Taking the high road
James Delingpole
YOGA FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T BE BOTHERED To Do IT by Geoff Dyer Abacns. £10.99, pp. 257, ISBN 0316725072 Geoff Dyer is my new friend. We met for the first time at Miriam Gross's annual literary soirée a few weeks ago and bonded instantly over the discovery that we share an ambition to try the South American hallucinogen DMT and would both like to find out whether it's really true that everyone who does it experiences the same trip (something to do with grey alien creatures, apparently).
It was lucky this all happened before I'd read any of his books, because if it hadn't I think I'd probably hate him. Not only did his new book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It help deny me one of the potentially best moments of my recent holiday in Africa (I'll explain how in a bit), but it also made me spit with rage and jealousy because his style and preoccupations are not dissimilar to my own, yet he's several more books and prizes down the line than I am and I worry that he may have cornered the market. What Dyer does — in this book, anyway, which a Dyer aficionado friend tells me is slightly less heavyweight than his earlier stuff — is to swan round the world with a succession of beautiful, articulate women, taking drugs, hanging out with strange people and recalling it all in neat, unfussy, languidly conversational prose punctuated with clever philosophical apercus and some great jokes.
The philosophical apercus are, I imagine, why this book is currently doing so well in the US bestseller lists. They all think it's a self-help book. But for me what makes it sing is its voice, self-deprecating yet slyly knowing, original, witty, amused and amusing. Here, for example, Dyer is describing the guests at a New Age retreat in Bali: 'Everyone had perfect posture and walked as though gravity were an option rather than a law.' Later, on discovering that one of the guests is suffering from hideously blistered feet as a result of a quack cure involving scorpion venom, he observes, 'I like hearing stories about people getting messed up on drugs.'
I do too, and Dyer is very good at it. There's a hilarious and frighteningly accurate essay called 'Skunk', in which he recalls the disastrous occasion when he introduced a sophisticated French woman to extra-strength hydroponically cultivated marijuana.
You are evil: she said. Skunk is like that: it takes the normal dope smoker's paranoia and raises it to a level of reeling expressionist insight.
Quite my favourite moment is his description of trying to change into a dry pair of trousers in the middle of an acid trip one rainy weekend in Amsterdam:
They had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over.
Of course, you don't need to be interested in drugs to enjoy the book. It works just as well as an idiosyncratic guide to exotic and not so exotic holiday destinations (the emptiness of Miami Art Deco, the splendid decay of Detroit and Leptis Magna) or as a treatise on how to make travelling less arduous (e.g. don't bother reading the guidebooks, just use your imagination and guess what all those old buildings were for).
I particularly warmed to his advice that sunsets weren't worth looking at and consequently made a point of avoiding one at my remote desert camp on Namibia's Skeleton Coast. Afterwards, a welltravelled couple told me that I had just missed an extremely rare meteorological phenomenon known as the green flash, where for a second before the sun disappears beneath the ocean you glimpse a flash of lime-green. They said it was the best they had ever seen. Thanks, Geoff.
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