Zona

Silk Stalkings

Zona
By Geoff Dyer
Canongate Publishing
ISBN: 9780857861672

Um… I have no idea who Geoff Dyer is… other than that he’s the writer of this novel, Zona, unofficially subtitled on this paperback edition as A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, plus a fair few other novels which I may or may not have the time/opportunity to read in whatever duration is left to me in this lifetime. Since I have no idea who this chap is you may, or quite possibly may not, be wondering how I came by this literary treasure. Well…

I was in the BFI shop on the South Bank to take the opportunity to catch their two for £25 “UK Criterion” sale (plus my x% off BFI membership discount) to upgrade a few of my more ‘upgradeable’ US Criterion DVD classics. So I picked Sword Of Doom, even though I remember the ending being a little too abrupt for comfort (which is about the only thing I do remember about it, to be honest) and another of one of my favourites by my second favourite director Andrei Tarkovsky (running a close second to movie God Akira Kurosawa, of course), namely Stalker. And then something caught my eye while I was half shuffling to the vicinity of the cash register and scanning the list of extras on the back of the Tarkovsky film… I noticed it had a commentary track by somebody called Geoff Dyer, author of Zona. Since this novel sounded like something very much to do with Stalker, a film I have been championing and heralding to my friends since I first saw it sometime in the early 1980s (or possibly late 1970s, my mind is not what it used to be), I thought I’d best make enquiries.

So I did that annoying customer thing and asked the cashier if he had this book, I pointed passionately at the listing on the extras and asked if he knew anything about said potentially cine-literate masterpiece and, much to my surprise (I freely admit) he took me to a displeasingly un-dusty bookshelf and pulled said tome from its ‘way too clean and far from the romantic vision of a dusty bookshop’ housing and there you have it. A book which, on its back cover, had me reeled in straight away as it not only mentioned it was a journey through Tarkovsky’s classic but also, at some point in this volume, mentioned three way sex. So it was bound to get, not only my attention but the attention of my trusty credit card, buckling under the weight of years of film related purchases.

So I took it on holiday with me and in I plunged into what is, in some ways, the print based equivalent of a highly personalised and highly irreverent commentary track for the film in question. It’s a curious piece because, although the writer is clearly a devotee of the movie (quite understandable, it’s a great work of cinematic art) it’s done with the kind of fashionable irreverence that horror hostess with the mostest Elvira might bring to one of her well written routines about various horror and sci-fi B movies over the years.

Now, I’m going to state here for the record that, despite being hugely entertained and fascinated by Zona, I don’t 100% agree with some of this stuff Dyer says in this sideways summary of a novel. That being said, he pretty much had me from the start in that I was very pleased to see that the author, like me, much prefers Antonioni's Red Desert over what he describes as "the pure cinematic agony" of L’Avventura. So straight away we had some common ground there. And then he said of watching this great director that…

"At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last - and no one can concentrate on anything - for longer than about two seconds."

… well, this did at the very least show that the writer and I did share similarities (in some ways… not so much on others).

It is however, an entertaining read and covers any number of, sometimes quite tangential topics such as the wisdom of Milan Kundera, the words of Albert Einstein, The Italian Job and even knowledge gleaned from Enter The Dragon. The references and comments do get quite autobiographical and personal at some points but it’s always handled in a light and witty manner.

There were some moments, however, when I did heartily disagree with Dyer’s asides…

Such as when he dismisses Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist… a film I can’t remember that well which is actually dedicated to Andrew Tarkovsky and which I was perhaps a little disappointed with on it's release due to much hyped expectations of the final product… as a nonsense and diminution of cinema, citing it as a film which doesn’t really have much to say and which doesn’t go anywhere. I mean, I completely respect that this is the author’s personal response to this movie but it seems, at best, a mildly contradictory view to someone who had, in an earlier stage of the book, highlighted  Flaubert's ambition to write a novel which is free from story content and instead exists as its own phenomenom resting primarily on the style of its words as something which he can relate to, especially as filtered by Tarkovsky’s way of shooting a movie.

I also don’t agree with Dyer’s assertion that it’s extremely unlikely you can discover your favourite film or expand your cinematic horizons after a certain age, although I can certainly appreciate the logic that lead him to that conclusion.

All this being said, though, the book is full of some wonderful observations and pondering of no small value during pub gatherings.

For instance when he talks about the age of the dial phone being some kind of golden era when the index finger was afforded a dominant position in society. A dominance which has been completely superseded by the age of the thumb as the most important digit for modern day living, being as we are in the age of the mobile phone and the new dawn of social media. Although, I have to admit that the scene which prompts this observation is the moment which I personally find to be the most powerful in Tarkovsky’s movie… when the three main protagonists are cut off in ‘The Zone’ and you realise the telephone has, impossibly, been ringing for a while. For Dyer, this sequence appears to be more of a comic interlude than the powerful and somehow terrifyingly potent signifier of a strange, alien presence within The Zone, it seemed to me.

However, any suspicions I began to harbour at this point that Dyer was less of sound mind than I at first perceived, was instantly made right again when he identified that the most common regret for most middle aged or older men is that they’ve never had a threesome with two women. This seems about spot on to me and so, with this common sense conclusion, the writer’s intelligence was firmly re-established for this particular reader.

Geoff Dyer’s Zona is an absolute ‘must read’ for cinephiles and, in particular, those who have a passion for the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. I might add that a knowledge of the film in question, the wonderful Stalker, is… while not an absolute necessity, certainly going to give you a much richer reading experience than if you go into this blind. That being said, I’m sure those of you who don’t know the movie as well as the rest of us will still enjoy the witty observations that the writer makes available to his audience. A definite, unmissable book shelf item for me, at any rate.