cutty Sark was still in service in 1953.

‘Orientation’ comes from the fact that the earliest Western maps placed the East at the top, putting Paradise in pole position.

Public procurement expenditure accounts for nearly 50% of the Afghan budget.

The weather in Northern Ireland is always fine.

Girls have a higher chance of getting pregnant than boys.