MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Geoff Dyer We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE MISSING OF THE SOMME by Geoff Dyer /2011/the-missing-of-the-somme-by-geoff-dyer/ /2011/the-missing-of-the-somme-by-geoff-dyer/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:51:29 +0000 /?p=20132 Book Quote:

“And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled A WAR MEMORIAL, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance…”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew  AUG 15, 2011)

When I first read just the title of this book — The Missing of the Somme — I thought perhaps it was an historical novel about World War I, or possibly a linear history of some of the men who had never come home from the fields of battle. Then, reading the Vintage description of Geoff Dyer’s slim volume, I banished those ideas in favor of curiosity about a work that “weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and film, poetry and sculptures, graveyards, and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.” Did Dyer ably marry these diverse elements and create a memorable contribution to WWI literature?

Just as Dyer noted above, he wrote an essay of 130 pages. No real chapters, just double-spaced breaks with italicized headings as he transits from one related theme to another. To make his points the author cites numerous quotations from Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Isherwood and others. Photos of statues and stone war memorials, including the two massive white pylons of the Vimy Ridge Canadian tribute to 11,285 native sons who were counted as “missing,” scatter the text. Dyer also compares a desolate painting by Caspar David Friedrich with a photograph of a bombed wasteland; in each one man stands as if he were the last human being on earth.

The British author links himself in with his forebears…in particular his grandfather who enlisted in 1914 and served as a driver of horse-drawn vehicles on the Somme but who fortunately lived to the age of 91 instead of falling and never again rising from the blood-soaked earth. Dyer proposes that his grandfather’s contemporaries embraced an ideal that made “a virtue of calamity” and dressed up “incompetence as heroism,” as exemplified earlier by the failed Scott expedition to the South Pole and then by the unbelievable loss of life in the trenches of the war. Of course, this blind zeal to sacrifice millions of their people to a stalemate war wasn’t only Britain’s fault. All the participant European nations were just as guilty and subjected their own young men to suffering unspeakable horrors and mass extermination. Once the armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, those living sought a way to remember, but not remember. “Then as now the official idiom of Remembrance stressed not so much victory or patriotic triumph as Sacrifice. Sacrifice may have been a euphemism for slaughter but, either way, the significance of victory was overwhelmed by the human cost of achieving it.”

So, Europe set about building vast cemeteries for those who could be identified and for those who were “missing” or unidentifiable. Dyer and three companions visited the Western Front/Somme and he expressed his thoughts about them. For instance, although this essay is not focused on the German experience during WWI, Dyer saw the German cemetery at Langemark where 25,000 men lie and observed: “There is no colour here, no flowers, nothing transcendent. The dead as individuals hardly matter; only as elements of the nation. There are no individual inscriptions, no rhetoric. Only the unadorned facts of mortality — and even these are reduced to a bare, bleak minimum. This is the meaning and consequence of defeat.”

Dyer’s group also paid respects at the French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette where 45,000 named and unnamed are honored. Pressing onward to three “tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge,” they then viewed the aforementioned Vimy Ridge where the Canadian missing Great War soldiers’ names are all engraved. The allies, the victors, made a conscious decision to record for posterity the names of all the confirmed dead and the missing.

This pilgrimage of Dyer’s actually took place in the early 1990’s (this Vintage edition is a reprint; the first edition was copyrighted in 1994) and was not the only one he embarked upon. He visited many memorial sites, including Thiepval where there were names of his own family on the markers. About that place he wrote, “For many men who survived, the Battle of the Somme (which, in memory, represents the core experience and expression of the Great War) put an end to the consoling power of religion….In some ways, then, the Thiepval Memorial is a memorial if not to the death, then certainly to the superfluousness of God.” The carnage, the disposability of humanity shattered many and crushed their hope and faith. Belief in God unquestionably decreased in the Western World the Twentieth Century, due to various factors including the self-destructive wars. Human beings tend to ask why an omnipotent Being would allow such wholesale death, not remembering that wars have a human cause.

