The Last Days of Roger Federer is a meditation on ageing: on life’s sole constant, terminal change. It’s Geoff Dyer’s fourth book since 2018. While that output mightn’t scream diminishing faculties, now that Dyer is in his 60s, endings are increasingly on his mind. It’s not dark yet, as the man said, but it’s getting there.
Dyer’s formal innovations were ahead of the autofiction curve, and The Last Days maintains this. Although the book is ostensibly a long essay, its form − a meditation in three sections, within which are nested mini-sections numbered from one to 60 or so − allows Dyer to glide stylistically between critical analysis, autofiction, art history, philosophy and more.
Thoughts on the elegiac grace of Beethoven’s Op. 132 string quartet nestle comfortably beside ponderings on the typography of Californian marijuana vendors. An analysis of light in Turner’s paintings sits near an account of the pleasure of walking out of the cinema during a terrible film. Equal parts conversational and critical, of the now and of history, The Last Days updates essay writing in the Montaigne style; it’s also regularly laugh-out-loud funny.
As the book progresses past meditations on musicians, artists and writers, the theme of playing tennis develops into a figure representing the very experience of being alive: “Never think beyond the present match, the current game, the unfolding point. Play the ball not the point.” Unseduced by facile literary epiphanies, Dyer observes that “the real interest is how things change neither dramatically nor suddenly but gradually. So gradually as to be imperceptible.”
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In this riffing on a multitude of topics, first warming up before giving heft until peaking, Dyer’s style is that of a sage jazz improviser. In the remarkably light manner by which Dyer shifts from one diverse topic to another, there’s also an echo of the modernist composer Richard Wagner’s description of his music as the art of transition: “for the whole fabric of my art is made up of such transitions: all that is abrupt and sudden is now repugnant to me”.
Life, after all, is transience. In that respect, the form of The Last Days mirrors its theme. In juxtaposing the profound with the prosaic, Dyer explores not only the sense but the nonsense of an ending.
