Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
By Geoff Dyer
Canongate 296 pages; £12.99
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Good writing can overwhelm quibbling misgivings about a book’s classification. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is packaged as fiction but, in formal terms, it is more of a travelogue. Starting with the homonym of the narrator’s and author’s first names, Geoff Dyer blurs the distinction between novel and reportage. In two abstractly related accounts of journalistic assignments in obscenely different parts of the world, it is difficult to tell where Geoff stops and Jeff begins. Yet Jeff in Venice contains enough sharp observations to justify its existence, whether or not it quite succeeds as a novel.

British journalist Jeff-with-a-J has been sent to cover the Venice Biennale, the Frankfurt Book Fair of the art world. Dyer’s justly praised non-fiction book on photography, The Ongoing Moment, was intelligent and intuitive, and he brings the same acuity to the Biennale exhibits. “The work may have been puerile,” he writes, “but the hunger to succeed of which it was the product and symbol was ravenous. In different historical circumstances any number of these artists could have seized control of the Reichstag or ruled Cambodia with unprecedented ruthlessness.”

Art soon takes a back seat to romance. At an opening bash, Jeff’s eye is caught by a winsome young woman in a yellow dress named Laura, who leaves it to chance whether they meet again in the swirl of parties and Bellini-swilling (the signature Venetian cocktail of champagne and peach purée goes down, it seems, with nefarious ease). After several near-miss sightings of his siren (the first time, “It was like a double annulment. They had passed each other like ships in the day”), chance obliges and the two intoxicate themselves on both substances and each other.

While we’re at all times in the hands of a smart, witty writer, the material in the first section feels familiar. Western literature has hardly left decadence and indulgence unexplored. Perhaps it’s the frequent coke snorting, but the drunken parties and extensive, literal sex scenes have a slightly dated, 1980s cast. Only Dyer’s dry art commentary and skilful evocation of the Biennale’s most dominant exhibit – Venice itself – reprieves the first half of the book from becoming merely “Bright Lights, Big City Goes to Europe”.

The second section skips from third to first person and Jeff-with-a-J becomes the narrator. He’s been sent by The Daily Telegraph to cover the ritual immolation of dead bodies on the shores of the Ganges in Varanasi.

The account is journalistic, albeit in the style of a traveller’s personal journal rather than a newspaper feature. Descriptions of traffic make London’s city centre seem like Stockton-on-Tees; descriptions of diarrhoea make us fear that our narrator will defecate himself into the next life before we reach the last page. The poverty and squalor, the incessant badgering of westerners to buy trinkets or services, the prostitution of religious rites into the come-ons of a tourist trap are all vividly conjured. Beggars were “waving silver bowls, empty except for grains of rice and the odd coin. They were the lucky ones. Some didn’t have bowls. They were the lucky ones too. Some did not have hands.”

As fiction, the Varanasi story is rather static until its closing pages, where it gathers narrative steam. Having loitered in Varanasi long after his Telegraph assignment is completed, Jeff begins to divest himself of all the desires so conspicuously on parade at the Biennale. The connection between the two sections isn’t so much that of character – Jeff is less a proper fictional creation, with a past and a family he might be fleeing, than a guiding sensibility throughout. Nor is their primary relationship the watery, decrepit nature of the twinned cities. The sections are instead joined like the head and tails of a penny: desire pursued, and desire repudiated. The last 20 pages resemble a droll version of Paul Bowles’s harrowing account of assimilation-as-madness in The Sheltering Sky.

Jeff in Venice doesn’t entirely satisfy as a novel. Nevertheless, Geoff Dyer is an extraordinarily reflective, perceptive and funny writer, as well as a fine prose stylist. He’s a keen commentator on the ironies of contemporary life from the very first page, on which Jeff hovers over an e-mail, torn between hitting “send” and “delete”: “If taking your own life were this easy, there’d be thousands of suicides every day.” On a budget airline: “The cost-cutting was amazing, extravagant even. No expense had not been spared.” Is this a travelogue or novel? Well, put enough great lines like those in any book and it’s worth reading, whatever you want to call it.

Lionel Shriver is author of ‘The Post-Birthday World’ (HarperCollins)