“For the first time in history the Great War resulted in a sense of the utter waste and futility of war” insists Dyer. This statement is perhaps too absolute because surely earlier wars must have instilled similar feelings in those who suffered in them. However, the sheer scale of this war did set it apart from earlier conflicts. Unfortunately, even with the determined observance of Armistice Day (with two minutes absolute silence and a complete stop of movement in the U.K.) and the design and building of myriad memorials to remind the coming generations that the true costs of war are unbearable, World War II began just two decades later. The war that was supposed to end all wars did nothing of the kind, perhaps because new generations, even if born into a world of remembrance, can’t truly grasp suffering they have not endured.

Dyer’s impressions of the sites are always vital and full of insights, but the somber travelogue represents a relatively small percentage of the essay. The author’s ruminations are more broad-based. His fine, point-laden prose touches on so many aspects of memorializing the Great War. He teaches history, sociology, philosophy, and art appreciation, among other things. But mostly, he reminds himself and his readers that no matter what human beings do after a devastating war, the real lesson learned should be: don’t do it (go to war) because the losses outweigh the gains. Yet, human beings are not likely to take heed, and so there will be more military cemeteries with interred soldiers who gave their lives for some cause or demand.

And perhaps because these soldiers died prematurely, unfairly, violently, it is best to do what Dyer wrote about a register of graves and its elusive truths of the war dead: “I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed.” Among those graves he wrote he’d never felt “so peaceful” and wondered “if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium…which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace.”

The Missing of the Somme tenders a unique and affecting meditation on war and its remembrance. I recommend this essay highly.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Original edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia on Geoff Dyer
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction

]]> /2011/the-missing-of-the-somme-by-geoff-dyer/feed/ 1 JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI by Geoff Dyer /2009/jeff-in-venice-death-in-varanasi-by-geoff-dyer/ /2009/jeff-in-venice-death-in-varanasi-by-geoff-dyer/#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:50:51 +0000 /?p=4327 Book Quote:

“Everything began as a joke–or some things did anyway–but not everything ended as one.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (AUG 22, 2009)

The main character of this novel, Jeff Attman, is a globe trotting art critic and journalist. But he hates his job, even hates writing, which can pose a problem for a print journalist. He keeps at it because it affords him the opportunity to use an expense account to do what he really loves: drink, take recreational drugs, chase women, drink more, occasionally exercise his rapier wit, use more drugs. You get the idea. He is fun loving and intelligent. He is a kick, the type of guy whose company you would probably enjoy, albeit in limited measures.

We follow Attman from London to Venice, where he is attending the city’s annual art festival, the Biennale. He is there on assignment for the art magazine Kulchure. He is to write an interview, take a picture of his subject and ask to borrow a drawing made of her by a former lover. He gets the interview, but fails at the other duties, which gives rise to self loathing and frustration. He simply hates everything, but for the aforementioned activities. And he hates himself. He feels that he has wrung his life dry. “It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.” He is, as we say, simply going through the motions.

It is critical to understand the importance of his name, Attman. Atman, with one t, in Hindu philosophy is the name, the pronoun, for the essential self, the core of being. Atman, the pronoun, survives death and transmigrates to a new life. Attman, the noun, our man Jeff, is exhausted by his lifestyle, his work, his play and ultimately his own core being. This is important, because book two, Death in Varanasi, later finds our hero on the Ganges, as an individual undergoing a transformation. But let’s not rush out of Venice just yet.

Central to the story-telling of Jeff in Venice, is a wonderful cat and mouse romance between Jeff and a woman he meets at a Biennale party, Laura Freeman, a gallery manager. He falls for her instantly, and finds himself uncharacteristically stymied and dumbstruck: “A voice in his head was saying, Act normal, act normal, say something normal. Don’t act like a nutter.” They banter and it is fun:

“It’s a great dress,” he said. “But, frankly, it wouldn’t be anything without the shoulders. And most importantly of all…the collarbones.”

