Reading, or re-reading, Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme is as good a way as any, and probably better than most, of preparing yourself for this year’s Edinburgh Festival, with its emphasis on memories of war that range from the edgy intensity of Britten’s War Requiem at the Usher Hall to the potential nostalgia of Bal Moderne, a choreographed evocation of the songs and dances of wartime Europe, which will be be presented for three afternoons at the Hub and is described as an “immersive” experience where the audience will be given an opportunity to dress up in period clothes and join the performers in a programme devoted to wartime popular entertainment.
Though the latter seems a long way from the stinking trenches of the Somme, it perhaps comes closer to the Dyer we know than the beautiful, elegiac, melancholy book he wrote in 1994 about what he prefers to call the Great War rather than (less emotively) the First World War. But the point about Dyer is that he is the sharpest of observers - of anything from Tarkovsky’s gaunt Russian film entitled Stalker, out of which in 2012 he drew his substantial book called Zona, characteristically subtitled A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, to his superb collection of essays, dating from 2903, about Thailand, France, Libya, and Italy, subversively entitled Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.
Dyer is famed for his polished flippancy, beneath which lies something often darker and, at times, quite disturbing. It’s the darker side of Dyer that emerges, without the flippancy, in The Missing of the Somme, but his keen-eyed watchfulness (which can be serious as well as funny) and interest in relics - ruins, graves and, in this case, the architecture of cenotaphs - are fully evident.
Twenty years on, the book continues to gleam amid the welter of centenary studies of the Great War that publishers have been battering us with, because it is so elegantly as well as movingly written and, like most of Dyer, is an impeccable model of style. Though the comedy - which, in his latest book, derives from two weeks spent on board an oppressive American aircraft carrier patrolling the Gulf - is inevitably missing, it is not missed. And even the new book ends with a night of total emptiness - nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to enjoy - in Bahrain.Its effect is like that of the finale of Vaughan Williams’s otherwise intimidating Symphony No 6.
7 July 2014
Though the latter seems a long way from the stinking trenches of the Somme, it perhaps comes closer to the Dyer we know than the beautiful, elegiac, melancholy book he wrote in 1994 about what he prefers to call the Great War rather than (less emotively) the First World War. But the point about Dyer is that he is the sharpest of observers - of anything from Tarkovsky’s gaunt Russian film entitled Stalker, out of which in 2012 he drew his substantial book called Zona, characteristically subtitled A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, to his superb collection of essays, dating from 2903, about Thailand, France, Libya, and Italy, subversively entitled Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.
Dyer is famed for his polished flippancy, beneath which lies something often darker and, at times, quite disturbing. It’s the darker side of Dyer that emerges, without the flippancy, in The Missing of the Somme, but his keen-eyed watchfulness (which can be serious as well as funny) and interest in relics - ruins, graves and, in this case, the architecture of cenotaphs - are fully evident.
Twenty years on, the book continues to gleam amid the welter of centenary studies of the Great War that publishers have been battering us with, because it is so elegantly as well as movingly written and, like most of Dyer, is an impeccable model of style. Though the comedy - which, in his latest book, derives from two weeks spent on board an oppressive American aircraft carrier patrolling the Gulf - is inevitably missing, it is not missed. And even the new book ends with a night of total emptiness - nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to enjoy - in Bahrain.Its effect is like that of the finale of Vaughan Williams’s otherwise intimidating Symphony No 6.
7 July 2014
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