FICTION: Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi By Geoff DyerCanongate, 296pp. £12.99
JEFF IN Venice, Death In Varanasiis a novel comprised of two entirely unrelated sections, the first an account of journalist Jeff Atman's booze and coke-fueled junket to an art event in Venice, the second a pilgrimage to the banks of the Ganges.
Atman is a profoundly unlikeable creation. Not magnetically reprehensible in the Raskolnikov/Bickle/Bateman sense, but repugnant in his blasé attitude to art and work, his spoiled westerner’s sense of entitlement, his condescending attitude to non-English speaking cultures, and his juvenile attitude to partying:
“Wow, Jeff was thinking to himself, this is not just the drug scene, this is the yacht scene. Im part of the drug-yacht scene! And what a great scene it was to be part of.”
This is not gonzo. Atman is a snob who complains about the quality of coffee in restaurants, mocks the accents of the locals, and makes ungallant remarks about the 1960s starlet he’s been sent to interview (the only well-drawn supporting character in the book, halfway between Jane Birkin and Marianne Faithfull).
He’s also a bore:
"Jeff had proved remarkably constant in his preferences. Hed liked drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and chasing after women who – another sign of constancy – ideally, were not too much older, now, than when he'd first started doing so. In recent years a bit more time was spent at home, zonked out in front of the TV, but that wasnt something he wantedto do, that was just recovery time. On occasions he was bored rigid by his idea of a good time, but nothing had come near to displacing or replacing it. And he'd never got to the stage or gone through the phase of being passionate about his work except in so far as he had always been passionately averse to it."
To which we can only respond: bring back National Service. This guy cares for little and is grateful for less, except, that is, the Californian gallery worker on whom he develops a puppydog crush. Cue a series of sexual encounters so incongruous they read like they’ve been cut-and-pasted from another book. When the affair comes to its inevitable end, Atman feels bereft, or maybe just hungover. Presumably this is the author’s shot at humanising his creation. Too little too late. By then he’s beyond redemption.
Throughout Jeff In Venice,the reader gets the feeling that Geoff Dyer would really rather be writing a non-fiction book or a think-piece than a novel. His prose style is yappy, uneven and in need of compression. He eschews character development and story structure in favour of the inner monologues of a middle-aged male riffing on pop culture in-jokes and zeitgeisty product placements.
Granted, the language is denser and more colourful in the second half, and if Death In Varanasireads more like a travel feature than fiction (or, in its more trying moments, 130 pages of holiday snaps in search of a plot), it also manages to effectively convey the crazy clamour of India.
Dyer is certainly capable of beautiful passages: “Lolly-pink, a temple pointed skywards like a rocket whose launch, delayed by centuries, was still believed possible, even imminent, by the Brahmins lounging in the warm shade of mushroom umbrellas” – but also David Brent-level lapses of taste, where his flippant, quippy tone clangs against the deeply unfunny subject matter, equating “Sadhu” with “saddo” and so on. One waits for a moment of enlightenment to illuminate the expedition, but it never comes.
On reading the glowing jacket endorsements from Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje and William Boyd, the reviewer is left to wonder if he's misread the entire enterpise, and the book is actually an F Scott-like fable of the beautiful and the damned, or a satire on the journalist as cultural tourist. But the best satirists, from Swift to Bierce to Saunders, always carry a big stick in the form of a governing moral conscience. Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasihas no such saving grace.
Peter Murphy is a novelist and journalist. His novel John the Revelatorwas published earlier this year by Faber