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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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On Sunday morning, the first big international rugby fixture – All Blacks vs the Wallabies – was played since Covid halted the Six Nations back in early March. This will be followed by the other Bledisloe Cup games, the leftover week and a bit of the Six Nations tournament, an England-Barbarians friendly, and then a veritable smorgasbord of the postponed southern-hemisphere Rugby Championship in about a six-week overlap with a specially-constituted European Autumn Nations Cup, including Georgia and, um, Fiji.

For fans of egg-ball around the world, this will come as an enormous relief.

For the last six months (thanks to some generous soul on YouTube) I have been endlessly rewatching just one rugby match. South Africa’s immortal World Cup final win against New Zealand, Ellis Park, June 24 1995.

As a good pseudo-South African, this is one of those ‘I remember where I was when…’ moments. A school cricket match in West Kent, scoring 41* (which isn’t relevant except it was my highest score, and took me 20 years to better it), and someone’s dad had one of those portable TVs that was about 15% screen, plugged into his car’s cigarette-lighter. I recall us hurrying off the field, just in time to see Joel Stransky kick what I’d always remembered as his Jonny Wilkinson-style last-minute, World Cup-winning, career- (not to say life-)defining drop-goal.

For a whole range of obvious and well-attested reasons, the iconic result contributed enormously to the new South Africa and to the cause of racial harmony and integration. In the run-up to that moment, though, it must be said, the game itself wasn’t exactly one for the ages. Hell, I realised as I tuned in for the first time, back in April, I didn’t even remember what the final score was. In fact, I don’t think I had ever watched the game.

The first thing you notice is how old everything looks. Or, indeed, is. Francois Pienaar’s rubber takkies, the refs’ moustaches, the commentator’s gentlemanly tones (“we eagerly anticipate a display of sportsmanship and skill, in this, the final contest…”), the synthesizer music, the lycra outfits on the balloon-girls. I doubt many would call Johannesburg ‘the City of Gold’ these days, and even the low-budget Lion King-alike dance show seems like something one might hesitate to do now, let alone with white dancers. The commentary will later mention such newfangled things as post-protectors, playing advantage, and the off-side rule. But the fact that the Springbok team had just taken a two-day R&R in Sun City may be what really dates it most of all.

Of course, South Africa was a good few years behind the modern world, emerging as it still was, slowly, from its grim apartheid post-war history. Chris Hani had been assassinated only a couple of years before. The rightly-celebrated elections of 1994 had nonetheless been heavily overshadowed by internecine violence. Many black South Africans still refused to support the Springboks, considering them/it a de facto racist emblem. In that context, certain aspects of the opening ceremony, like the military fly-past and the helicopters, still come across as somewhat sinister.

But then Mandela appears, the crowd chant “Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!”, they start ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, and damn if I don’t well up every time.

No-one expected the South Africans to win the cup. Having only been accepted back into world sport in 1992, few players had had much time to establish themselves at the highest level. Two Springboks, ‘Os’ (= Ox) du Randt (“the diesel mechanic from the Free State”) and Chris Rossouw, had never lost a match in national colours; but that was more a mark of inexperience than anything. Others got their debut as subs during the final! Mark Andrews, a lock, ended up playing No.8 for the last two matches of the tournament, for the first time since he was 13. The Springboks as a team were seeded ninth – which should have meant they didn’t make it to the quarters.

They’d had a good start, beating Australia, the reigning champions (who hadn’t lost a match for the last 12 months) in the opening game. From there, they hadn’t had the toughest path in rugby history to the final – facing Romania, Canada, Samoa, and France – and had notched up the best defence stats in the tournament. But even on their best day, no team wants to meet the All Blacks in a final, especially a New Zealand team who’d (predictably) proven the best attack.

As befits the last World Cup before the professional era, most of the numbers were much smaller then. The redoubtable NZ scrum-half Graeme Bachop, was equalling someone’s (mere) 29-cap record for the All Blacks in that position. Pienaar, who’d led Transvaal to three domestic trophies in 1993, and been named Rugby World‘s International Player of the Year in 1994, had only played 21 times for his country (albeit all as captain), and four of those since the start of the tournament.

