From Roger Federer to Bob Dylan, a look at decline, comebacks and failing abilities

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer is not a book about tennis but about the ‘things one comes around to at last’
The author dives into the careers of notable names, and examines how life may unravel when greatness comes early and retirement happens young

Ageing society

Peter Neville-Hadley

Published: 4:00pm, 8 May 2022

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The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings, by Geoff Dyer. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Despite its title, Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer is not a book about tennis, but rather, as the 63-year-old writer of other equally hard-to-classify non-fiction puts it, about “things one comes around to at last, late in the day, things one was in danger of going to one’s grave without having read or experienced”.

Much of the work is in very short sections, resembling a scrapbook of ideas around this topic. It’s a wide-ranging meditation on decline, on comebacks and on failing abilities, including the failing ability to detect one’s own failing abilities.

So far, so glum. But Dyer’s outlook is mostly matter-of-fact and overall one of irritable positivity. He’s often drily humorous, and at times elegiac.

The book is also about the impossibility of knowing when repeatedly reluctant joints, spine or neck will finally insist that last week’s regular tennis game was, in fact, the last. It’s about too how life may unravel when greatness comes early and when retirement happens young.

There were Battle of Britain fighter pilots grounded at 20 simply for having improbably survived to that age, and for whom life was never as exciting again. For footballer George Best, it was all over at 26 (although there was an 18-month comeback).

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Dyer’s observations of the everyday – the realisation that the contents of a book recently read have already been forgotten, the concern for how to make the best of remaining time – will have those of a similar age leaping from their chairs in shocked recognition at his precise capturing of entirely familiar niggling worries, regrets and states of mind (if their leaping days are not already over).

As Dyer points out, there’s an overall lack of control over circumstances even among those who attempt to manage their decline.

“You plan carefully, do everything correctly and then, at some point, something unpredictable, random, and entirely unforeseeable happens. You fix it. You continue on until the next setback […] You make all this effort, go to all these lengths, and then at some point, whatever you have done, you run out of options. You run out of life.”

Geoff Dyer’s outlook in his book is mostly matter-of-fact and overall one of irritable positivity. Photo: Getty Images

The book’s perspective is distinctly male, with Dyer’s preferences and prejudices at its core, including a taste for occasional experimentation with drugs and a shoulder-mounted chip about the British class system.

There’s much on the career arcs of tennis players and boxers, but also those of favoured writers, composers, artists, jazz musicians and rock stars: Martin Amis, Tennyson, Keith Jarrett, Wagner, John Coltrane, Jack Kerouac and many more.

Much space is given to the apparently never-to-retire Bob Dylan, long past his prime in performance. As Dyer explains tartly, “People go not to see Bob Dylan but to have seen him.”

Dyer’s observations also include the Battle of Britain fighter pilots grounded at 20 simply for having improbably survived to that age, and for whom life was never as exciting again. Photo: Getty Images

There’s also material on quitting large projects, which leads into thoughts on whether Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (published between 1951 and 1975) is actually funny.

“Neither witty nor entertaining except in that passing-the-time sort of way that is almost synonymous with wasting time, it seemed entirely devoid of merit.”

And nor is Robert Musil’s substantial The Man Without Qualities (1930) worth the effort. Nor Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time (1913), at 1,267,069 words, is the longest novel that exists.

Much space is given to Bob Dylan, pictured here at Hyde Park on July 12, 2019. Photo: Getty Images

Some of these, he concludes, should have been tackled when he was in his 20s. “Strange, the way it was easier to read difficult books when one knew less about books and reading.”

Late in the book is passing mention of a recent minor stroke, which perhaps spurred the title. But Dyer is here to stay.

“I’m not knocking on heaven’s door any time soon. I’m not going anywhere but if I were I’d be going out on my shield even if the shield, in my case, is a desk.”

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Defining his retirement would anyway be difficult. “If part of the job is sitting in a chair at home with your feet up, reading, then the difference between work and retirement is imperceptible.”

Dyer, although self-admittedly a curmudgeon, fails to mention the late-life pleasure of being insistently grumpy, but perhaps that’s because he didn’t wait until later life to indulge himself.

He does write about the dangers of becoming grand in old age, and Post Magazine would have liked to have asked him more about this, but none of several requests for an interview was graced with a reply.

A lost opportunity to hit the ball back over the net while he still can.