30/06/2016 Meet the Author

Geoff Dyer writes fiction and writes about his travels with equal ease.

He has a pen that's always being described as "original".

In his new book, White Sands Experiences from the Outside World,

he is out in the world.

In French Polynesia, the strange wastelands of New Mexico,

in the forbidden city of Beijing.

But through it all, he is talking, of course, about himself,

about the business of writing, and about the strange impulses

that we all feel from time to time about wanting to be somewhere else.

Welcome.

Geoff Dyer, we all need to travel, don't we?

Geoff Dyer, we all need to travel, don't we?

Er, yeah, but staying put is nice too, isn't it?

Not for you, I suspect?

Well, the more you travel, with all the kind of exhaustion

and inconvenience that entails, the more attractive the idea of just

staying put and sitting tight.

Well, it may be attractive, but when you see what you get out

of these experiences - with all the confusions

and all their surprises - you realise that as a writer

particularly and as someone with an active imagination,

there's always something to be gleaned from the simplest,

most bizarre everyday experience in somewhere new.

Yeah, I mean, that is certainly true.

And even when you get to a place and it turns out that

what you were going there for hasn't quite delivered.

what you were going there for hasn't quite delivered,

invariably, there's some kind of pleasing side-effect

or incidental pleasure which renders the trip worthwhile

in a way that sometimes the original purpose didn't.

And this book, White Sands, begins with a quest

to French Polynesia.

Yeah.

And that falls into the category that you've just

mentioned, doesn't it?

Yes, because it was a really...

It was sort of a foolish undertaking.

Because I didn't just want to go to French Polynesia,

which is one thing you can do, I wanted to actually step

into a Gauguin painting.

Not as one of the bathing women, I take it?

No, but more as sort of the Gauguin figure.

And, you know, you see brochures for French Polynesia

and what they don't advertise is, you can have the full-on

Gauguin experience.

Because that's really no longer available.

And actually, Gauguin found after he'd been there first of all,

went back to Paris for a little while, returned to Tahiti,

and he found that, oh, he wasn't having the Gauguin experience there.

It's interesting how disappointment can sometimes be the best

thing for a writer.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a piece in the book where we go to see...

my wife and I go to see the Northern Lights and, you know,

the Northern Lights don't appear.

And at one point, we hear that we're too far north to see

the Northern Lights.

And that was a thoroughly disappointing trip,

except that it was worth going because out of it,

this piece of writing emerged.

Because all the places described in this sort

of collection of experiences are in their way fascinating.

The emptiness of New Mexico, for example, which is

a very affecting place.

For me, in New Mexico, I was there for a very concentrated

experience of landscape, because there was one particular bit

of it I was going to.

It was Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, that land-art installation

where he's installed these silver poles in a grid that's a kilometre

by a mile, I think.

And the idea is that it attracts lightning.

Of course, it turns out that it's very vulgar to go

to the Lightning Field and actually expect to see any lightning.

It remains a very rare occurrence.

But as a sort of...

Erm, it's got an incredible sort of gravitational pull,

that work of art, if you can call it that.

Well, these big installations are extraordinary.

But do you feel confined here?

Do you know, I'd put it the other way round, actually.

I mean, I think actually, the natives of Texas or Arizona,

they're aware that they live in a place with big skies,

but I think when you come from this cloud-shrouded rock in the Atlantic,

you get a real sense of your spirit opening up.

Many of your writings have connections that people

who follow you on the page understand and enjoy.

There's one particular connection between the Lightning Field that

you mentioned a few moments ago and the Somme, which we're

all thinking of this week as one of the big moments

in the recollection of the First World War.

The book that you wrote is being reissued to

mark the experience.

What did you learn first of all, or feel first of all,

when you made that journey to the battlefields of Flanders?

Yep, so I was actually living in Paris, writing a novel,

and then I did something I'd wanted to do for ages - this

was in the early-'90s - to visit the cemeteries

on the Somme, not really being sure what I'd find.

And then I came to that memorial designed by Sir Edwin

Lutyens...

The Thiepval.

Yeah.

And there I saw, in huge letters, 'The Missing of the Somme'.

And there was such a sense of something converging

there and, at the same time, something emanating from it.

And for me, I think that was the start of my fascination

with these places where, if you like, history

is manifest in geography, where the temporal is expressed

in the spatial.

When I saw this memorial and those words...

And that word the 'Somme', I think I'd heard it at home before

I heard it at school, and it seemed to me...

I asked the question, what is it that drew me to this place?

And of course, in order to answer that question, you have

to answer some more.

You know, what baggage did I bring?

Cultural, historical, autobiographical, familial,

this kind of thing.

So yeah, it's a place you feel where some sort of...

Some of the real defining things of our century -

sorry, of the last century - converge there.

The Somme, the memorial, is all about remembering,

but there's a prophetic dimension to it as well because...

Because of course, it looks ahead to a kind of whole

century of disappearances, of places and people

being destroyed.

The subtitle to the book, Geoff, is 'Experiences

from the Outside World' and it strikes me that word 'Experiences'

is the important one.

It's not a question of going somewhere simply to take a mental

photograph or see something new, understand something new,

it's something deeper.

It's a feel, it's an experience of place that moves

you very strongly.

Yeah, the pieces in the book, they're not the equivalent

of postcards, or photographs, of monuments or whatever.

It's more that...

And it's certainly not the case that the place is a kind of backdrop

in front of which...

a sort of passive backdrop in front of which dramas are being enacted.

It's more that the place - say, the Forbidden City in Beijing -

is a kind of active component in the drama.

It's got its own kind of agency and power.

Geoff Dyer, thank you very much. Thank you.