Roadside Picnic, Stalker and the Zone pt 2 of 3
The brothers Strugatsky
The second section of the novel Roadside Picnic ends on something of a cliff hanger.
Apart from the mystery men from Malta there is also a death and a birth.
Previously, Red has noted unhappily that Tender, the third of the group to go into the Zone, has a wife and children which complicates the issue of his selection. Now, as part three opens we are aware that Red is now in the same position as Tender - making the name itself have meaning. Red is forced to be Tender, clever.
And tender he is, firstly we see an easy sort of interplay between husband and wife, and then as he pets his daughter ‘Monkey’ the full extent of Schuhart’s filial feeling is revealed;
“Redrick carefully hugged the warm creature… and cuddled his cheek against the plump little cheek covered with silky golden fleece. “Monkey. My little Monkey. You sweet little Monkey you.””
However, it is not with his own family that we first glimpse the tender side of Red. It is in the way he deals with a fallen colleague. Rather than immediately addressing the events of the previous chapter, the new section opens with the resolution of what has clearly been an entirely different adventure - as Red and another man Burbidge are hiding from Police pursuit near a Graveyard. The use of the graveyard setting and the mysterious figure found within it suggest a faux Gothic just as the earlier chapter suggested neo-noir.
But this is momentary, Police lights flash and the extent to which Red represents the black market is finally revealed. The hiding from authority, the selling of illegally obtained goods and the poor conditions in which the townsfolk live, all suggest a resistant underclass. I am surprised that such a book was not suppressed.
This is re-enforced once Schuhart returns home, he lives in a fairly cheap apartment block full of nosey neighbours and fat men in vests. He eats a simple meal of fried fish, and must apologise for disturbing the people next door. Once he has unwrapped the swag from the Zone, the novel becomes (for a while) startlingly similar to the American ghetto thriller ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem’. There are directly comparable scenes, and the writing which shrinks down to a tight pulp style is much the same.
Recently the British writer, M. John Harrison evoked the ever changing zone and its artefacts in the excellent novel Nova Swing, the cover and narrative of which also nod back to the hard-boiled style of Roadside Picnic and Alphaville, whilst connecting to the contemporary Cyberpunk trend. Here however, Harrison makes the logical progression and deals with the Zone on a cosmic scale, in the form a gigantic (and enigmatic) spatial rift.
The writers of course are in on the pulp thriller joke, and (unlike the opening sections) furnish the tale with some fully Chandler-esque comedic descriptions, like this one; “Noonan… short, plump, and pink sill lucky, well-off, freshly washed and confident the day would bring no unpleasantness… Dick’s Peugeot was also plump, short, freshly washed and seemingly confident that no unpleasantness threatened it.”
Eventually (and for the sake of his daughter) Schuhart and two other companions enter the Zone one final time. It is also at this point that some critics have said the novel falls down. Bizarrely, one of these is Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris, the other science fiction novel adapted into film by Tarkovsky. Lem is no fool, yet he dismisses the latter section of Roadside Picnic for being too much of ‘a fairytale’.
This is true - indeed very much so, the last voyage into the Zone has obvious parallels with the Wizard of Oz and the adventures of Dorothy, the scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man. The Brothers know this - there is even a black dog in the book. But Lem chooses to ignore what is obvious in the first section, that before throwing the metal nuts around to determine where not to tread, Red notes the tactic is ‘Hansel and Gretel in reverse’. The dangerous objects in the Zone include such notable devices as ‘Witches Jelly’. There are sly references too to Baba Yaga and Rumplestiltskin. I suppose it is possible that the translation has emphasised these elements but that seems unlikely.
journey to oz - one road or another.
In any case for this reason, I found no jarring descent into make believe and faery fable.
Early on in the novel we are also introduced to the fact that the Zone makes people talk - and talk a lot. As if given truth serum novices to the zone say whatever is on their mind and cannot in fact prevent it. Red finds this irritating and attempts to tune it out. However, this literal un-free freedom of speech is far from gibberish (which, Red notes at one pint, is what people type in offices). The characters reveal who are they are and ask contemplative, if rhetorical, questions. In the movie the characters are far less loquacious but their dialogue is intense and revelatory.
This may be the hardest section for a viewer simply because the philosophical dialogues require concentration - but it's worth it because what is being discussed is nothing less than Humanity and how it can choose to exist and acknowledge that existance, give it meaning and find meaning within it.
The Zone therefore acts as a clearing house, people are able to shed their previous personas - they are metaphorically naked, (indeed, in the film version they are not even named but are simply, Stalker, Professor and Wriiter, three parts of Tarkovsky himself perhaps) each therefore coming to the kingdom of heaven as a child. (The climax of the novel Roadside Picnic offers a spectacularly cruel twist on this analogy).
The idea of a space in which there is a freedom from identity and consequent clarity of expression and communication is explored in other films such as Cocteau's Orphee and its offspring Goddard's Alphaville.
ceremonies of the horseman - Orphee and Alphaville.
Of course, Red never overcomes his conscious self identity in the frame of the novel - in fact, restating who he (thinks he) is destroys his ability to use the Wish Machine in any profound way.
This is the final time where his character is undermined and the blame is solely his. From a seeming Lemmy Caution / Rick Deckard type Red ends simply as a fatally trapped human animal.
Despite the humour of their presentation - The Brothers' novel is therefore much bleaker than the gloomily pictured Tarkovsky movie which ends far more ambiguously and with the emphasis on more than simply the protagonist. I am not sure whether the description of the wishing machine as ‘a golden ball’ naturally implies a religious symbolism I would leave that to individual interpretation. A potentially religious meaning was obviously seen by Tarkovsky however since he presents the journey as a quasi-pilgrimage*, with the Stalker actively quoting the Bible and discussing the lack of Faith in the world. The journey changes the three holy fools into the guise of the three wise men seeking the star. On the other hand, hardly the most didactic of film-makers, Tarkovsky leaves the conclusion ambiguous. The wishing machine becomes a sort of chamber, it is unclear whether the characters make use of it - indeed their waiting outside is indeterminate - I was reminded of Kafka’s The Castle where the young official seeks entrance to an eternally distant symbol of the Kingdom, and in much the same fashion, the story told within Kafka’s Trial about the door to the Law and the eternal waiting outside it.
end of part two.
*which of course is one way to view Solaris, also.
erk! i hope this is all making some kind of sense!?!