Rave reviews are rare creatures in the mealymouthed world of publishing, but for Geoff Dyer they are becoming commonplace - the paperback editions of But Beautiful and Out Of Sheer Rage - re-issued to coincide with a new novel Paris, Trance - are plastered with them. All three books are entirely different: Out Of Sheer Rage is a mischievous masquerade, built around a literary biography of D.H. Lawrence; Paris, Trance, is a reworking of Tender Is The Night for the Ecstasy generation; and But Beautiful is a book about 1950s jazz musicians that through a complex interplay of mood, narrative and rhythm (like the music they played) transcends its form and delivers a masterly evocation of jazz itself.
Dyer, 39, and six foot three, has the look of a new-age monk. His head is a grizzled five-o'clock shadow beyond shaved, a tracksuit cowl sits around his neck and from within the stretched parchment of his face, blue eyes glitter with Messianic intensity as we discuss the relationship of fiction and reality amid the clatter and bustle of Brixton market. Suddenly, an old man shambles towards our pavement table, wagging his finger: "Don't tell lies, tell the truth," he exhorts, the words spilling out between nicotine-stained teeth.
Dyer is as if electrified. It is, he says "a Wordsworthian encounter. The leech gatherer admonishing me" and he hopes this "great fictive moment" will be incorporated into the finished interview. I need no encouragement, because it is precisely such moments - bizarre, unexpected and yet utterly right - that drive Dyer's writing. Not for him the nine-to-five "bashing it out day after day like Roth or Updike". "In order to write I have to experience things, to be at the mercy of my existence."
Geoff Dyer's references as we speak are largely American, yet he is entirely English, a bright boy from a working-class family who made it to Oxford via the classic route of an inspirational English teacher at his grammar school who encouraged him to read beyond the exam curriculum. ("Kerouac, Salinger, Joseph Heller and then Lawrence of course") An only child, Dyer discovered books when he was 13 and the first novels he read were by Alastair Maclean. "He said somewhere that before he wrote a book he always knew the story absolutely - so I thought, `Oh that means I can never be a writer because I can never think of plots'."
The concerns of serious writers he later went on to - character and motivation - also left him stranded. "It wasn't till I left university and read Roland Barthes, and crucially John Berger, that this other way of writing became available to me, which was reasonably imaginative, wasn't just sort of boring criticism. It was writing which collapsed the distinction between the critical and creative, the primary and the secondary. And I thought, `Oh God, I could do this'. Berger gave me the confidence really to think that you could write about anything if you were interested in it. When I was writing the jazz book I really didn't know much about it, except that I liked it."
All of which makes the extraordinary But Beautiful even more extraordinary, as in addition to literary plaudits (it won the Somerset Maugham Prize) it has been hailed as a masterpiece by jazz musicians themselves, on both sides of the Atlantic. "The general point that emerges from this is that it's not what you know, it's what your passion gives you the capacity to discover. If I'd waited till I knew enough about jazz to write the book I wouldn't have been interested enough. And when I finished the jazz book I got lots of offers to write about jazz, but of course I didn't have any interest. I have immatured with age. Techno is now my great passion."
Each of his books, Dyer says, charts a journey of discovery. Take Out Of Sheer Rage, the "biography" of D.H. Lawrence. (The title is taken from Lawrence himself referring to his difficulty in writing a biography of Thomas Hardy.)
The reader arrives at an understanding of Lawrence's irascible, indecisive and self-indulgent character through the irascible indecisive and self-indulgent voice of the biographer - a process of osmosis rather than any digestion of scholarship, a mosaic of serendipitous parallels. Whether they are fictional or real is beside the point. Some are, some aren't. "The `I' in that book isn't me. The `I' is a narrator. And one aspect of me - the indecisive, irritable me - is exacerbated. It becomes 90 per cent of the narrator's personality whereas it is only 10 per cent of me. It's like Roth's Zuckerman stuff. Roth isn't Zuckerman."
Another journey of discovery was The Missing Of The Somme (reprinting next year), the result of taking a train to escape the Paris heat one baking summer to visit the first World War cemeteries.
`It was one of the most intense experiences of my life and I thought `Oh God, what drew me here?' So then I had to do back into my childhood, when this word, `Somme', would be there in my family with all its incredible resonance, and doing Wilfred Owen at school, all that stuff and also crucially what baggage did I bring with me - cultural, personal? The Somme was a typical experience for me.
"It's there, it's a place. For me an interest in history is almost always activated or centred on a place. The experience was the classic sort of thing you might write a poem about, but my impulse is always to articulate it in the form of an essay. And the first World War book is a weird meander of an essay. That's the thing: to essay something, to try something. The Lawrence book is crazier, yet the same kind of thing. The novelisation of material, all that `he said, she said' goes hand in hand with the straitjacketing of the material's potential."
The danger of straitjacketing, has not, however, prevented Dyer from attempting the more conventional "he said, she said" form of novel. Indeed his latest book, Paris, Trance is full of pingpong dialogue, as though he has used the straitjacket of form as an engine for creative energy. "One of the great books of the post war period is The Names by Don DeLillo and the dialogue there is so far out, there are no characters in the book, and he constructs these lovely essays in the form of dialogue. And there's no real difference between what's going on inside the inverted commas and what's going on outside. So I loved the idea of constructing these essays on film in the form of dialogue. And I did want to write a novel, with all the `he said, she said' stuff, but again with no story, though I was aware of this potential problem because if you don't have a plot, then other stuff has got to be going on." So it became the echo-chamber of Tender Is The Night ("a shrieking book"), reverberating to the rhythms and themes of Fitzgerald's classic of obsessional love, dissipation, selfdestruction.
Geoff Dyer has now seven books to his name, all - bar a study of his mentor John Berger - inhabiting the fertile set-aside that divides fact from fiction, all written with originality, wit and maverick lyricism. With a nod to Lawrence, perhaps, they are also sexually highly provocative. In Dyer's fictional (or not) worlds, sex is often used as an antidote to boredom, and boredom, he admits, is a factor in his never staying in one place - metaphorically or geographically - for very long. Next off the press (already written) is a book about an unsung American photographer William Gadney and a book of collected articles and essays.
And now? After living in Rome for several years he thinks he would like to write a book about antiquity. But he also likes the idea of living in Detroit. "I'm really interested in Detroit as a place because that's where Techno started. So I thought maybe I could write a book about Detroit and Rome together."
Geoff Dyer's new novel, Paris, Trance, is published by Abacus, price £11.70. The paperback editions ofBut Beautiful and Out Of Sheer Rage are being re-issued by Abacus and Littlebrown to coincide with a new novel