SOURCE: “Track Events,” in New Statesman and Society, November 26, 1993, pp. 46–47.

In the following review, Jukes offers a generally positive assessment of The Search, but finds shortcomings in the novel's film noir style.

Three factors weight very heavily in Geoff Dyer's favour. His first book, a critical biography of John Berger, showed him to be one of the few younger writers taking on Berger's tradition of experiment. His second, The Colour of Memory, was effectively a critical biography of a generation. Of all the hyped novels about 1980s London it remains one of the most genuine. And his third, But Beautiful: eight improvisations on jazz, a genre-defying book. With Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, it shows a way out of the dead ends of conventional fiction.

The only problem with such a persistently inventive list is how to add to it, and The Search strikes out in yet another new...