The Colour of Memory

by Geoff Dyer

'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

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, British Literature, London, Literature

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my third Geoff Dyer novel and it sits right in the middle: better than 'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi' but not as good as 'Paris Trance'. Take away the heroin, throw in Sexual undercurrents, and switch from Edinburgh to south London, then I'd say it shares the same energetic vibe as Trainspotting. There are also nods towards Martin Amis too. The Colour of Memory centres on the a nameless narrator who works dead-end marketing jobs, and his group of slacker close friends as they face the many ups and downs of living as part of the lost generation in 80s Britain. There is lots of drinking and smoking dope, whilst trying to avoid work as much as possible. One is a writer who can't be bothered to write much, and another is an insomniac obsessed with cleanliness. And of course we get the love interest. Dyer through sharp insights portraits the simple pleasures of friendship really well, and will no doubt spark memories for the British reader who lived out their 20s in the 80s. For me it was the mid 90s/early 00s, but it certainly made the colour of my own memories come flooding back. I could see my former self in there somewhere, especially when it came to crashing out drunk on a mate's sofa, and also falling for the same girl. Where did it all go? It only seems like yesterday. I really felt the nostalgia washing over me. It's certainly one of the best novels I've read in recent years on friendship.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things.
*
Each loss bothered me a little less than the previous one. [...] ‘I’m becoming immune to catastrophe,’ I said.
*
The words broke over me. I stared into the dark sky above and around us. The night remembered the voice. The night remembered how the voice had needed the night.
*
The wind howled as if it longed for the coarse grass of the moor.
*
This book is like an album of snaps. In any snap strangers intrude; the prints preserve an intimacy that lasted only for a fraction of a second as someone, unnoticed at the time, strayed unintentionally into the picture frame. Hidden among the familiar, laughing faces of friends are the glimpsed shapes of strangers; and in the distant homes of tourists there you are, at the edge of the frame, slightly out of focus, in the midst of other peoples’ memories. We stray into each other’s lives. In the course of any day in any city it happens thousands of times and every now and again it is caught on film. That is what is happening here. Look closely and maybe there, close to the margin of the page, you will find the hurried glance of your own image: [...]

[Brian Grover · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an impulse buy made while strolling past McNally Jackson one night, but I'm extremely happy to have made it. It's essentially a book with no plot, just 60 short chapters strung together that piece out a year in the life of a group of 20-something friends in the London suburb of Brixton in the late '80s. They're a group of would-be artists and layabouts who have little ambition beyond scraping out a living and enjoying each others' company, which sounds like it could be insufferable. It's not.

The characters are a sharply drawn bunch - smart, funny, and good-hearted. And the writing is dynamite. Beautiful and spare, it creates an idyllic snapshot of youth that made me long for days gone by. Since I finished it, I've gone back and picked it up a few times and re-read random passages, and no doubt I'll read it cover to cover again soon.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this review has read the book, can we talk about the postscript ending? I need closure on this.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

“In August it rained all the time-heavy, corrosive rain from which only nettles and rusty metal derived refreshment. The sky was a grey sea with no tide.”

So opens this novel. There is a lot of lovely writing in here, Dyer has some really clever and memorable ways of looking at things and phrasing thoughts, the kind of wording which really brightens up the dullest of scenes.

