Tracey Emin at the 2007 Biennale

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi By Geoff Dyer, Random House, Rs 395

Geoff Dyer is well on his way to becoming a cult figure in Britain. He was born in Cheltenham in 1958 and after graduating in English literature from Oxford, it did not take him long to realize that keeping himself unemployed, together with a chronic capacity for laziness, boredom and “a huge, overwhelming sense of purposelessness”, could be the best combination for a life of prolific, intelligent, uncategorizable and serially obsessive creativity. His collection of short pieces is called Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures, 1984-98; both title and subtitle are important. In its sharpness, hilarity and deadpan greyness, his Anglo-Englishness is somewhat, although not entirely, in the line of Waugh, Connolly, Isherwood and the two Amises, Kingsley and Martin. Yet it strays restlessly across the Atlantic towards a writer like Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night inspired Dyer’s third novel, Paris Trance (1998), as this, his fourth novel, takes off from Thomas Mann’s 1912 classic and Visconti’s film of it. Dyer’s work is also haunted by D.H. Lawrence, the failed attempt to write whose biography resulted in the brilliant misadventure of Out of Sheer Rage (1997). And through Lawrence, his restiveness is shaded by the intellectually nomadic genius of somebody as thoroughly un-English as Nietzsche.

As a writer, Dyer starts most often with nothing more (and nothing less) than an informed and intuitive cluelessness. Then, the Slacker Laureate’s recklessness kicks in as he risks allowing himself to fail to do what he had set out to do. But, in the process, something entirely new and unexpected is pulled off. This is more or less how Dyer’s books on jazz and on photography, But Beautiful (1991) and The Ongoing Moment (2005) respectively, ended up being among the finest of their kind. Blurring the lines that separate fiction from non-fiction, yet relentlessly precise in scholarship, they unshackle jazz and photography from the dreariness of academic writing, setting a new benchmark in what Dyer calls “imaginative criticism” in But Beautiful. In a 2005 article, Dyer describes himself as “a literary and scholarly gatecrasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise, making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on”.

All this is relevant, in a serious as well as delightful way, to the self-reflexive non-adventures and seemingly inadvertent profundities of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Jeff is, and is not, Geoff. This is as true of the first, eponymous, Venetian half of the novel, as of its second Varanasi half, where Jeff disappears into an unnamed alter ego. It creates a strangely fractured persona across the novel, pleasurably bemusing in its discontinuous continuities, which the reader has to work out from a few, deceptively trivial clues left lying around in the book. “I like to write stuff that’s only an inch from life, from what really happened,” Dyer says in an interview, “but all art is of course in that inch.”

Try reading aloud the title of this novel. The way it forces you to lisp out Mann’s famous title, bringing its high-European seriousness down to English goofiness and to the clichéd exoticism of Varanasi’s burning ghats, is a foretaste of how the novel plays with the sentimental education of its Western and Indian readers. As a London-based art-writer, in his mid-forties (“the vague years”) and with hair freshly dyed, Jeff finds himself in the sweltering heat of Mann-Visconti’s Venice. But Dyer’s Tadzio is a gallerist from LA called Laura Freeman (Henrietta Stackpole meets Anne Hathaway), sexily adept at stealing bottles of Prosecco from museum bars and quite at the other extreme from Tadzio’s maddening sexual remoteness. And what is raging in this Venice is not the bubonic plague but the Biennale, made bearable by the ubiquitous bellinis. Dyer makes a fictional composite of the three Biennales that he had visited, as he explains in the notes at the end. This gives him the opportunity to embed real contemporary artists and their works in his fiction, giving it a vital dimension of lived and “enacted criticism”.

This mixing of art and life, and of fictional art and real art (the characters watching, partying with or discussing figures like Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, Ed Ruscha and Nick Serota) creates a rich feeling of disorientation in the novel. It is as if, like Spenser’s Guyon in the Bower of Bliss, we, the readers, together with Jeff, Laura and their peers in art-hunting cleverness, repeatedly come close to losing our bearings in the labyrinths of art, even as our sense of reality and of ourselves is precariously heightened by this closeness to the sublime and the banal, to Venice itself and all that it has come to stand for. This is the cornucopian and often literally hallucinogenic world in which Dyer sets his comic-bleak explorations of the depths and shallows of modern intimacy and of modern art.

The Varanasi half takes these explorations to what could be wrongly called the ‘spiritual’ plane — for Venice and Varanasi, despite their associations with art, religion and death, become, in Dyer’s hands, cities of indomitable substantiality. Both cities continually return people to the sensual and the grisly lives of the body, be it while snorting a line of coke among the Tintorettos in the Scuola Grande or while peeing vengefully into the Ganges (“it was one of those epic pisses that seem never to end”). Dyer’s way around Varanasi’s inescapable clichédness — refracted through Ginsberg’s Indian Journals, and the photographs of William Gedney, whom Dyer has edited and introduced — is to take each experience (monkey, cow, goat, sadhu, diarrhoea) as if his narrator was the first person it was happening to, and then to trust the acuteness of his eye, intelligence and language to take its writing beyond the predictable. Whether he is writing about Varanasi’s “hyena children”, or how in a particular temple “the notion of the ridiculous became suddenly sublime”, or reporting a fellow-traveller’s opinion that “Gandhi advocated non-violence because he secretly wanted to smash people’s heads in with a hammer… especially Nehru’s”, Dyer is free of politically-correct caution. The result is wonderfully entertaining, his unflinching funniness moving effortlessly into beautifully evocative descriptions of real exhibitions (Dayanita Singh’s Go Away Closer at the Kriti gallery) and performances (Malkauns on the violin on the terrace of the Ganges View, “one of the great hotels of the world”): “Even as it soared free, it dug itself more deeply into the earth.”

What joins the two parts, however, is something far more intangible and elusive than art, life or the self (Jeff’s surname is Atman). It is a profound sense of nothingness, a blankness at the heart of things inner as well as outer, which produces a different kind of vision (or non-vision) at the end of each part. Unable to take his eyes off the Tintoretto Crucifixion, Jeff registers the peculiar lack of transport afforded by the experience: “an epiphany that never came, never happened…. Perhaps that was the epiphany, surrendering himself to what he was seeing.” In Varanasi, this strangely compelling flatness is embodied in the far bank of the river, “a greyness without substance: formless, qualityless”, where the narrator watches a dead body being eaten by dogs, and which, on being visited, proves to be metaphysically anti-climactic. The only thing that is possible in the face of this nothingness is a sort of sublime drollery. But even that, at the very end, becomes a “leaning forward and letting go, leaning on nothing”. Gustave von Aschenbach would have understood.