SOURCE: “At the Going Down of the Sun,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1994, p. 22.

In the following review of The Missing of the Somme, Horspool finds shortcomings in Dyer's overreliance on existing sources, particularly Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and Dyer's scattered meditative approach to the subject.

The rituals of Remembrance Day are intended to commemorate the dead of both World Wars, but Geoff Dyer, though he has lived through neither, is not alone in identifying those rituals—and the act of remembrance itself—overwhelmingly with the First World War. The Great War is still for him, in Wyndham Lewis's phrase, “the turning-point in the history of the earth.” The Missing of the Somme is projected as a meditation on remembering the War, and on its literary and artistic legacy, which lasts even to today (though Dyer has what he recognizes as a recurring fear...