In the race to be first in describing the lost generation of the 1980s Geoff Dyer in THE COLOUR OF MEMORY leads past the winning post. Were not lost one of his heros friends says were virtually extinct. It is a small world in Brixton that Dyer commemorates of council flat and instant wasteland of living on the dole and the scrounge of mugging which is merely begging by force and of listening to Callas and Coltrane. It is the nostalgia of the DHSS Bohemians the children of unsocial security in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage. Not since Colin MacInness CITY OF SPADES and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city. A low-keyed style and laconic wit touch up THE COLOUR OF MEMORY THE TIMES