WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

PARIS Trance rhymes best with "Paris France" if you put on an American accent, and Dyer's new novel puts on American accents of Hemingway and Miller for a modish rewrite of their fictions of expatriate drunks and deadbeats in Paris. DH Lawrence is added to the mix by way of a sly reworking of Women in Love: Dyer concentrates on two couples getting it together on foreign soil.

The mix makes a cake which he can both eat and have because if we were to say that this novel is meretricious, trivial and emptily hedonistic, Dyer would of course reply, "well, yeah, that's the way we live now".

Orwell remarked on Miller's Tropic of Cancer that there is "a penalty for leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil". And there is no shallower soil than Dyer's prose style. He has set out to write a novel without a plot (he is quite explicit about this, it must be said). All that happens in the novel is that two boys meet two girls in Paris, one couple friendly lovers who eventually marry, the other passionate lovers who separate. But, before this happens, we have to spend 200 pages in their infuriating company. All four form a little gang of pleasure-seeking fools, stoned most of the time, indulging in trivial pursuits, being happy, having fun. That's fine, you might say, sounds like Friends. But, unfortunately, it is Friends without the jokes. You are forced to endure their bana1 dialogue ("I've developed a liking for olives," said Alex. "I hate them," said Luke, "I've always liked them," said Sahra), their inane games (they test their knowledge of Pariscope film listings), their sexual appetites and never has anal sex been made to sound so boring), their arch "lita- like these nies of quirks", their doped-out, dopey, blurred vision of Paris nightlife. What seems extraordinary is Dyer's confidence that we will envy them their happiness. Only with ferociously keyed-up wit could you hope to run a novel on such poor stuff. You need Miller's brawn, Beckett's icy deadpan, Wilde's froth or Lawrence's superstitious belief in private sexuality. What we get is a needlessly poverty-stricken narrative style, a degree zero of writing which assumes that novels should be versions of the tedious jabber of adolescents killing time. We get their views on films, kitsch culture, Ecstasy, clothes, pornography, on all the trivia of post-modern hype, all in a desiccated basic English and Eurospeak, e-minds priding themselves on their useless knowledge of the superficial "tropes" of the world as pleasure dome. But that knowledge is a form of futile ignorance. Dyer believes such ignorance is happiness, and this is a book about postmodern happiness. If happiness means poor writing, opiate trivia and dull company; well, I, for one, don't want it. At one point, the featureless principal couple, Nicole and Luke, in their aimless drift through the city, end up in the Egyptian section of a museum. Nicole likes the ancient Egyptians because theirs was "a civilisation in which nothing ever happened". Luke, in a typically unfunny and graceless act of fancy, wants to open "a museum of boredom" detailing the "history of tedium". Dyer has written just such history with this book.

Copyright 1998
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