Geoff Dyer on China’s can-do spirit, Clint Eastwood’s squint and Forbidden City romance

Geoff Dyer’s appearance at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival next week will not be his first book event in China. The British writer has visited mainland China for readings and signings, including Beijing and Shanghai this year. Dyer describes his China experience with a bittersweet sense of comedy that fans will recognise instantly.

“I had loads of people wanting their books signed,” he says. “I was getting that nice feeling, which I really enjoy, of thinking, ‘I am big in China.’ I am strutting around, Billy Big Bollocks, thinking, ‘I put this sorry-a** country on the map.’

“Then I see a Chinese writer. She hasn’t got 200 people waiting to get their books signed. She’s got 2,000. I realise, I have a lot of readers in China because there’s an awful lot of people.”

The anecdote is classic Dyer, whom The Observer news­paper has called “the finest comic writer England has produced since Martin Amis in his pomp”. Place is vividly rendered, often through its relationship with art, and in the middle is Dyer himself, often cast as disgruntled punchline to his own joke. It is as if John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) had been reimagined by a jester.

Little wonder, then, that during an entertaining ramble of a conversation at Dyer’s home in west London, he uses travel to describe his writing. “As soon as you have a journey, you have automatic narrative interest,” he says. “I like that idea of the essay as an epistemological journey. You start with some sort of uncertainty or curiosity. At the end, you come to a destination or conclusion or under­standing that you didn’t have at the outset.”

At this moment, Dyer blinks as if he has emerged into blinding light. “What was the question? I can’t remember, but at one stage I thought that was an appropriate answer to it.”

This, too, is classic Dyer. His speech, an unpolished imitation of his obsessive and funny prose, revels in digression, with one idea sparking another and another and another. A Dyer answer may set out somewhere near the question, but often ends in a galaxy far, far away. It is not hard to imagine him talking for weeks without approaching a full stop.

Dyer has turned this capacity for distraction into an idiosyncratically pleasurable art form. His masterpiece, Out of Sheer Rage (1997), hilariously narrates his inability to write a book about D.H. Lawrence; Zona (2012), his wittily learned study of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s bewitching, impenetrable feature Stalker (1979), began life somewhere completely different.