Amusing musings

His latest book, collected occasional pieces from 1999-2010, Working the Room, reflects the eclectic nature of Dyer’s output, dividing the pieces under the headings Visuals (on painters and photographers), Verbals (writers), Variables (travel, sex, music) and Personals (autobiography).

Dyer likes to describe himself as “the son of a sheet metal worker and a dinner lady”. He went from grammar school to Oxford, but rather than continue climbing the ladder, he spent the next few years slacking: smoking dope, listening to music, and reading and writing for his own pleasure.

He followed his homage to Berger with two books about jazz, a novel and a non-fiction book. He then wrote an account of the Great War, The Missing of the Somme, before taking off in another new direction with Out of Sheer Rage, a hilariously bad-tempered book about trying to write a book about DH Lawrence. His most recent novel/travel book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, had the usual mixed reception.

Dyer’s idiosyncratic full-length works are interspersed with journalistic pieces in which his sharp wit and offbeat observations alternate with petulant moans about hotel pillows, over-frothy cappuccino, and disappointing croissants. People started asking when he was he going to settle down to being a serious writer, in the conventional sense, and stop getting distracted. The answer, now that he is in his 50s, seems to be never.

Dyer’s work retains an enviable freshness precisely because he has managed to follow his enthusiasms and write about them in apparently effortless conversational style. He is the first to be amazed that it is possible to make a living by writing about what you interests you at any given moment.

Here that ranges from Is Jazz Dead? (on the ascendancy of world music), to WG Sebald’s melancholic writing, Richard Avedon’s photography and Rebecca West’s book about Yugoslavia.

Dyer has always been rated more as a critic than a novelist. The collection’s epigraph, from Don Paterson, restates the case with typical bravado: “There are writers for whom no forms exist: too clever for novels, too sceptical for poetry, too verbose for the aphorism, all that is left to them is the essay.” Dyer describes his method as that of a literary and scholarly gatecrasher. He argues persuasively for the eclectic background knowledge that a “generalist” (as opposed to a specialist) like himself can bring to a subject.

The most ambitious personal essay, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, exemplifies Dyer at his worst: trite, self-obsessed and verbose. But in contrast, there is the tantalising account of how he met and married Rebecca Wilson, director of the Saatchi Gallery.

Dyer’s writing lacks the compassion and humanity of John Berger’s and would benefit from more stringent editing, but if you like your criticism to be wide-ranging and unpredictable, provoking the occasional loud laugh, he will not disappoint.

Picture: WANDERING STAR: Eclectic British essayist Geoff Dyer. Picture: Paul Hawthorne / Getty Images