Geoff Dyer’s classic The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly, unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, he examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.
The Missing of the Somme (Vintage)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A lyrical meditation on memory and the meaning of World War I. . . . [A] thoughtful and thought-provoking pilgrimage through the war’s bibliography and battlefields. . . . Illuminate[s] how thoroughly memory and history are interwoven with literature.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[A] strange and wonderful meditation on the cultural legacy of World War I. . . . The Missing of the Somme shows us that stark simplicity isn’t the only way to talk about war. . . . [It is] a lovely, alive work.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The Missing of the Somme . . . looks back at the unfathomable destruction of [World War I] through the fogged, distorted lens of collective memory, which can only deteriorate further with the passing of time. . . . How do we bring ourselves to acknowledge such awful events? And what purpose do memorials really serve? They are, Dyer implies, inherently insufficient.”
—The Boston Globe
“Fresh and often unsettling. . . . Sophisticated and nuanced. . . . Quirky but often brilliant. . . . The timing could not be more appropriate. . . . For Americans, as for Britons, memory of World War I is now entirely a matter of secondhand information. Only the films, books and monuments remain. Dyer poignantly and at times playfully examines the way these objects shape his countrymen’s mental picture of what happened between 1914 and 1918. . . . As [his] meditation on remembrance demonstrates, reminders of the past do have a life of their own, shaping and reshaping the vision of history we carry in our minds. . . . The Missing of the Somme will not disappoint [Dyer’s] fans.”
—The Kansas City Star
“[An] instant classic. . . . Dyer supports his point with an impressive survey of poems, letters, memoirs, and novels, combined with a perceptive analysis of British war memorials, and utilizing extensive citations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Brilliant. . . . The great Great War book of our time.”
—The Observer
“Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“[A] penetrating meditation upon war and remembrance.”
—The Daily Telegraph
“No contemporary writer blends genres like Geoff Dyer.”
—Time
“A loving book . . . about mourning and memory, about how the Great War has been represented—and our sense of it shaped and defined—by different artistic media. . . . Its textures are the very rhythms of memory and consciousness.”
—The Guardian
About the Author
Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, a critical study of John Berger, and five other books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. He lives in London.
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More About the Author
Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and six other nonfiction books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. The winner of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award, Dyer is a regular contributor to many publications in the US and UK. He lives in London. For more information visit Geoff Dyer's official website: www.geoffdyer.com
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed."
August 11, 2011
By K. M.
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
In The Missing of the Somme (Vintage), Geoff wrote an essay of 130 pages. No real chapters, just double-spaced breaks with italicized headings as he transits from one related theme to another. To make his points the author cites numerous quotations from Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Isherwood and others. Photos of statues and stone war memorials, including the two massive white pylons of the Vimy Ridge Canadian tribute to 11,285 native sons who were counted as "missing," scatter the text. Dyer also compares a desolate painting by Caspar David Friedrich with a photograph of a bombed wasteland; in each one man stands as if he were the last human being on earth.
The British author links himself in with his forebears...in particular his grandfather who enlisted in 1914 and served as a driver of horse-drawn vehicles on the Somme but who fortunately lived to the age of 91 instead of falling and never again rising from the blood-soaked earth. Dyer proposes that his grandfather's contemporaries embraced an ideal that made " 'a virtue of calamity' " and dressed up " 'incompetence as heroism,' " as exemplified earlier by the failed Scott expedition to the South Pole and then by the unbelievable loss of life in the trenches of the war.
When armistice came, Europe set about building vast cemeteries for those who could be identified and for those who were "missing" or unidentifiable. Dyer and three companions visited the Western Front/Somme and he expressed his thoughts about them. Among the chosen sites was the French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette where 45,000 named and unnamed are honored. Pressing onward to three "tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge," they then viewed the aforementioned Vimy Ridge where the Canadian missing Great War soldiers' names are all engraved. The allies, the victors, made a conscious decision to record for posterity the names of all the confirmed dead and the missing.
This pilgrimage of Dyer's actually took place in the early 1990's (this Vintage edition is a reprint; the first edition was copyrighted in 1994) and was not the only one he embarked upon. He visited many memorial sites, including Thiepval where there were names of his own family on the markers.
Dyer's impressions of the sites are always vital and full of insights, but the somber travelogue represents a relatively small percentage of the essay. The author's ruminations are more broad-based. His fine, point-laden prose touches on so many aspects of memorializing the Great War. He teaches history, sociology, philosophy, and art appreciation, among other things. But mostly, he reminds himself and his readers that no matter what human beings do after a devastating war, the real lesson learned should be: don't do it (go to war) because the losses outweigh the gains. Yet, human beings are not likely to take heed, and so there will be more military cemeteries with interred soldiers who gave their lives for some cause or demand.
