With Airbnb invasions and Instagram mobs, author Geoff Dyer charts how paradise can quickly feel overcrowded – and explains why he still finds the world worth wandering
Interview by Eugene Yiga
Geoff Dyer, the British author of four novels and numerous non-fiction books, is renowned for his travel writing, insightful cultural criticism and genre-defying works. Recipient of the Somerset Maugham Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award and Windham Campbell Prize, Dyer has been hailed by New York Magazine as ‘one of our greatest living critics’ and ‘one of our most original writers’.
But despite his extensive travels and accolades, Dyer nearly missed out on becoming the celebrated wanderer he is today. Indeed, as he reveals in his new memoir, Homework, the apple fell far from the family tree – both his parents died without ever flying on a plane.
‘My parents were unusually, but not uniquely, disposed to stay at home,’ he says. ‘In fact, the only time they ever went abroad was in their 70s, when they took a rather dismal coach trip around northern France. It wasn’t just that we didn’t go abroad for our holidays – we didn’t go anywhere, or at least we did so only reluctantly.’
Dyer vividly remembers a friend coming back from the Isle of Wight when the two were about eight. ‘He was bright red with sunburn and I was so envious,’ he recalls. ‘Holidays meant sunshine, and by the 1970s, some of my other friends started to go abroad for their holidays. But my dad could never see the attraction of this.’
Not only did his father disapprove of the fact that people on holiday could escape British laws and drink all day long, but he also hated the idea of spending money. All of this meant that Dyer grew up with no impulse to travel and didn’t get on a plane until he was 23, in 1981. And what a plane ride it was.
‘I had a posh girlfriend whose mum lived on this beautiful island in the Caribbean called Anguilla,’ Dyer remembers. ‘It was totally undeveloped at the time – just gorgeous beaches and sea. There was no theft at all on this island, I was told. So I left my camera in the back of a car with the windows down while we went for a swim. And when we got back, of course the camera had been stolen.’
Despite that experience, Dyer gradually got into the habit of going abroad and seeing new places. But as someone who didn’t have a job at the time, he realised that he didn’t need to go on a holiday to escape from work. More than that, he didn’t even like being on holiday. Instead, what he enjoyed was living his ‘usual life’.
‘By my early 30s, this had extended to living in New York, Paris and New Orleans for long periods,’ he says. ‘With no email, it was slightly difficult for newspaper editors to contact me. And with no streaming, I always had to lug a great collection of CDs and books around. But I had the good fortune to live in certain places, either just before they became cool or when they were at their peak coolness. For example, Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach [Los Angeles] was voted the coolest block in America in 2012. Needless to say, from precisely that moment on, it began to go downhill. A friend said despairingly that it was now just one iteration away from a branch of Prada opening.’
NEW FORMS OF PARADISE
Today, our understanding of travel has radically changed. In some ways, Dyer thinks of this moment as ‘the paradise we’ve dreamed of all our lives’. It’s now so easy and acceptable to work remotely with digital tools, while Airbnb allows you to rent places effortlessly and (sometimes) cheaply.
‘Except it’s not quite the paradise it seemed,’ Dyer admits. ‘My friends who live right in the centre of Naples and can’t imagine living anywhere else say they might have to move when their current lease expires because they can’t afford it. Everyone wants to live like locals and, as a result, the locals can’t live there.’
Dyer sees this as a somewhat ironic reversal. In Florence, for example, people used to complain about the kind of cruise ship tourists who wanted to see everything in a day. They’d come, eat a sandwich and leave. Now the complaint is the opposite – it’s about people staying too long.
‘In this kind of scenario, the host cities are the victims and the tourists are viewed as a kind of cross between a plague of locusts and shiploads of pillaging Vikings,’ he says. ‘In other words, they’re the ones to blame. But actually the places themselves, whose population benefits economically from tourism, are also to blame.’
These complaints from the hosts go hand in hand with claims about the so-called Disneyfication of places such as Florence – but Dyer believes that the selling of themselves and their city’s charms is often homegrown rather than imported. And in some cases, it pre-dates Disney by a very long time.
‘The [tourist] tax levied by Venice seems like another increment of what has always been one of Venice’s great skills: squeezing money out of anyone who sets foot there,’ he says. ‘So there’s a reciprocity of blame.’
SOCIAL SATURATION
Another platform that gets a lot of blame is social media. People have always taken pictures of beautiful places and these pictures make others want to go there. But for Dyer, the acceleration and intensification through Instagram – where a restaurant becomes a destination not because of the food but because of the photos – makes that process almost pathological.
‘You can see it in cities around the world,’ he laments. ‘A particular restaurant, unremarkable in every way, has such vast queues of people you think it must be a pilgrimage site with mystical healing powers. And it is a pilgrimage site, of course, but it has sickening powers.’
While it may have once been possible to distinguish between being a traveller (good) and a tourist (bad), Dyer thinks that distinction has been almost entirely eroded – unless you travel to somewhere that’s not even worth going to. And yet there’s no need for that, given how many great places there are to see.
‘Take, for example, the American national parks,’ he says. ‘We see pictures of them from an early age. We hear lots about them and if we’re lucky, we visit them ourselves. The Grand Canyon has a massive reputation and yet no-one who goes to the Grand Canyon is ever disappointed. It fully lives up to its awesomeness – as does Angkor Wat or Pompeii. I must have been to Venice 30 times, and every time I go, it blows my mind. And I’m not just referring to the incredible price of a second-rate spaghetti vongole.’
For Dyer, one of the lessons of travel is what he admits is a rather banal one. It reminds us that, in spite of the amazing variety, we have so much in common. Most of the people on this planet have no more intention of harming you than you do of harming them. People the world over are surprisingly nice.
‘I’m not naive,’ he says. ‘Of course, it would have been extremely foolish to have turned up in Fallujah or Grozny a few years ago expecting avocado toast and a cordial welcome. But given the amazing disparities of wealth, given that when you go out from your hotel in Bombay or Manila, say, you’re regularly passing people in the street who own less in total than you’ve stashed away in the safe of your hotel room – when you do that, isn’t it amazing, not just that you’re not robbed, but that you’re not eaten? Isn’t that an incredible tribute to what a safe place this endangered world of ours is? Doesn’t that make you want to get out and see more of it – and more of them – both the planet and its inhabitants?’
While it might be easier than ever to go to certain places, other places have become out of bounds. (‘I haven’t done the maths, but I suspect there are slightly more places in the world now that you can’t go to than there were 20 years ago,’ he says.) If it’s not due to war, it’s down to the bigger issue of climate change, which will lead to another reversal: southern Europeans escaping the summer by travelling north, as opposed to northerners travelling south.
And yet the desire to see the world remains a deep human urge. At the same time, Dyer believes that ‘the wonders of this world are as wonderful as they ever were’. ‘Like everyone, I love watching footage from space probes sent to explore Mars or Jupiter,’ Dyer says. ‘But the truth is that, aesthetically, none of these planets come within a million miles of our own. Bits of Arizona are excellent stand-ins for Mars. And in addition, we have pyramids, tropical rainforests, stunning cities, ruined temples and all the rest.’
Still, if there’s one place he’d love to go, it would have to be to the Moon. Why? ‘Because you’d get the most stupendous view of Earth.’