I’m sure I must have said it before in another review of his books, but Dyer seems like he’d be a good guy to go to the pub with. In saying that I was pretty disappointed with the ending which just seemed to fizzle out which was a shame, but all told this was an enjoyable little read.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book without a plot (as acknowledged by the author himself) still tells a great story, in the same way a picture can tell a story. It's more a series of vignettes, each pretty much stands alone but they are woven together to form a year-in-the-life tale of young drifting Londoners in the 1980s. A lot of subtleties in how the characters are developed, nothing in your face. The more I think about this book the more I like it.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes the characters let you know what’s going on in THE COLOUR OF MEMORY by Geoff Dyer, like when one, a writer, explains that he never applies plot. Plot kills. This first novel kills, but not mortally, and, of course, it’s plotless. The other way Dyer pops into the narrative is by an aside, slipping next to you and whispering in your ear, such as when he explains that memory, like this book, is more a collection of snapshots that capture not only a moment of your time and place, but those extras that have wandered into the picture when the shutter opened. These disjointed pictures, connected by a half-dozen recurring characters, develop into a place and time that feels real because it reflects a place and time we’ve all lived through, young adulthood. If your youth was aimlessly spent in pursuit of unambitiousness and leisure then this will ring true to you as well. Dyer likely lived through this, for, as he also notes in the book (or was it the introduction?), for him fiction is an inch away from the truth. It’s in that inch that this book lives. And like the young, the book is very funny, not that all kids are humorous. No, most are too earnest for that. But these kids without interest in prospects lay claim to a dry, straight-faced jokiness that makes hanging out with them fun. Dyer writes in the introduction (this time I’m sure) that he did a little editing for this American reissue, deleting a joke he stole from a friend, who he later discovered stole it from Woody Allen. I wished he kept it in. It’s important to have shared memories. If you didn’t have a wayward past, a nonlinear excursion en route to adulthood, then by all means take his.

[Kholofelo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.

If a book is called a novel and is without a plot, then there must be something special in between its pages to keep you reading. This one has no plot and has nothing special about it, apart from the rumours you've heard about the apparently wonderful author of it- which leaves you with even more disappointment because of the great expectation.
However, there are some really good snapshots of life as we know it, that make you slightly nostalgic and urge you forward through each page. But all in all, I wouldn't recommend it. Find yourself something more interesting to read.

[Madhuri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like listening to jazz. It swept me with a deep nostalgia for someone else's memories.
It is a collection of Imagery and descriptions. And those odd thoughts which fill the mind but don't often come on paper.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love this book. I've read it so many times

[Alfie Shaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is less a novel with a structured and coherent plot, and more a series of vignettes detailing the lives of a group of unemployed 20-something year olds in South London, reflecting Dyer's own experiences of Brixton in the 1980s. It could be described as an ode to inactivity or hedonistic indulgence in random pursuits, for as long the aimless characters remain interested in them. The narrator fastidiously boards up his door to enhance his flats precarious security, then he'll fling you to the pub with his mates, then off to Clapham Common to play football, before going back to the flat for a dabble at amateur decorating. There is not really any reason for doing all this, other than as simply something to do. If your looking for a story with direction, you are going to be frustrated.

Still, Dyer does have an uncanny ability to freeze time and look at an often banal moment, enhancing the sense that nothing is really happening in the characters lives. This could be the narrator and his friend sitting up on the roof of the apartment block watching the green and red lights of planes drift by in the night sky, or a circuitous walk past the halls of power in Whitehall, or simply watching the bus driver steer the vehicle through chaotic traffic. Many things noticed by the narrator a lot of people would miss in the deranged rush generated by supposedly gainful employment. The lack of work summons the characters freedom to observe.

I was frustrated by the lack of reflection partaken by the characters though. The early 20s are a precarious time in ones life when you are still figuring out who you should be in the world. While the characters are unemployed, little is said about what they want to do with their lives. They are just content with moving from one one superfluous activity to the next without thinking about the future at all. Myopia in its purest form. Dyer has mentioned in multiple interviews that the dole was far more generous in the 1980s and the present day wouldn't afford the kind of idle lifestyle necessary for breeding obscure artists, to our contemporary detriment. Still, the characters do not make any meaningful reference to their artistic pursuits, other than to the fact they were not really doing them. This sort of idleness just seems unobtainable, but perhaps my perception is coloured by the work crazed culture of our own era.

For a self confessed bohemian wanderer, the narrator also appears to have an unrealistically pure relationship with his sister. Their sensitive interactions often seem more like those between lovers than siblings. To give Dyer his due, he has remarked that he prefers writing from experience, rather than wholly relying on imagination. He does not have a sister himself and perhaps dreaming up the relationship was a bit of a strain. It comes across so in the prose.

Nevertheless, the book is a fun evocation of a unique time in London. While at times being a bit existentially shallow, it in many ways does what it promises to do.

[Oryx · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book oozes England. I think it may be one of my favourites. I am completely in awe. I have no other words. It was beautiful.

