Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

become a subscribe
/ find a job
supporter
news
/ opinion
/ sport
/ arts
/ life

books
/
music
/
tv & radio
/
art & design
/
film

Books

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review

A very English dissection of Tarkovsky's Stalker

From Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, 1979. Photograph: BFI

Sukhdev Sandhu
Thursday 16 February 2012 09.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

A mong the many tributes that the film critic J Hoberman received after he
was fired by the Village Voice last month came one from a former student named
Matt Singer. Now a writer and TV host, he compiled a list of the most important
things he'd learned from a seminar Hoberman had taught as a side gig at New York
University. It contained a good deal of sound advice – "Watch for excess words. If
there's a shorter word, use it"; "Vent your spleen. In criticism, it's better to be angry
than depressed" – but the most basic and important message was this: "Plot synopses
automatically ruin a review."

Rightly or wrongly, the synopsis is regarded as one of the lowest forms of writing. Two-
thirds of the way into Zona, his characteristically singular book about Andrei
Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), Geoff Dyer declares: "There are few things I hate more than
when someone, in an attempt to persuade me to see a film, starts summarising it."
Doing so has the effect of "destroying any chance of my ever going to see it". It's a
surprising assertion – though less so if you're familiar with Dyer's books which,
whether they're about jazz, the first world war or DH Lawrence, go out of their way to
fuse form and content in arresting fashion – because Zona is one long movie summary,
a shot-by-shot rewrite.

With a running time of just over 160 minutes Stalker is itself a long movie. Alongside
Solaris (1972), it's the Russian film-maker's best-known work, tracking an arduous
journey in which a middle-aged man known simply as the Stalker leads the Writer and
the Professor through a militarised wasteland into a territory named "the Zone'", at the
heart of which lies "the Room" that is said to grant the deepest wishes of anyone who
steps inside.

Loosely based on a 1971 novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, it's a
science-fiction-tinged story whose apocalyptic setting and general hazards (gunfire,
underground tunnels, sodden waterways), to say nothing of its quest motif, prefigured
modern-day computer games. So much so that in 2007 a Ukrainian company issued a
first-person shooter game entitled S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that was partly inspired by it.

With its cast of shaven-headed men who resemble Gulag inmates, its blasted
topographies and its posing of fundamental questions about human happiness,
Tarkovsky's film has often been interpreted as an allegory of life under communism.
Dyer, who has diligently ploughed through a great deal of the critical commentary
Stalker has inspired, not only flags up that particular reading, but draws attention to
how it can be seen as a prophetic work that anticipates the zones of exclusion drawn up
in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

But Dyer, for all his chafing against the parochialism of what passes for intellectual
culture in this country, and even though many of his essays and books are set abroad,

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

has always been an English writer. This expresses itself in the tone of Zona, so that, as
much as he portrays the Stalker and his companions as metaphysical pioneers, they also
come across as stumbling chumps straight out of the pages of Jerome K Jerome's Three
Men In A Boat.

Equally, though there are ample references to Merleau-Ponty, Žižek and Heidegger,
these are offset – or complemented – by stray putdowns of Jeremy Clarkson ("The Zone
is a place of uncompromised and unblemished value. It is one of the few territories left
where the rights to Top Gear have not been sold") and casually entertaining footnotes,
one of which quotes Mick Jagger's thoughts about Jean-Luc Godard with whom he'd
just finished working on Sympathy for the Devil: "He's such a fucking twat."

Some readers may find these riffs and asides more whimsical than enlightening. Some
might be wondering too if Dyer's ever-evolving genius for comic writing now leaves him
no time or desire to pursue the bruised lyricism that lit up earlier works such as The
Colour of Memory (1989) and Paris Trance (1998). What's certainly true is that
hardcore cineastes weaned on, say, David Bordwell's cognitive film theory will find
Zona a little undercooked. Would Dyer care? If his characterisation in Out of Sheer
Rage (1997) of academic criticism as wilfully sterile onanism is anything to go by, I
suspect not.

For myself, I think it's rather wonderful that he is writing about Tarkovsky in a manner
that is as colloquial as it is learned. Dyer rescues him from the clutches of the arthouse
crowd, depedestalises him, draws connections between the ruined landscapes in Stalker
and the brambly, abandoned train station at Leckhampton, near which he grew up in
the 1960s.

At a time when David Cameron appears to regard The King's Speech as the acme of
film-making, and any art that's remotely ambitious is derided as obscurantist or elitist
by middle England's cultural gatekeepers, it's especially important to stress that
interested film-goers can enjoy works more challenging than The Inbetweeners Movie.

It's equally pleasing to read Dyer speak up for the pleasures of watching films, not in
domesticated and tamed form on DVD, but at the cinema. Stalker itself, which is an
immersive experience as much as it's a visual spectacle, loses its magnetic force when
watched at home. Dyer talks about the "possibility of cinema as semi-permanent
pilgrimage site". He also claims "the Zone is cinema."

Beyond the book's bravura formalism and in spite of the suspicion that it could be
viewed as a highbrow take on live-blogging, it's Dyer's ability at moments like this to
make pilgrims of his readers and to lead them on a journey in search of truths about
love and about the nature of happiness that make Zona such an exhilarating
achievement.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

• Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts is published by Verso.

Topics

Books

Geoff Dyer
reviews

Reuse this content

View all comments >

more on this story

The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read - review

David A Bell on the Dreyfus affair told from the Catholic point of view

16 Feb 2012

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by

Simon Callow - review
David Edgar on an insider's view of the writer as actor

17 Feb 2012

Leon Trotsky by Joshua Rubenstein - review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

Sheila Fitzpatrick on how the revolutionary's life has risen to the status of a myth
17 Feb 2012

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd – review

Steven Poole on a first world war thriller trying to cover too many bases
17 Feb 2012

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil - review

17 Feb 2012

Crime roundup – reviews

17 Feb 2012

Pantheon by Sam Bourne – review

17 Feb 2012

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson - review

17 Feb 2012

most viewed

UK education media society law scotland wales northern ireland

world europe US americas asia ausralia africa middle eas cities

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

development

sport football cricket rugby union F1 tennis golf cycling boxing racing
rugby league

football live scores tables competitions results fxtures clubs

opinion columniss letters editorials

culture flm tv & radio music games books art & design sage classical

business economics banking retail markets eurozone

lifesyle food recipes health & ftness love & sex family women home & garden

fashion

environment climate change wildlife energy pollution

tech

travel UK europe US

money property savings pensions borrowing careers

science

professional

the observer

today's paper obituaries g2 weekend the guide saturday review

sunday's paper comment the new review observer magazine

membership

crosswords blog editor quick cryptic prize quiptic genius speedy everyman azed
weekend

video podcass

digital archive

culture › books › andrei tarkovsky

Sign up to our daily email

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]

Zona by Geoff Dyer - review | Books | The Guardian

Email address

Sign up

become a supporter
make a contribution
securedrop
solve technical issue

advertise with us
work for us
contact us
complaints & corrections

terms & conditions

privacy policy
cookie policy
digital newspaper archive

all topics
all contributors
Facebook
Twitter

© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/16/zona-geoff-dyer-review[8/21/2017 10:54:59 AM]