To discover that Geoff Dyer has reached the memoir-of-his-childhood years is to be abruptly mugged by the passage of time. Surely Geoff Dyer can’t be, as Wikipedia solemnly informs me that he is, now in his middle sixties? Not Geoff Dyer, of all people? Surely he’s still thirtyishly slacking his way around Benares, subsisting on daal and magic mushrooms, or haplessly seeking out transcendence at a rave in Stuttgart?
By this I suppose all I mean is that Dyer is the sort of writer whom many readers discover in their twenties, and that he is the sort of writer who seems to tell you important things about what life could, or should, be like. His books seem to suggest that you can indeed get away with it: that you can mooch around foreign cities taking drugs and having sex, and that when you emerge from this pleasant matrix of not actually doing anything, you will have written a string of good books about what it means to be alive.
But the pleasant matrix of not actually doing anything isn’t really what Dyer’s books are about. Dyer’s recurrent postures, on the page, of thwartedness, laziness and incompetence (in Out of Sheer Rage, he famously wrote a book about failing to write a book about DH Lawrence) bely the iron will, and the distinctively literary intelligence, that have now helped him to create an extensive shelf of books. Comic self-deprecation, in its various modes, is simply the prose method that allows this sunny enthusiast to get at his true subject, which is preoccupation.
Dyer is the laureate of preoccupation. His books have ostensible subjects: the first World War in The Missing of the Somme (1994), slackerish travel in Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It (2003), photography in The Ongoing Moment (2005), Andrei Tarkovsky in Zona (2012)… But their actual subject is a preoccupation familiar to anyone who has ever developed a consuming interest in a niche subject – an obsession, that is, of the kind we half-damn and half-praise by calling “nerdish”.
Dyer has long since grasped that such preoccupations might look like distractions but are actually the most basic stuff of consciousness itself: what we like to think about when we think about what we like.
Homework, Dyer’s 19th book, is therefore not just an account of his childhood and adolescence but an account of his childhood and adolescent preoccupations: Airfix models, toy soldiers, collectible stamps included in packets of Brooke Bond tea, Action Man dolls, a Dawes Red Feather racing bike, Chelsea FC paraphernalia, the albums of Yes and Hawkwind, fantasy paperbacks by Michael Moorcock… The material furnishings, that is, of a postwar English childhood.
“Material” is the key word. Homework begins with an epigraph from Raymond Williams, the great theorist of postwar English life and its material changes. “Great confusion is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified, as history,” this epigraph ends; it tells us what Dyer is up to in his book. His hobbyist anatomy of childhood obsessions – wearisome at points – adds up to a metonymic account of postwar British history; confusion is welcomed, as confusion always is in Dyer’s work, as closer to the truth than clarity.
Dyer – born to working-class parents in 1958 – grew up in Cheltenham, in an England still shaped at all levels of experience by the war. Cataloguing his toy guns, Dyer notes that “Everything which is wartime had been metal was, in our version, remoulded in plastic” – and this is also an account of the England of the 1960s. “Airfix offered a complete childhood vision of war on land, sea, and air,” he writes; the model kits “represented in miniature a much larger process of reproduction and representation of war that dominated our childhood.”
Homework – the title evoking school but also the basic dialectic of working-class life at that time – follows the course of maturity itself by starting with toys and taking gradual cognisance of parents. Dyer’s father served in India during the second World War but never spoke about it; in Dyer’s account, the privations of wartime left his parents with a deep sense of secrecy, thrift and defeat, a kind of “subsistence existentialism”; they were “citizens of a psychological GDR”.
Dyer’s parents are movingly memorialised, here. But it is difficult not to feel that Dyer’s programmatic hedonism, in life and in art, is a refutation of his parents’ anhedonic thriftiness – and thus of the shadow of the war. In the book’s closing pages, Dyer discovers literature, studies hard, gets into Oxford, and begins the painful process of becoming something other than a postwar working-class kid from Cheltenham – a process that ends, of course, with him writing this book about being a postwar working-class kid from Cheltenham. Out of Sheer Nostalgia? No. More like Out of Sheer History.