But some of these players would have been legendary at any time. The young Andrew Mehrtens – born in South Africa (boooo!) – was the first player in history to score 100 points in just five matches (it helps to be the kicker for New Zealand, obviously). Chester Williams, the totemic Springbok left wing, had scored 10 tries in his last 7 internationals.

It’s fun to hear absolute man-mountains like du Randt and Garry Pagel being introduced as ‘young’ men at the start of their careers. Others had those unforgettably pre-weathered faces, like Pienaar’s and Sean Fitzpatrick’s, despite being only 28 and 32 respectively. Andre Joubert – who played the final with a broken hand! – looks like a hungry wolf.

There are more whose names I recognise, but couldn’t have picked out in a line-up (or vice versa, obviously): Kobus Wiese, Hannes Strydom, even the unimprovably-named Zinzan Valentine Brooke. But a lot of these guys were just entirely unknown by me – in part, I think, because the impending professionalism of the sport meant that many (including the biggest guns, like Pienaar and Stransky) moved to Europe shortly afterwards, and so curtailed their international careers. Obviously the South Africans are my guys here; but Ian Jones? Mike Brewer? Jeff Wilson? These names meant nothing to me.

Which brings us, inexorably, to the player (officially or otherwise) of the ’95 World Cup: New Zealand’s Jonah Lomu, the youngest ever All Black, 1.95m tall and 118kgs, already famous (when did he trample over one of the Underwoods?), who alone just put four tries past England in the semis, and who’s as good as guaranteed to lift the Webb Ellis trophy one day. Today, most likely.

Now it’s a bright, blue, winter’s afternoon at Jo’burg altitude, and within the first five minutes it is fairly evident a big chunk of New Zealand’s game-plan is to get the ball out wide to you know whom. “All eyes have been on Jonah Lomu,” declares the commentator, “No.11, the left wing of New Zealand. A terrific footballer…”

It isn’t immediately going to plan, mind. A bit hilariously, world-class flyhalf Mehrtens’ kick-off doesn’t go the requisite 10 metres. Then Stransky’s penalty response doesn’t find touch. Mehrtens gets first blood, then misses a drop. Stransky slots his own first penalty shot, then Mehrtens pulls one back, then Stransky levels it, before missing another one. With all that final pressure, and an extra 8m on the boot (one commentator estimates), it was perhaps inevitable this match would involve a lot of kicking in the hope the opposition are the first to make mistakes. But not this much kicking. “This is turning into a match for the real connoisseur,” avers the commentator, wrongly and precipitately.

At about the 7-minute mark, there’s a cross-field kick from the All Blacks, and “James Small, against Jonah Lomu, [passes] on the inside…”

I don’t really register. But about five minutes later, there’s a second mention, when Mehrtens targets him down “Jonah Lomu’s side” and he responds with an enormous, Campese-style clearance kick. “James Small, of course, who played for South Africa U19, at full back…”

And now my ears pricked up. Who? “South Africa’s most-capped player on the field today, with 23 tests and 10 tries…”

Wait. What? Their most-capped player??

It’s true, of course. He was on 23 caps; he had 10 tries to his name; and he was already something of the Springbok’s troubled wunderkind. And yet I don’t recall ever having heard of James Small. (I blame my parents: they didn’t let us watch TV as kids, and certainly weren’t going to spring for Sky subscriptions, and thus the chance of learning names of foreign sportsmen was quite close to nil). So while I watched the match the third or fourth time, I read up on him.

James Small had form, on every level. His 1992 debut, in this same stadium, was also against the All Blacks, where South Africa lost… by three points (I don’t create the coincidences. I just report them). He had been the first Springbok to be sent off for dissent, in a match against Australia, by none other than Ed Morrison, the ref, now, of the ’95 RWC final. He had ‘retired’ from the round-ball code, what’s more, at 17, after being suspended for headbutting another referee. He was also a provincial-level sprinter in high school, and had been offered some sort of scholarship to go to university in San Diego, but his working-class family could not afford to send him there. In the end, he didn’t go to university at all.

