Indian Ink

There's a luminous kind of writing, which creates a memory as if from one of your own dreams. It's troublesome to read, though, because I now think I have been to Venice during a Biennale, and Varanasi in the off season. Dyer seems to be writing about either someone else's story that he's convinced is his own; or about a dream he is yet to have.

Geoff Dyer is always very dryly funny, self-deprecating (when you know the character is his own cipher), and always puts you in the room. In "The Colour Of Memory", I was in the Brixton pubs and flat-shares that his characters rolled through. In this novel, I was in the heaving, Bellini-swigging tents of ego-fuelled installations.

Strangely, the second section set in India, is less powerful. Perhaps because I've been there for a little while, and the scenes have no dream-space to live in within my own memory. No room in the ethereal.