What do Beethoven, D.H. Lawrence and George Best have in common?

This is not a book about tennis. Roger Federer appears early on, trailed by the obligatory question ‘When will he retire?’ He figures more prominently in the final 80 pages – still looking, despite the imminence of hanging up his racquet, as if he moves ‘within a different, more accommodating dimension of time’. There are cameos from some of the game’s other stars at various points on the way to the exit: the young Bjorn Borg (‘heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise’), the often crocked Andy Murray (‘a mumble-core Hamlet’) and the middle-aged, disgraced Boris Becker (afflicted by a ‘hitherto unseen condition called testicular elbow’). But the title is a characteristic act of wrong-footing. Although Geoff Dyer may love watching and writing about tennis, as well as biffing forehands, his favourite sport is playing the fool, presenting himself as a lazy flâneur, or guileless pilgrim, while actually engaged in self-examination and cultural critique.

The meat of The Last Days of Roger Federer is those ‘other endings’. Some are personal to Dyer: his final trip to the Burning Man festival; a related suspicion that he suffers from ‘a tendency to do things one time too many’; the feeling that in his sixties he has ‘drifted to the fringes of the sexual marketplace’. Others are contemplated at a distance: Bob Dylan’s interminable farewell tour; Nietzsche’s descent into madness; the dwindling of certain art forms; the retirement of George Best (‘It was the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing something they loved’). Yet in truth the distance is never great. Just as Dyer can’t write about himself without mentioning the artists who’ve distracted him from self-involvement, so he can’t write about other people without describing what it is to catch himself observing them.