Product Description

'In the race to be first in describing the lost generation of the 1980s, Geoff Dyer in THE COLOUR OF MEMORY leads past the winning post. "We're not lost" one of his hero's friend's says, "we're virtually extinct". It is a small world in Brixton that Dyer commemorates, of council flat and instant wasteland, of living on the dole and the scrounge, of mugging, which is merely begging by force, and of listening to Callas and Coltrane. It is the nostalgia of the DHSS Bohemians, the children of unsocial security, in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage. Not since Colin MacInnes's CITY OF SPADES and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city. A low-keyed style and laconic wit touch up THE COLOUR OF MEMORY' THE TIMES

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127832 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

Review
'Of all the hyped novels about 1980s London it remains one of the most genuine' Peter Jukes, NEW STATESMAN *'Captures the vigour and life of Brixton ... there are vivid tableux of street life, shot through a compassionate lens ... sustained and powerful' SUNDAY TIMES * 'Dyer writes crisp Martin Amis-inflected prose, full of acute and neat phrases' TLS

About the Author
Author of 3 novels, a study of John Berger & 4 genre-defying titles including But Beautiful, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize and the most recent Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It. His book of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, was also critically acclaimed.

Customer Reviews

Beauty in the bleak
I wasn't looking for an exciting plot, or an entirely new scenario. I know that the dole-queue of 80's Britain has been explored before and will be again, in fiction. This may be a nostalgic read, but isn't a nostalgic write as such, as it was first published in 1989.

I like Dyer's characters, I care about them. I find them real. They are sweet, sincere, kind people, with strong bonds of friendship. I care what they do, I enjoyed being part of their time together, time when often little happens but they enjoy eachother's company and the passing of time. I felt that male friendship was touchingly portrayed. These men have feelings (of course), they show them, not through flashy shows of emotion and "new-man" (this was before the "new-man of course!), but in the care they show one another.

Above all, I like that Dyer enjoys words. He clearly cares about language, and paints with it. The book is very sensual - lots of visual passages, but plenty of sounds and smells, too, and the feeling of hot or cold - depending on the season - well-evoked. In a couple of places I worried the prose was moving slightly towards the purple (but only everso slightly!). And in a few places I found the repetition of fire or jet-trail imagery a bit tiring, though on reflection, I think this adds to the feeling of repetition in the lives of Dyer's characters, who do live in a bit of a cycle.

I like Dyer's observation of detail, and the way that through this Brixton becomes almost a character in the novel. Though he acknowledges the bleak, miserable environment these friends inhabit, he does find the beauty in it, and conveys that beauty admirably.

I found the ending touching, it made me think back to earlier passages, and really tied the book up well for me.

I have read that Dyer is working on a book about a series of photographs. This makes perfect sense to me, as there is a lot of that in this novel - photographs evoking memories and wonderings. I will look forward to that book.

Certainly this is a novel I would recommend to friends, and one I know I will re-read.

What Remains of our Hopes: Colour Of Memory
Geoff Dyer's The Colour Of Memory is an amazingly well-written novel, (the author's first) perhaps more so for how it is written than for what actually takes place on the pages, more about this a bit later. The narrator of Colour Of Memory, plus five or six close friends are all young, university-educated and living a near-impoverished existence in a series of barely inhabitable South London, Council flats.

In Colour Of Memory, Dyer describes in beautifully vivid detail a series of intimate snapshots of life lived day to day on the margins of Thatcher's Great Britain in the mid-1980's. The novel begins with a kind of lost generation, Hemingway-esque line; "In August it rained all the time-heavy, corrosive rain from which only nettles and rusty metal derived refreshment". From this line onward, the tone is set with the narrator losing his low-paying, unengaging, government-sponsored job as well as being evicted from his Brixton apatment. Narrator and friends are all portrayed by the author with a wistful, near-biographical approach; discussing the Darwinist, capitalist landscape of Tory-dominated Britain, listening to Maria Callas on a cloudy afternoon, arguing the merits of John Coltrane's sixties-era recordings, smoking strong dope on the roof of the narrator's flat, attending parties in dangerous neighborhoods and just scraping by while trying to nurture their separate, artistic ambitions. Without question, the characters of Colour Of Memory, narrator included, are all 1980's beatniks of one kind or another and the novel makes clear how quixotic a life this really is, living in a society and an atmosphere that values financial prowess and ordinary survival skills over creativity of any variety.

What takes place on the pages of Colour Of Memory is seemingly woven together with an invisible thread, there appears to be no obvious plot, rhyme or reason to the action. Yet, the reader is propelled forward through one shimmering vignette after another, one can't articulate why, one just seems to feel some connection to these people and therefore cares about what comes next, no matter the order of happenings. Colour Of Memory could be seen as self-indulgent and a trifle mundane, but fortunately for the reader it easily escapes this fate by presenting itself as a compelling group of beautifully written recollections, sometimes sad, usually funny and certainly tracing the beginnings of a great writer. Maybe Dyer summarized this novel before it even began with a quote from John Berger, probably his biggest influence: " What remains of our hopes is a long despair which will engender them again".

Dolequeue Revisited
The Colour of memory is a nostalgic drench in those balmy happy-go-lucky days of 1980s unemployment, a sort of Dolequeue Revisited. Its cast of urbane, witty, 20-something Brixton-dwellers coast serenely from park to pub to party in a haze of soft drugs, beer, and sparkling conversation. This is the Dandy Aristocracy of the DHSS, critics and artists all, cunningly staying clear of the squalor of a dull job, biding their time on housing benefit until their genius is recognised. They are only occasionally menaced by the more brutal elements of the society around them, elements never as thin, beautiful, or musically-sophisticated as themselves, often identifiable by the noun+faced adjectives applied to them: lard-faced, lager-faced, pavement-faced etc. The story is told in short, episodic passages, each rising to a final poetic epiphany - ah, so many epiphanies in those blissful days of Thatcherite largesse! The writing is crafted in strong equiAmisian contours, marked by the play and reversal of cliche, the sharp decoding of metropolitan debris, the random danger of proletarian violence. It ends with a thin ooze of vague, unearned tragedy, and, rather strangely, warms one to the memory of Norman Tebbit.