Homework by Geoff Dyer review – coming of age in 70s England
Droll, erudite, digressive, self-deprecating, laid-back rather than standup in his humour – the Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakable. In his new book he says he's 'most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback, an educationally enhanced version of something that still [comes] under the broad conversational church-pub known as banter'. You can hear the banter in the title of his 2003 book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.
Banter's trickier with a childhood memoir. If you were relatively happy growing up, as he was, in Cheltenham, the only child of parents who loved him, and you want to be honest about your upbringing, then you can't muck about too much. Dyer's humour has never precluded seriousness – about jazz, film, photographs, paintings, DH Lawrence and much besides. But as the title suggests, Homework is a duty in earnest, a task he's compelled (if only by himself) to complete.
As a book about beginnings, it's also chronological, moving from infancy at the end of the 50s to his arrival at Oxford as an undergraduate. Straight-line narration isn't Dyeresque: telling the story of the early years means breaking with the late style he used so winningly in his 2002 book about endings, The Last Days of Roger Federer, which was arranged in numbered sections. A nonfiction Bildungsroman is more of a challenge. It's a while before he hits his stride.
To outsiders Cheltenham sounds posh, but the end-of-terrace house he grew up in was a modest two-up, two-down. His father worked as an aircraft engineer; he'd been in India during the war but after that his only trip was on a coach to France in his 70s. He had no time for royals or religion and hated spending money: if petrol was needed for the car, a sky-blue Vauxhall Victor, he'd only half-fill the tank. Life meant the allotment and submission to his lot. 'I was home-schooled in notions of acceptance I later found entirely unacceptable,' Dyer says, rejecting the 'subsistence existentialism', to which his mother also adhered. Born on a farm in Shropshire, she'd have liked to be a seamstress but worked in the school canteen and as a cleaner.
Toy soldiers, conker fights, fizzy drinks, Wall's ice-creams, chicken-in-a-basket pub lunches, swimming lessons (plus verrucas), trips in the family car to see relations, programmes on the black-and-white telly: his recall of period detail and brand names is exceptional. Perhaps it's an only-child thing or that the re-discovery of two boxes of small, semi-educational cards (the kind that came with tea and cigarette packets) has helped him access his past. As a boy he was an avid collector and as a writer he's the same: back then he'd be completing a card sequence or building an Airfix model, now it's 'the process of compiling and organising the work you are holding in your hand.'
As he documents childhood minutiae, Dyer moves slowly. With half the book gone he's still finishing primary school. Then comes the 11-plus, which he passes ('the most momentous event in my life, not simply up to that point but for its duration') and embarks on the path that will separate him from his parents. The clash he describes, between a boy's growing desire to be 'with it' and his parents' dour commitment to 'go without', is one all boomers will recognise, especially those of us brought up in the provinces. He quotes the poet Tony Harrison on how 'books, books, books' create a chasm. His parents were tolerant of him as a 'less than nice adolescent' but what he thought, felt and experienced became increasingly 'incommunicable' to them. He is, he says, 'a grammar‑school boy through and through to the core of my being'. He means it proudly.
As a high achiever at school, he wasn't much of a rebel and has few dramas or traumas to report. There's a scary ride on his racing bike and the occasional near fight, but more often it's the teenage boredom of having 'nowhere to go' and the problem of how to meet girls. His collecting urge moves on to Athena posters and LPs. Then things pick up – and the humour does too. He has sex (in those days, for a boy, a matter of 'resistance overcome by negotiation and sleight of hand'), becomes a boozer ('men with huge guts were almost role models'), and gets a Saturday job in a shop selling Airfix kits ('I became a born-again modeller'). More eventfully, he's part of a crowd that goes on a post-pub rampage; through ill-fortune – his shoe-print is found on one of the cars they clambered over – he's the only culprit charged and fined, an episode that leaves him feeling the shame of a loser who, on the verge of going to Oxford, has let his parents down.
Here and there he holds stuff back, like the nickname he was given at school ('I hated mine so much that I won't even repeat it here') or the reason he was taken to the GP about problems with his 'toy-oy', his father's name for the penis. But he doesn't spare himself embarrassment, whether it's failure to inherit his father's craft skills (he describes himself as a 'wildly impatient, cost-cutting, tantrum-prone bodger') or the night he locks his parents out of the house after a heated row. 'Presenting myself in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the last 30 years,' he says, but he takes care with others. Some of the names here have been changed.
What does make him feel guilty of betrayal ('nothing has ever been more painful for me to write about') is telling the story of his mother's horrendous birthmark, which stretched from her left shoulder to her left hand; surgery in her 20s removed it up to the elbow but she couldn't bear a second operation to remove the rest. Dyer leaves this revelation until late on in the book but as he says, sympathetically, it explains so much about his mother: her privacy, powerlessness and lack of self-worth. His portrayal of his father is no less affectionate: his feeling of being 'hard done by' was wearisome and 'yes, he was unbelievably tight but he was also and always, at the deepest level, honourable'.
Dyer worries that the book will read 'like the biography of someone who went on to become a minor British painter best known for seascapes'' or 'the memoir of a forgotten jazz man'. He wouldn't want it to be just another Gloucestershire childhood memoir, either, in the shadow of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie or Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills. What lifts it beyond routine reminiscence (and makes the excess of cigarette cards and Airfix kits more bearable) is its evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms while still recovering from the privations of the 1930s and 40s. The grown-up, cosmopolitan Dyer doesn't miss the place yet he does, intensely: 'England, my England: that has felt mine more than ever, since I've been living where I've always dreamed of being, in California, where I'll never feel at home.'
Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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