Geoff Dyer wrote the “The Missing of the Somme” in the ’90s. In the book is evident Dyer’s essay on memory and the First World War.

The book opens by describing an old family album—“Every family was touched by the war and every family has an album like this”—and moves on to general reflections on the photography, memorials, and literary testaments of the war. Dyer operates like a historian in reverse; he says that “the Great War urges us to write the opposite of history: the story of effects generating their cause.”

Dyer accesses to the Great War through art, reportage, and myth. Through the collation of art and history, “The Missing of the Somme” articulates its true subject: the remembrance and representation of war. “The issue,” Dyer writes, “is not simply the way the war generates memory but the way memory has determined—and continues to determine—the meaning of the war.” Dyer penetrates through layers of memory—memory of a war that, unlike the one that followed it, often seems meaningless.

Dyer wanted to write a book that was not about the War itself but the effect of the idea of the War on his generation. Looking at WWI in this way, Dyer is always searching for “what is not there” to impose meaning retrospectively, and perhaps even to alter history.  Dyer’s accomplishment is not to convey facts but to comprehend the ways in which wartime memory is used and abused, corrupted and constructed, fought against and submitted to.

The Missing of the Somme is an important book for later generations whose task it will be to reflect on the wars of the previous century. It is a powerful display of human compassion; if the physical monument to the missing of the Somme acknowledges the missing soldiers, Dyer finds a worthier place for them in our imagination.