Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes.
Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal exegesis of Stalker, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece). He skilfully dismantles conventional boundaries between the subject and the self, between artist and critic, forever restlessly inquiring into the nature of literary form and identity… Basically, Geoff Dyer went and did it. He got there first: modest, funny, clever, inventive. He is the deracinated writer’s deracinated writer.
And now he’s done it again with Homework, which is a memoir about growing up in post-war England and is exactly the kind of memoir just about anyone who grew up in post-war England might want to write. Born in 1958 and brought up in Cheltenham, Dyer’s was an archetypal mid-to-late-20th-century English childhood. Two up, two down? Check. Outside toilet? Check. Mum a dinner lady? Check. Dad a manual worker? Check. Odd and interesting aunts and uncles? Check. Fond memories of playing war with your friends on the estate? Check. And Airfix models, comics, bubblegum cards, conkers, the little drinks cabinet with drinks that no one drank, Robinson Crusoe on the telly, the corner shops, the tinkers and blade sharpeners who used to come to the door, verrucas, the buzzer in the doctor’s surgery, Action Man, heaped spoons of sugar in your tea and coffee? Check, check, check, check. It’s all there.
And all perhaps a little bit boilerplate: file under Standard British Childhood Memoir. It reads rather like the reminiscences you might hear from a weary centrist dad-type DJ on Radio 6 Music struggling to come up with a filler between a track that’s a trip down memory lane and a track from an exciting new indie band who sound quite like the band you just heard back down memory lane; or in a tired stand-up routine by a comic who frankly could do better and who doesn’t fill stadiums for a reason. Dyer’s childhood memories are interesting but generic – could have been me, could have been you, could have been anyone else equipped with a childhood in post-war England. Big whoop.
Until about halfway through the book, that is, when Dyer sits the 11-plus, at which point, of course, everything changes. Dyer writes: ‘This was the most momentous event of my life, not simply up to that point but for its duration. Everything else that has happened couldn’t have happened were it not for that.’ He’s not wrong. The 11-plus – for which the homework in Homework has been done – is when it gets personal: ‘I am a pure product of grammar school, a grammar-school boy through and through, to the core of my being.’
Suddenly it all adds up. Everything comes into sharper focus. The book moves from vaguely amusing and entertaining social history into a deeply personal narrative. You start to see the lineaments of the adult Dyer emerge: the intellectual confidence and the breadth of reference, from literature and visual art to sport, cinema and music; the narrative self-awareness; the laconic comic timing; the air of self-deprecation and scepticism; the ease; and the ever so slight discomfort. He has Cheltenham Grammar School to thank for it all. He goes to Oxford. He now lives in California. He’s Geoff Bloody Dyer.
Everything’s good – and yet. Homework is an unashamed celebration of the opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement, which set the stage for a privileged life of creative exploration and intellectual endeavour. But it is also a quiet acknowledgment of what he left behind. Which was the world of his parents.
Keen readers of Dyer’s work will have encountered his parents before – and the characteristic humour and tenderness with which he writes about them. But with both of them now dead, Homework acts as a kind of retrospective appreciation of their many qualities, brought into sharp relief. Of his dad, he writes:
His capacity for the experience and expression of feeling hard done by were, in the end, his only weapons and they were, by definition, almost worthless… It’s not as if he had great expectations that were thwarted. No, his hopes and expectations were meagre at the outset, and yet he was, with a few exceptions – a 10 per cent discount here, a free Wall’s choc-ice there – disappointed even in these.
And of his mum:
People talk quite readily of an inferiority complex but in my mum’s case there was nothing complex about it. It was horribly simple. Where could esteem, a sense of self-worth come from? That was simple too. Kindness, unfailing honesty and reliability: true refinement. And being good with her hands – but not so good she could become a seamstress.
They’d have been rightly quietly proud of Geoff’s Homework. He’s a very clever boy. He’s done very well. He was bloody lucky.
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