4.17

[Helen Stansfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has no plot, which I knew when starting, but found it interesting as it’s set in the 80s when my dad would have been the narrator’s age

I don’t read many books set in the 80s so it was refreshing for there to be no modern references

Due to lack of plot, not very gripping, but a very easy holiday read 3⭐️/5⭐️

[David Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A warm, funny debut novel that follows a group of friends, all smart, around age 20 and underemployed by choice in late 1980s England. They hang out, drink beer, listen to "Sketches of Spain" and try to avoid getting burgled. There's no plot, but plot is overrated, right? Often very funny, it's also lyrical and elegiac for a time and circumstance the narrator understands needs to be remembered before it fades.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became a fan of Geoff Dyer's writing style a couple if years ago and am making my way through his books. His style is clear and honest, opposite of pretentious, and he works very hard to make it feel fresh, sensitive, funny all at different moments. This first novel set in 1980s Brixton section of London is all those things and it was a pleasure to find it in the U.S.

[Ahana Maitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoff Dyer's The Colour of Memory is the perfect book for rainy afternoons. There is no plot, which seems slightly off-putting at first; but the almost musical quality of Dyer's prose more than makes up for it. I was unsure about this one at first, but it left me with a most pleasant, warm and fuzzy feeling.

[Joe Vess · Rating 5 out of 5]

As noted above, this is my all-time favorite book. I like everything about it; the unconventional style, the language, the stories, the world it creates and the situations it evokes. Every time I read it I get more out of it. Recommended for everyone.

[Tara Busa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet plot driven by the lives of a group of 20 somethings. Beautifully written, studded with smart observations of life and human nature that creep up on you while you're reading. Love Dyer's unique description of color and dry humor.

[Shayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet again I deeply enjoyed a book where not much actually happens!

I read this one because months and months ago I did a google search for books like A Little Life and this one was suggested. I can definitely see why. I had made the search because I wanted another book that would rip my heart out as much as that one did, but what I didn't realize was that I also wanted another taste of the friendship in A Little Life.

The Colour of Memory isn't sad at all really, but at the core of it is a group of friends-- a group of 4 witty, spontaneous, intellectual, artistic, lazy, epicurean, broke, aimless 20-somethings. They're just so fun and interesting to hang out with that I couldn't feel bored at any point. Every chapter is just a snapshot of their lives together in Brixton in the 80's. They go to bars, parties, the pool, each other's houses. They have jobs, on and off, but mainly they just enjoy each other's company and get high/drunk.

It's a really sweet book, and I saw a lot of myself woven throughout it. It just had this really earnest, unpretentious quality that I loved. So many achingly tender descriptions, so much humanity. *chef's kiss*

I don't have anything smart to say about this book (do I ever, about any book?). Mostly it was just something that felt written for me. I want a group of cool artistic friends who will hang out on the roof of my apartment building, reading and talking while I paint at an easel on the most beautiful summer evening. It was a very indulgent read. Plus there were tons of black people in this book, which was surprising and awesome.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much life, there is so much love. There is so much to see. Incredibly witty and an unforgettable cast of characters. Beautiful, beautiful prose. Never a dull moment. The city is alive.

Wonderful metaphors, such as:

I felt pretty bad too—like a toilet full of unflushed shit.

And here is my favourite moment from the entire book:

I looked around. The trees around the park were perfectly still as if time had stopped, as if every second of the afternoon were held in a single moment: Steranko frozen in his running, his feet barely touching the grass; Carlton bent down tying his shoe, the breeze rippling his shirt; the muscles straining in someone's leg; players jumping for the ball, their feet suspended in mid-air; the goalkeeper's hands rising above their floating hair; the ball hanging over them like a perfect moon. And everything around us: the crease of the corner flag, the wind-sculpted trees, the child's swing at the top of its arc, the water from the drinking fountain bubbling towards the lips of the woman bent down to drink; the cyclist leaning into the curve of the path, a plane stalled in the sky, someone's thrown tennis ball a small yellow planet in the distance.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deceptively simple tale of life among a group of 20-somethings in 1980s Brixton, UK.