Small, not obviously one of life’s more natural philosophers, would later go on to associate strongly with the non-white players, saying that as a merely non-Afrikaans player, he felt discriminated against in SA rugby. He was known for being one of the most vocal supporters of the new South Africa, enthusiastically learning the new anthem, and weeping openly in Mandela’s former cell on a team trip to Robben Island.

On the day of the final, Mandela himself warmly shook hands with Small before the anthems, and reminded him that he had “a big job to do.” Mandela’s son reputedly had posters of Small in his bedroom. I mean: you’d take that on your tombstone, wouldn’t you?

Anyway, now, here he is. That high-shouldered, stiff-legged frame, not dissimilar to, say, Dan Biggar or Elliot Daly these days. The all-round athleticism (and attitude) of Sonny Bill Williams. The face, a cross between Tom Hardy and a leery greyhound. (I don’t recall who played him in Invictus, but it should definitely have been Tom Hardy.) He’s lean, he’s mean, and it’s entirely possible that I’m slightly in love with him.

The No.14’s “big job” for the day is to mark the steamtrain Lomu. For, as it turned out, the better part of two hours. And he achieves it.

Ultimately, Lomu only manages half a dozen serious bursts. The first, about 13 minutes in, comes from an inside pass. The crowd goes wild, but he only makes a few metres before South Africa concede an off-side penalty right in front of the posts. His second comes out of nowhere, down the left wing, beating and/or brushing off a couple of defenders. Thankfully, nothing comes of it. The third, a short run, in the middle of the field. Still nothing. But knowing what he’s capable of, you wince every time somebody gives him the ball.

South Africa have a try ruled held up. Small takes some courageous hits. The match rages from end to end, thanks to the (not always brilliant) kicking. And at half time, the Springboks lead, for the first time in the game, 9-6. The commentators are pleased that the referee hasn’t given “too many penalties” – although the scoreline doesn’t necessarily reflect that impression.

In the now-famous mid-game team-talk, Francois Pienaar has his arm around Small’s shoulder.

Early in the second half, Small himself nearly picks up a kick through from Joubert, just metres from the NZ line, but can’t quite manage it. And then, about 20 minutes in, after a kick from Joost van der Westhuizen, and a gather and run from the fresh legs of Marc Ellis, suddenly Lomu is out on the left wing with the ball. He gets past Small… but mercifully it’s been adjudged a forward pass.

As Small and Lomu walk back towards the scrum, offscreen, the commentator records “a friendly little tap of the hand from James Small and Jonah Lomu. They know they’re in a massive contest here today…” It’s a remarkable gesture of respect in the circumstances – though the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like Small affording to be comradely, where he’s just nearly lost the World Cup!

If you ever had to put in one day’s work in life, marking Jonah Lomu out of all usefulness in a World Cup final would be perfectly acceptable. But is it unfair, on closer (and repeated) inspection, to suspect that, as in many a nervy big match, the ’95 final was not Small’s most impressive career performance? Bit scrappy? Couple of naff-looking shirt grabs? Often not the one bringing Lomu down?

That said, no doubt some of this can be attributed to a kind of survivor bias: if Lomu spent the whole match having to avoid James Small then Small’s presence was worth its weight in gold. (The All Blacks, certainly, were also playing a bit of a bluffer’s strategy, Lomu’s main role being to occupy the minds and territory of would-be tacklers, thus leaving full-back Glen Osborne, similarly fast and massive, to take late and unexpected passes down the wing.)

The clock ticks on, and the game gets messier as the exhausted players make mistakes. A commentator opines that the All Blacks have not played well in the final 20 minutes of a lot of matches. (These days, you wouldn’t bet against NZ scoring a try five minutes into overtime. Just ask the Irish.) Another Mehrtens drop-goal attempt falls short. Small takes a high ball face-to-face with Lomu, and wins a penalty. Within seconds, Chester Williams is almost scoring in the All Blacks left-hand corner. Wouldn’t that have been a thing? South Africa’s only black player scoring the only try of the match, 30 seconds into overtime. But the bounce favours New Zealand.