“Well, thank you again.” He had spoken honestly. Her shoulders were not wide; they were bony but strong-looking.

“I suppose I should return the compliment.”

“Please. Don’t feel you have to.”

“No, I want to. I really do.”

“Ok. Maybe the shirt.” He held out his arms, a gesture that was part display and part shrug.

“It is a nice shirt.”

“Thank you. Look, I know I had to drag that out of you, but, well, it’s my favorite shirt. I feel it’s so…”

“Blue?”

“No.”

“Wrinkled?”

“No. Though I admit I could have folded and packed it more carefully. No, the word I was looking for was ‘manly.’ Sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. You were right on the brink of getting it anyway.”

“Was I?” I thought I was going to say ‘cheap-looking.’”

We are happy for Jeff. He and Laura make such a nice couple. And they have ever so much fun having sex together, taking drugs and getting drunk, all of Jeff’s favorite sports. We keep waiting for the shoe to drop, for something to come along and mess everything up. A spouse, or work, a deception, anything–but it never does. They are a happy couple, genuinely–though not committed. And by the end of the Biennale, Laura is off to lands unknown. She is going to quit her gallery job and see the world. “The places everyone goes. South-East Asia. India.” At the end of Jeff in Venice, our hapless soul-searching journalist-critic is broken-hearted and desolate. He is empty. Jeff in Venice ends.

Then the story picks up again, an undisclosed amount of time later (one gets the sense it has been while), in India, in Varanasi, at the turn of the Ganges, where everything spiritual is reputed to have congealed. “Varanasi made going anywhere else seem nonsensical. All of time was here, and probably all of space too. The city was a mandala, a cosmogram. It contained the cosmos.”

The story changes voices. No longer do we have a narrator telling us what Jeff is doing; rather, he is driving now–first person narration–and informing us directly. This is important, as Death in Varanasi is all about that core being, Atman, of which only Jeff can convincingly inform.

Varanasi. He stays. In Jeff in Venice he dyes his hair, looking for an edge, a more youthful look (he is 45). In Death in Varanasi he cuts it, his hair, except for “a little pigtail at the back of the head, as I had seen on mourners.” And a bit later, he confesses, “I am mourning for myself.” Our hero, and indeed he now is one, having realized and striven to overcome his deficiencies and shortcomings, is on a path which will render his former self dead–thus the title–and deliver up a transformative being.

The second book gives us a depth of character in Jeff that is not readily apparent in book one. Yes, we recognize the Jeff of Venice to be sharp as a tack and funny. But we don’t realize the vacancy of being he is subject to. Nor do we have an appreciation of his ability to self reflect until he makes his way to Varanasi. There, we find him transformed from his previous Venetian self. “I didn’t renounce the world; I just became less interested in certain aspects of it, less involved with it…” I found the two books–or sections–simultaneously at odds, yet complimentary. The traditional reader in me wanted more of a narrative connection between the two; but the reader risk-taker liked the gap, as Dyer himself calls it. It was jazz-like, a riff where you know there is a connection, but can’t put your finger on it. Dyer said in an interview of the narrative distance between the two books: “Instead of papering over the gap, I’d accentuate it, make the two parts completely distinct. Instead of trying to make the narrative rope thicker and stronger, I’d just have these tiny, almost invisible filaments linking the sections, all these little echoes, chimes and rhymes.” It succeeded wonderfully in this fashion.

There is a quality to this story which I find immensely refreshing, a manner of spirit in the telling that gives one confidence and hope. It is not a stretch to say it makes one think that this is what Dostoyevsky would have written like had he actually had a good day. This is a wonderful book. A great and edifying story well told.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 76 readers
PUBLISHER: Pantheon (April 7, 2009)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Geoff Dyer
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

The Missing of the Somme

Others to check out:

 

And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Raymond + Hannah by Stephen Marche

The Story of My Baldness by Marke van der Jagt

Bibliography:

Nonfiction

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