14 saturday review Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesLike all Dyer’s books, The Last Days of
Roger Federer feels like what Martin Amis
called “a transfusion from above”, but one
from your smartest and funniest friend.
Dyer hates the idea of sounding “grand”
and frets over how to write about Beetho-
ven without sounding like “a bit of a
ponce”. He needn’t worry: he writes mov-
ingly and effectively about Federer’s (sor-
ry, Roger’s: “Even though I’ve never met
him, it’s Roger, always and only Roger”)
ever-postponed retirement. When he
goes, “the reign of beauty is coming to an
end”. For Dyer, Federer is “an illusion we
can believe in”, and we feel the agony in his
point-by-point account of the Swiss great’s
defeat to Novak Djokovic in the 2019
Wimbledon final.
Yet tennis is just a sliver of this wide-ran-
ging, eye-opening book. Nietzsche said
that “the profoundest mind must also be
the most frivolous one”, and even while
Dyer is enabling us to see things in a new
way, he’s riffing brilliantly on stealing big-
ger and bigger quantities of shampoo from
hotels, or being hilariously honest about
the tedium of much great literature.
Henry James’s The Ambassadors made
him feel that “my reading glasses were
somehow changing prescription mid-
sentence”; William Faulkner’s The Sound
and the Fury “was an absolute doddle: three
pages was enough to persuade me I’d
never make it.”It’s at these moments, when he brings
himself into the book, that he’s most enter-
taining. A basketball court he passes regu-
larly is “democratised to the extent that it
looks like the exercise yard of a zero-secu-
rity prison”. On the other hand, longtime
Dyer fans will note, if not welcome, the
return of his regular obsessions — jazz,
DH Lawrence, the Burning Man festival
— and it’s here that he comes closest to
trying our patience with what we might
call verbal Dyerhoea. However, if you
don’t like one topic, there’ll be another
along in a minute. There’s something in
this book (Larkin, Dylan, DeLillo, Ground-
hog Day) for everyone. Well, almost every-
one, but even Sally Rooney will have a late
style eventually.
Dyer is still watching tennis — “compi-
lations of Roger’s best drop shots or ultra
slo-mo footage of his backhand on You-
Tube” — and still playing tennis, even
though it now takes him many times
longer to recover than he spends on the
court. “This book,” he scolds himself,
“must not be allowed to become an injury
diary or sprain journal.”
His desire to keep going is probably has-
tening the end, but as long as he keeps his
eye sharp and his sense of humour (which
is “about so much more than being funny;
it’s an entire relation to — and view of —
the world”), we’ll be laughing, and think-
ing, all the way.Roger Federer. For one thing you don’t
need to pretend you like things any more.
“Jeez, but I’m glad I’m old,” he writes, “old
enough to not mind staying in, sitting
around revising this book.”
Dyer is 63: not near the end by any
means, but old enough to know what late
means. This comes as a surprise to those of
us who have followed the youthful bounce
of his career, where he flits around enthu-
siastically, writing funny and clever books
about pals on holiday (Paris Trance) or
photographs (See/Saw) or aircraft carriers
(Another Great Day at Sea) or what it’s like
to watch Where Eagles Dare (Broadsword
Calling Danny Boy).
Dyer writes books, novels and non-
fiction that are “only an inch from life —
but all of the art is in that inch”. Or as he put
it in his travel book Yoga for People Who
Can’t Be Bothered to Do It: “Everything in
this book really happened, but some of the
things that happened only happened in
my head.”
Tennis is one of the things that is always
in his head. Playing it, of course — he once
wrote about being so self-conscious of histhin legs that he used to play tennis wear-
ing jeans — but also watching and writing
about it. (He suspects that when a writer
friend “shared his password for the Tennis
Channel”, it was “designed to undermine
and gradually destroy my writing life”.)
And his new book uses tennis as a spring-
board for talking about late work and last
things, starting with the sadness of watch-
ing contemporary greats such as Federer
and Andy Murray persist “in coming back
for more even if more meant less and less”.
The practice is not limited to tennis
players. Think of the overweight fighter,
turning up again for the gilded glory of a
retirement purse; the washed-up crooner
on his fifth farewell tour; bands such as the
Sex Pistols who “re-form and become their
own tribute acts”, trading on a nostalgia
that they originally existed to oppose. Yet
it’s hard to take out of your life the thing
that gave it meaning, and worse if your life
has been, as Beethoven expressed his
choice, “sacrificed to sublime art!”, then
the art dries up, but the life goes on.
Friedrich Nietzsche found that “posthu-
mous life can start when one is still notion-
ally alive” and spent his last ten years in
an asylum.
JMW Turner, who like all good artists
was obsessed with money to the point of
pathology (Sir Walter Scott said Turner
would “do nothing without cash and any-
thing for it”), was seen as yesterday’s man
even as he painted those great works —
“the world washed clean by light” — that
we now recognise as his masterpieces.I
sn’t growing old fun? As the poet
George Oppen put it: “What a strange
thing to happen to a little boy.” Well,
there are compensations, as Geoff
Dyer points out in The Last Days ofbooks
Roger Federer and
the strange beauty
of the twilight years
Geoff Dyer’s witty
book explores late
careers, from grand
masters to old rockers.
Review by John Self
For Dyer, Federer is
‘an illusion we can
believe in’. We feel the
agony of his defeat
JULIAN FINNEY/GETTY IMAGESracquet man Roger Federer still playing at 39 at Wimbledon last yearThe Last
Days of
Roger Federer
And Other Endings
by Geoff D yerCanongate, 304pp; £20