At 80 minutes, the scores are level, 9-9.

In a fraught first half of extra time (10 mins), each side claims another three-pointer. 12-12. And with seven minutes of play left, Joel Stransky scores that drop-goal. A huge one, above the tops of the posts. 15-12. “This will be the longest 7 minutes those 15 players and these 62,000…” but the game has already restarted. Five minutes to go, and the camera zooms in on Small, dragging himself off the field on the far side, like a paralysed soldier.

With just a couple of minutes left on the clock, Stransky lines up to take another pretty standard right-footer’s kick at goal. He takes his time… and pushes it wide. (So much for my schoolboy memory.) The last act of the game is a knock-on by van der Westhuizen.

But South Africa still win, by 3. The Jo’burg crowd goes mad. The national anthem starts to play again, and is either stopped or instantly drowned out. Pienaar and the Springboks, subs and coaching staff included, kneel on the ground and pray. He and Stransky embrace. You can see Small dashing about in the background.

The South Africans do a lap of the ground, to a reprise of ‘World in Union’. Pienaar makes his ’43 million South Africans’ speech, and then Mandela comes back out, in Pienaar’s No.6 shirt, and hands Pienaar the Webb Ellis trophy, and the event is freeze-framed into history.

They do another lap, with the cup, the tannoy blasting ‘Shosholoza’. In all the pictures, Small looks like the cocky young hero that he almost certainly was: the one grinning, fooling about, doing the victory signs and rock-star poses. Noticeably younger at heart than many of his countrymen in 1995. No wonder he became a literal poster boy.

It feels like something of an omen now. I’m kind of pleased that we don’t actually see him leave the field.

A noted scorer of tries, Small did not run in a single one during the 1995 World Cup, which must have been incredibly frustrating for the young warrior. His reputation from that competition depends on his defence, against the French in the semi-final, and then against Jonah Lomu, more or less personally, in the final. He would later be labelled, and by the New Zealanders, ‘the man who won the World Cup.”

The following year, Small was the leading try-scorer in the inaugural Super 12 season. He retired from the national side in 1997, on a total of 47 caps, and 20 tries – overtaking, in his final game, the Springbok try-scoring record of Danie Gerber. In 1998, he returned to playing for the Transvaal, but ran into discipline problems with, well, the former All Blacks coach Laurie Mains(!). He retired, after an injury, in 1999. In all, he played New Zealand 9 times, losing 7 of them. He never scored a try against the All Blacks; but then my understanding is that Lomu never scored against South Africa, either.

James Small was always talked about in terms of a ‘rough diamond’, ‘flawed’, ‘rebel’, a ‘bad boy’, or (and I particularly liked this) ‘180 km/h in a 60 zone’. Alas, amid much talk of how he played with ‘passion’ and ’emotion’ (the standard euphemisms for getting sent off), and ‘lived his life in the same way’ (i.e. affairs or drinking problems), he blew pay cheques on Armani suits, took drugs, and was mentioned in the same breath as Eric Cantona or, more worryingly, Paul Gascoigne. After retirement from rugby, he got involved with modelling, property development, and the restaurant business. He had a rocky, intermittent relationship with a South African model called, unbeatably, Christina Storm. In 2001 he attempted suicide. Mandela called to check on him.

But he is spoken of too as having being extremely friendly to any up-and-coming players, and great with kids and fans at off-field events. He’s also rumoured to have pinched the World Cup trophy to take round to a mate’s house party. Hard not to like a guy like that, one feels.

Still, I have had time to wonder why I’m quite so drawn to him: a man about whom I know next to nothing, beyond having watched him play one single rugby match about a dozen times. Ridiculous as it may sounds, I think it’s because of all the people on the pitch (except maybe the bowl-haircutted Mehrtens), Small looks most like I imagine I could just conceivably have done if I had played professional rugby. Moreover, his story bridges the gap between a version of myself aged 18 (over-achieving and full of promise) and aged, say, 28 (not). A little lost-potential avatar that I can call my own.

