Hack of darkness

Geoff Dyer turns junket journalism into art in
his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

by JULIET WATERS

About five years ago, I read Geoff Dyer’s Yoga For People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, a collection of travel essays that meanders through New Orleans, Libya, Italy, Cambodia, Detroit and Burning Man, to name only a partial list of destinations. I still smile wistfully when I remember Dyer’s description of losing his way in Amsterdam, too high on mushrooms to negotiate a successful trip to the bathroom, let alone find his way back to his hotel. And I still feel like this story happened to me, or one of my friends.

Dyer writes travel fiction in a charming, contemplative, highly entertaining voice you’d like to believe would be yours if you were living his life. Self-aware, and only sometimes self-indulgent, insightful and almost never condescending, Dyer seems to have somehow escaped all the excesses, bad and good, that befall travel writers. He’s no misanthropic, self-destructive gonzo. But while he remains endlessly fascinated by spiritual pilgrimages, he remains stubbornly resistant to them. Despite what seems to be extensive travel along the hippy trails of Asia, when Dyer, or one of his alter egos, claims to have never meditated, you believe it.

Loosely autobiographical, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is the story of Jeff Atman, or “junket Jeff” as his frenemy journalists call him. According to the acknowledgements, Dyer was married when he travelled to Venice and India, the two settings of this book. That fact alone makes it impossible to think of Jeff as a mere avatar. The protagonist of this book is recently divorced and reads more like what Dyer thinks he might have become had he continued to drift through life offering up his keen insight, education and wit for easy hire.

The first half of the novel takes place at the Biennale, the most prestigious annual art show/ cocktail party on earth. A high-end London magazine has sent Jeff. But while he has some obvious critical and literary abilities, Jeff is going through a chronic case of writer’s block. He knows he can deliver something readable, but every word he pushes out has become an effort. Not surprisingly, he falls easily in love with a young American woman, and spends much of the trip snorting coke while drinking about a bathtub worth of Bellinis. All this would read like high culture hackery if Dyer weren’t also able to convey what a poignant waste of a brain Jeff is. It’s impossible not to care about this lovely mind so in danger of drifting into oblivion. Jeff believes “it’s possible to be a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time.” Dyer makes us believe this as well.

In the second half of the book Jeff extends another high-end junket to Varanasi India into an indefinite stay at The Ganges View, a hotel with a glamour that seems at once homey and haunted. Page after page of mesmerizing anecdotes about this dark city of pilgrimage drift by like offerings, both sacred and slightly rotting. Dogs gnaw on dead bodies thrown into the river, and freakish deformities are so commonplace that a man carrying his swollen testicles around in a wheelbarrow seems only mildly bizarre.

What begins to feel like an infinite but repetitive cast of characters stay and leave the hotel as Jeff falls ill and seems dangerously close to becoming one of the corpses that is ritualistically dipped into the Ganges. One waits for the moment of recovery and epiphany that will send Jeff back to the West. There’s a formula to this sort of novel, isn’t there?

Apparently not. To reveal the ending would be a sin against writing. But Jeff in Venice has me already planning my next summer vacation. Not to Venice, or India, or any of the places Dyer visits in his travel fiction. Right now my ultimate vacation is looking like a couple of weeks, happy and safe in my own home, just re-reading Dyer’s books.

JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI
BY GEOFF DYER, CANONGATE,
PB, 291 PP. $25