Another great book by Geoff Dyer

Coming from Geoff Dyer, the title of his latest book could be sardonic. Indeed, coming from Geoff Dyer,  Another Great Day at Sea could be exactly the opposite of what its title implies,  and what it is about could be just what it is not about. It’s certainly not about the catching of Moby Dick. Its subject is bigger than that. Nor is it a modern author’s  search for Conrad’s Lord Jim.  Yet like the most famous of all Dyer’s books  - Out of Sheer Rage, which was intended to be about DH Lawrence - it is certainly about something that won’t leave him alone.  His Lawrence book, it’s true, was about being unable to write a book about Lawrence, and the first impression you get of his new book is that it might be about the sea, or it might not.  Those who read everything Dyer writes, as I do, must guess what he is likely or unlikely to give them.

Another Great Day at Sea is in fact about the spell Dyer spent as a writer in residence on board the biggest ship in the world, the aircraft carrier USS George Bush, half a mile long, a vast floating pantechnicon on constant patrol of the Gulf, more crowded than a cruise ship, amd where most of its 5000 crew have to squeeze themselves at night  into “six-pack” bunks, separated from each other by curtains, as in the sleeping car containing Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

Once on board, Dyer thinks he is within his rights to demand  his own cabin where he can sleep and write in peace. His request is granted, though the only available room is right below the flight deck where the constant howl of jets  landing and taking off throughout the night is the price he must pay for it.   It’s the sort of situation in which he was bound to find himself, and he survives it by wearing a cranium protector, or by visiting the carrier’s chapel, despite his atheistic tendencies,  to hear hauntingly soaring hymns, or by crouching on deck in the expectation that a plane might chop off his head, as happened to someone in Catch 22. He describes the food (inedible) and discovers that there is  a token Starbucks on board, though he knows that this is not the vessel in which he might track down the perfect doughnut and perfect cup of coffee - a topic to which he devotes a wonderfully obsessed essay in a previous book. 

It turns out that the words “Another great day at sea” are a pronouncement by the captain, with modest but fascinating variations, in a daily broadcast to the crew. Dyer found it deeply moving, as I myself did when, during my RAF  days,  General Grunther similarly greeted everybody at SHAPE in Paris. What is it about the Americans, even when they are manning the most formidable man o’ war? 

The question could be the title of another book, but this one is beautifully written and unimprovable, especially in its pristine big-size format, wonderfully illustrated and edited, which puts the much cheaper, if handier, kindle version inevitably in the shade. Yet the book is not dependent on its large-scale design.  The writing is what matters, and the story is as intimate in its way as Alain de Botton’s study of Heathrow,  A Week at the Airport, which in some respects it delightfully resembles.

25 June 2014