I got to the end and had to sit back with closed eyes and embrace my own post-college experiences up and down the Northeast Corridor here in the States during those very same years. Friends, moments of joy, strange encounters, dead-end jobs, vivid colors of brick row houses, faded wooden roof decks, and early evening skies. The sounds of a softball game three blocks away, the shouts of the South Philly amateur leaguers, the light traffic-hush along Lombard and South Streets, and the chikk-a of another can of Piels or Yuengling soon to be drained. Roxy Music's "Avalon" or Lou Reed's "New York" -- depending on the mood or whether we were heading out or just returning from our neighborhood watering holes. This book has provoked a surprising level of introspection and regard for my own past ... and my fondest friendships.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Questo libro è come un album d'istantanee, e in ogni istantanea finiscono degli estranei. Le stampe preservano un'intimità non più lunga di una frazione di secondo, giusto il tempo per qualcuno - al momento passato inosservato - di sconfinare senza volerlo nell'inquadratura. Celate fra i visi sorridenti e familiari degli amici spuntano fuori sagome sconosciute; e nella lontana casa di qualche turista, un po' sfocati a margine della foto, ci siamo noi, nel bel mezzo dei ricordi altrui. Invadiamo gli uni la vita degli altri. Succede dappertutto, migliaia di volte tutti i giorni, solo che ogni tanto la cosa viene fissata su pellicola. Qui è lo stesso. Forse, se guardate bene, a lato della pagina troverete il riflesso sfuggente della vostra immagine che fa la cosa al bar, corre appresso all'autobus, beve birra su un tetto, sanguina sul pavimento della Metropolitana («L'avrei aiutata, mi creda, ma ho avuto paura; non sa come mi spiace»).”

[Thomas Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Colour of Memory has no plot, if I were to try and describe the key incidents in the book I'd struggle because there really aren't any. It is just the year in the life of a roughly 30 year old man and his group of bohemian unemployed friends in London in the 80s, but the characters and setting are so engaging that I loved every page.

There is an undercurrent of loneliness that runs throughout the book, despite the unnamed narrator having a very active social life, but what I took from it is that it's important to find beauty in the mundane, find meaning in the seemingly meaningless, and cherish moments with friends as these will be gone far sooner than we think

[Ian Mapp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think this was recommended on a Deserter Podcast and you can see why it appeals to our two anti-heroes of that medium.

This is set in the 1980s and I imagine a near auto-biographical recounting of the authors experiences of dodging work, scamming the dole, drinking cheap beer, consuming cheap drugs and living life on the edges of society. Or in the pub.

The writing at times is superb. Reminding me of Martin Amis to an extent.

Captures a time and place well - ends abruptly. Not one for lovers of plot.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I’m a big fan of Dyer’s other work. I would say this is probably the worst of what I’ve read from him. However, he does warn you that there is no plot. Instead it is just a time capsule of his youth. While not the best read, if you’re a fan of Dyer it’s worth the read. The prose is charming and the memories are sweet. Since there is nothing to follow you can breeze through it fairly quickly.

[Gintarė · Rating 1 out of 5]

There was first, but totally failed, my knowlegde with Geoff Dyer. I choose book, because her name was siund interesting. I expected something from life, however nothing similar I don't get. I can't said one thing, which I didn't like. There was everything: writing style, words, storyline. Everything. That's why I didn't finished "The Colour Of Memory".

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A couple of years ago I said somewhere that ‘I like to write stuff that is only an inch from life – but all the art is in that inch’. The importance of that inch – and the fun to be had within it – first made itself apparent in these pages.”

Geoff Dyer, ‘Note on revised edition’, The Colour of Memory (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012), n.p.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

2000 notebook: Celebration of being young and having friends and living in Brixton in the early '90s.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un'ambientazione di periferia urbana, un romanzo d'esordio e di formazione, di quelli che sembra siano più utili a chi scrive che non a chi legge. Ne è uscito un ottimo autore però.

[Federico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sketches. Like a collection of pictures with words instead of colors and shapes. I’ve loved it

[Manini · Rating 5 out of 5]

so so so good. a series of vignettes set in thatcher’s very long shadow.