Well, 1995 was a while ago now – and a good handful of those young men are, alas, no longer with us. Ruben Kruger succumbed to brain cancer, at only 39. Chester Williams died of a heart attack, age 49. Joost van der Westhuizen – the scrum-half with the intoxicating green eyes (and 89 caps) – passed away finally a couple of years ago, age 45, killed by the motor neurone disease that had confined him to a wheelchair for years. On the All Blacks side, Jonah Lomu, most famously and tragically, had his career cut short by kidney failure. He died in 2015.

It is a natural rite of passage to see your boyhood sporting heroes age and die, almost as much as it is to realise their replacements are at least 10 ten years younger than you. But these guys weren’t old enough for death, yet. Sad to relate, then, James Terence Small collapsed last summer, aged 50, allegedly naked and probably not alone, in a Johannesburg strip club. He died in hospital.

Whatever the minutiae of his death (and there were variables, including firearms), or the turbulent couple of decades that led up to it, the fond farewells to Small poured in, and especially from within the South African rugby community. John Smit, World Cup-winning Springbok captain in 2007, referred to Small as his hero, growing up. The All Blacks called him a ‘fierce competitor’, which I think is their way of saying they’d rather he had married their sister than that they’d had to face him on the field. Butch James, the 2007 fly-half, said he had played against Lomu, and was glad not to have had to against Small.

The memorial was held at the Wanderers Stadium, with tributes from the ANC, current Springbok captain Siya Kolisi, and Lomu’s widow. It was attended by several hundred fans, and many former Springbok teammates.

Whilst the 1994 election was of course the preeminent shift in South Africa, domestically, it could be argued that the watershed moment for the renascent nation, in terms of international presence, was the winning of the 1995 World Cup. And while the new South Africa has had its up and downs, both in its politics and sport (South Africa once even lost to Italy…), it’s undeniable that the Springbok brand is now one of the strongest in the world.

In the pro era, admittedly, they have a pretty bad record against the All Blacks (14 to 36, or thereabouts) – but then who doesn’t? And of course, with final victories in 2007 and 2019, both sides have won the same number of World Cups, the Springboks winning almost half of those they have competed in (as opposed to only 1/3 in the case of the New Zealanders). But the ’95 win is where it all started. For the 25^th anniversary in June this year I believe the game was even re-broadcast on SA television.

South Africa return to the international stage this autumn as World Champions once again, led by Kolisi, the first black captain of South Africa, the first black captain to lift the World Cup, and the 2019 Most Influential Person in world rugby.

Of course, there is already concern in South Africa that an ‘undercooked’ test side that for political reasons has (unlike their opponents) played no Super Rugby recently, and has several high profile injuries, may be embarking on a campaign that will end in ‘massacre’. Nkosi sikele iAfrika.

—
For The Critic, in a slightly different edit

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, July 19 1906
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Jacob Zuma is the only black South African president never to lift the rugby world cup.

At Morrisons, your opinion gets rewarded with a £500 voucher.

Vegetarianism, which is based on false hypotheses and ideas, does not have followers in the Soviet Union.

Property blinds all eyes.

You must be prepared to stabilise if you need to excavate earth.

Apples don’t have daddies.

Only humans know that trees are beautiful.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is appearing at the CENS Workshop on Understanding and Countering Online Falsehoods and Influence Operations.

Necessity, Manitoba, has a population of 1,230 souls.

Almost everyone is happy to accept the cookies.

The lion-keepers at Dublin Zoo have a remarkable record in breeding lion cubs.

Gustav Mahler wrote the Kindertotenlieder before any of his own children died.

Basketball is not an interesting sport.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, June 14 1907

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The Sports Direct on Baker Street has actually closed down.

A fifty-five-legged creature would be a pentekaipentekontapus.

The best way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

Truth is truth and nothing which you can report can affect it in any way, though it may excite the emotions and allay the curiosity of a number of very ineffectual people.

The supposition that it is necessary to feed the Cobra Lily a piece of hamburger or an insect daily is erroneous.

Pairs of prime numbers that are 6 apart are known as ‘sexy primes’.