And perhaps because these soldiers died prematurely, unfairly, violently, it is best to do what Dyer wrote about a register of graves and its elusive truths of the war dead: "I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed." Among those graves he wrote he'd never felt "so peaceful" and wondered "if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium...which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace."
THE MISSING OF THE SOMME tenders a unique and affecting meditation on war and its remembrance. I recommend this essay highly.
[4.5 stars]
The British author links himself in with his forebears...in particular his grandfather who enlisted in 1914 and served as a driver of horse-drawn vehicles on the Somme but who fortunately lived to the age of 91 instead of falling and never again rising from the blood-soaked earth. Dyer proposes that his grandfather's contemporaries embraced an ideal that made " 'a virtue of calamity' " and dressed up " 'incompetence as heroism,' " as exemplified earlier by the failed Scott expedition to the South Pole and then by the unbelievable loss of life in the trenches of the war.
When armistice came, Europe set about building vast cemeteries for those who could be identified and for those who were "missing" or unidentifiable. Dyer and three companions visited the Western Front/Somme and he expressed his thoughts about them. Among the chosen sites was the French cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette where 45,000 named and unnamed are honored. Pressing onward to three "tiny, beautifully located cemeteries at Redan Ridge," they then viewed the aforementioned Vimy Ridge where the Canadian missing Great War soldiers' names are all engraved. The allies, the victors, made a conscious decision to record for posterity the names of all the confirmed dead and the missing.
This pilgrimage of Dyer's actually took place in the early 1990's (this Vintage edition is a reprint; the first edition was copyrighted in 1994) and was not the only one he embarked upon. He visited many memorial sites, including Thiepval where there were names of his own family on the markers.
Dyer's impressions of the sites are always vital and full of insights, but the somber travelogue represents a relatively small percentage of the essay. The author's ruminations are more broad-based. His fine, point-laden prose touches on so many aspects of memorializing the Great War. He teaches history, sociology, philosophy, and art appreciation, among other things. But mostly, he reminds himself and his readers that no matter what human beings do after a devastating war, the real lesson learned should be: don't do it (go to war) because the losses outweigh the gains. Yet, human beings are not likely to take heed, and so there will be more military cemeteries with interred soldiers who gave their lives for some cause or demand.
And perhaps because these soldiers died prematurely, unfairly, violently, it is best to do what Dyer wrote about a register of graves and its elusive truths of the war dead: "I let them stand for themselves, their mystery and power undisturbed." Among those graves he wrote he'd never felt "so peaceful" and wondered "if there is not some compensatory quality in nature, some equilibrium...which means that where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace."
THE MISSING OF THE SOMME tenders a unique and affecting meditation on war and its remembrance. I recommend this essay highly.
[4.5 stars]
36 of 43 people found the following review helpful
By E. Filson
Format:Paperback
I must confess that I bought this book only because Geoff Dyer wrote it and he is my favorite author and I am a completist. I figured it was an early novel, something to give me insight into his development.
Imagine my disappointment when it arrived and I discovered it was History. Mind you, I love history (check the other reviews I've written), but I tend to find a subject and read everything I can about before I burn out and move onto something else and I really couldn't be bothered to develop a new fascination for the Great War with so many others still going.
A year later, on a whim, I brought the book with me on vacation and found myself in Paris dining alone after marching against the war. It was the first book in my bag that I grabbed and by the end of dinner I was getting all choked up and teary-eyed. By chance sitting not so far from the Somme with this book in my hands, thinking of a war not yet started, at the table in the corner, it was very affecting. But I think anyone who is interested in this perspective will find it moving whether in peacetime or war, in Nebraska or Tokyo or Egypt.
The book itself succeeds because it's not about numbers and casualties, but how we remember these struggles and how we forget them at the same time. It succeeds by placing the reader not in the conflict, something he/she could never know, but in his/her own seat: remembering that which wasn't experienced. To say more would be to demean the book and Dyer's superb writing so just read it.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you've ever wondered why it is you have a particular empathy with the soldiers of the first World War, especially of Flanders, this book is for you. It goes a long way towards explaining that peculiar fascination we have with the bravery of those who died, and how the details of this war, almost a hundred years later, can touch our hearts today in a way that nothing else can.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
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