Zona - review

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
by Geoff Dyer
(Canongate, £16.99)

In Zona, Geoff Dyer walks the reader through a famously arduous, highly influential film - Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction opus, Stalker - which we experience as if Dyer's eyes and ears were ours. You could read his short book in half the time it takes to watch the near-three-hour movie, which is about the enigmatic journey a trio of middle-aged men take through a derelict zone in the Russian countryside.

More in the spirit of things, though, might be slowing your reading pace down to a long-take Tarkovskyan trudge, savouring the digressions and treating it as a real-time travelogue.

The film takes its title from the character of a guide, who's responsible for leading this glum expedition to a room where fulfilment of life's ultimate desires awaits. In navigating us through it, and explaining what draws him back again and again, Dyer becomes a Stalker in his own right, re-enacting a quest whose goal is stamped indelibly on his psyche.

Dyer admits that his relationship with Stalker wasn't love at first sight. Watching it when it first came out, he confesses that he was "slightly bored and unmoved" but somehow unable to shake it off, which must be a very common reaction to Tarkovsky's work.

Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1969), even the endurance test that is Solaris (1972) all provide clearer analytical checkpoints than Stalker, a film that superficially invites allegory while making it very hard to stick. Interpretively speaking, it's like a donkey that keeps moving while you're trying to pin the tail on.

This is all part of its cult fascination. Tarkovsky insisted during his film's bedevilled, nearly-abandoned production that the conventional trappings of science-fictional narrative had to be stripped down to a minimum. It belongs to the genre not so much physically as philosophically; as Dyer puts it, "tremors from the future can be felt throughout".

The broken, bombed-out quality of the landscape eerily foreshadows the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Dyer speculates, not altogether implausibly, that photographs of the reactor's ravaged surroundings may have been tacitly informed by memories of this film's aesthetic, so that it could be said to have "helped generate and shape the observed reality that succeeded it".

If there were a David Foster Wallace club for eloquent footnotes, Dyer would be one of its most esteemed members by now. This has excellent ones on the Gulag, his father's terror of overpriced choc-ices on holiday, Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010), the resemblance between his wife and Natascha McElhone in Soderbergh's remake of Solaris (2002), quicksand, the notion of the miraculous, vacillating about dog ownership, and his loathing of Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009), which he finds utterly repellent and silly, while also being an authentically crafted tribute to Tarkovsky's film-making.

Zona, for its part, is the rare book that respects the mystery of a film without feeling obliged to dismantle it. Slogging through Stalker in Dyer's company is a playful kind of pilgrimage.