The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton.

A man will don his jacket in the same way every day.

It takes thirty seconds to have a dream and thirty minutes to recount it.

Eight billionaires currently possess as much wealth as the world’s 3.6bn poorest inhabitants.

The United States Dictionary of Occupational Titles does not account for being a ‘Philosopher’.

Scuba divers roll backwards off boats because if they rolled forwards they would just go into the boat.

The code words in the system are pure guesswork. 

Buccmaster believes the old gods built the Roman roads and talks about ‘angland’ in a time when much of the population has only just finished being Danish. He has no truck with ‘cyngs’ and does not answer Harald’s call to Hastings. But when ‘geeyome the bastard’ arrives with his punitive taxes and rapacious knights, Buccmaster finds himself inspired to launch a violent rebellion against legal, financial and cultural annihilation.

History will not permit that he succeed, of course, so perhaps it does not much matter that Buccmaster is delusional, cowardly, and generally a disastrous leader. But his political objections are entirely legitimate, not least regarding a people’s access to their native language: ‘all that we is is bean tacan from us’. It has been a long time since Buccmaster’s descendants had cause to view themselves as victims of a conquest, but this remarkable feat of literary sympathy puts us right back in his apocalyptic vision of the end times for ancient England.

Rather more recent British history repeats itself in Randall (Galley Beggar Press 317pp £11), Jonathan Gibbs’s scathing pseudo-memoir of the Young British Artists and the art market under Cool Britannia. In a parallel artiverse where Damien Hirst died in the late 1980s, Ian ‘Randall’ Timkins has taken the London contemporary scene by storm, selling ‘holographs’ to the rich and famous derived from their own used toilet paper. He and his circle hang out in the pubs around Goldsmiths, attend events they ‘affect to despise’ and say profound things like, ‘There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it.’

Randall and his retinue occupy a milieu that’s equal parts Geoff Dyer and Bret Easton Ellis, and if the overall tone is just a fraction too refined for a City-boy narrator whose idea of culture was once a ‘signed and framed’ poster of Cindy Crawford, it’s a credit to Gibbs’s writing (and the YBAs) that you don’t need to have paid any conscious attention to the art world over the last twenty years for all of this to still feel familiar. If you can only put up with the slightly obnoxious characters, in fact, Randall is ideal for those who already dismiss most contemporary art as just so much Merda d’artista.

Aaron Thier’s The Ghost Apple (Bloomsbury 289pp £16.99) belongs to the more full-blown variety of satire. Tripoli College, a fourth-rate New England liberal arts institution – established for the betterment of ‘Indian Scholiasts’ – has been hit hard by the financial crisis, thanks largely to its overexposure to the company that manufactures Monopoly money. The college forms a new ‘partnership’ with Big Anna® Brands, a snack-food corporation, the ethical commitments of which include ‘the introduction of clean Human Power™ plow technology’ on its Caribbean plantation estates. One of these is the island of St Renard, where Tripoli’s ‘Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture’ enables politically engaged students of all creeds and colours to experience life in a Big Anna® republic.

With his merciless spoofing of course-listing gobbledygook and ‘brand history’ bullshit, Thier’s hectic assemblage of prospectuses, slave narratives, ‘Scandal Vulnerability Assessments’ and insane (but basically verbatim) Victorian health advice marks him out as a potential successor to the late lamented Tom Sharpe, and reaches a new high – which is to say low – for the satirical campus novel.

In Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (Jonathan Cape 234pp £14.99) a young woman from Delhi comes into adulthood at the turn of the millennium, amid a human geography of cyber-boom and rampant development but also abysmal poverty, corruption and obsession with the country’s nuclear neighbour. One of a generation of schoolgirls who were told that they would be ‘the future of India’ but still find it unsafe to go out at night without ‘a man and a car or a car and a gun’, she sidesteps her aunt’s incessant attempts to marry her off and begins a turbulent physical relationship with an ‘ugly’ young man with whom she makes eye contact one day in a busy restaurant. He is the first person she has met who lives on his own, and he becomes her guide to parts of the city that have been thus far inaccessible.

Although the story is not exactly a happy one, the boldness of our protagonist is redeeming: in a setting one expects to be peopled with trapped or defeated women, her determination to forge her own genuine, personal experiences (however painful) is important. Kapoor’s prose, though, is a bit over-wrought and self-consciously modernist in places, and her whistle-stop tour of what should be the seamier aspects of the Indian capital occasionally seems to be ticking boxes (‘Lutyens’ Delhi’; ‘monumental grandeur’) for the ‘international’ audience.

In The Scatter Here is Too Great (Jonathan Cape 203pp £14.99), Bilal Tanweer does a better job of maintaining the flavour of something from another culture. Nine interlinked stories – focusing, in threes, on ‘A Writer in the City’, an old communist poet and a young man who steals cars from defaulting bank customers – orbit at various distances around a bomb blast at Cantt Station in central Karachi. In delivering these disparate viewpoints and dimensions of big-city life, Tanweer purposefully encourages an element of narrative opacity and incoherence. But although each individual strand is not without interest, no one section is particularly substantial or rewarding, and the book as a whole struggles to generate much momentum. Ondaatje-esque reflections appear here and there in support of Tanweer’s approach – ‘True stories are fragments. Anything longer is a lie, a fabrication’ – but, bluntly put, this collection could have done with a little more fabricating.

No such complaint could possibly be levelled at Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (Picador 555pp £16.99). ‘As a child,’ announces one of his Sebaldian co-narrators, ‘I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed.’ Rahman satisfies that expectation in spades and with considerable control and polish. On one level, this is the story of two boys from different sides of the tracks and, indeed, from different sides of what used to be East and West Pakistan, who meet at Oxford in the late 1980s and then go on to work in high finance until one loses interest, retrains as a human rights lawyer and ends up in Afghanistan.

On another level, this book is a colossal investigation of the difference between seeing and knowing and understanding, taking in geopolitics, the banking crisis, black swans, NGOs, game theory, the British education system, cartography, war, primatology, (post-)imperialism, Christopher Hitchens, carpentry, Glyndebourne, translation, naval pennants, cognitive sciences, literature, black holes and Bath Olivers. Deeply insightful and limitlessly quotable, this is the kind of book every novelist dreams of writing and no first-timer should ever have had the chutzpah to attempt. As Rahman’s own narrator says, somewhat flagrantly: ‘nothing in his account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse.’

The same cannot be said of Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood (Serpent’s Tail 232pp £11.99). One drought-ridden summer John Cole shuts up his bookshop, gets lost driving out of London, breaks down and ends up being invited into an unofficial lunatic asylum, the occupants of which, for some reason, believe they were expecting him. He stays a week. Why? He is frustrated, even scared, by his new companions (Perry is good at the tiny details of mistrust and uncertainty); he thinks they are all lying to him; they are. But he doesn’t leave. Is he perhaps there for his own treatment? We are not vouchsafed an explanation.

Thanks to the litter of symbols and portents (think Henry James rewired by Murakami, or Virginia Woolf directing a sequel to The Village), After Me Comes the Flood consistently feels like it’s about to have a lot going for it. But there’s ultimately no pay-off, leaving the impression that it was all just an exercise in atmosphere.

None of that airy ambiguity in Katherine Faw Morris’s Young God (Granta Books 195pp £12.99). When her skeezy mother dies falling into a ‘witch-tit freezing’ river, trailer-park teenager Nikki decides to take control of her life and sets about making something of herself – specifically, a drug dealer. In two hundred short, violent and often unpleasantly sexual pages Nikki goes about her emotionally lobotomised progress, smoking Kool menthol cigarettes (‘the best thing that’s ever been in her mouth’), shaving herself like a porn star and responding to should-be major life events with a perfunctory ‘Oh’.

The basic so-what-ishness of the ending is perhaps unavoidable, given the context. But Morris’s punchy and unwavering style is absolutely of a piece with her unforgiving environment of post-Palahniuk white-trash girl-power – with guns. And fuchsia end-papers.

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For Literary Review