J.R. Rain's SILENT ECHO

I don't even remember what the other offerings from the inaugural "Kindle First" selection were; as soon as I saw this pretty spiffy cover and read the blurb, I knew I wanted to read this, and soon!

Silent Echo is probably going to be marketed as mystery or crime fiction; I gather the other, J.R. Rain, is somewhat an established name in those genres, at any rate, and there is a mystery plot forming the novel's narrative backbone, but really, the mystery is the least interesting thing about the book.

The private eye tracking the killer - who turns out to be something of a serial killer, with signatures and weird motivations and the will to play games with the people trying to catch him and all -- is dying, you see. Of AIDS-related lung cancer. And it's not just a someday sort of dying; as the novel opens, Jimmy Booker has already lived two months beyond his prognosis, and is struggling every day to do basic things like get out of bed. Fortunately -- and this is where Silent Echo really stands out -- he has an amazing, selfless, generous and wise friend to help him through everything.

Numi, a Nigerian artist who has transplanted himself to Los Angeles and met Jimmy many years ago while Jimmy was investigating a case, skirts the "magical negro" trope for the most part, though he has moments. What saves him from just being one is the degree to which he has devoted himself to keeping his friend Jimmy alive; he's not a guru, not an impassive dispenser of wisdom, nor is he merely a helpmeet, though he is that as well. He is a kind and loving friend, who lets Jimmy occasionally act like a selfish jerk, calls him on it only very gently, helps Jimmy with even the most intimate of tasks, and has become the benevolent dictator governing who, in Jimmy's last days, gets to bother him.

A childhood friend of Jimmy's makes the cut, and that's where the murder mystery comes in; Jimmy's specialty is missing persons, and Eddie's wife (a sort of unlit old flame of Jimmy's as well) is missing, under circumstances that echo the missing persons case that started it all for Jimmy back when he was a teenager: the disappearance and murder of Jimmy's kid brother.

The plot, in other words, is dead simple, even a tad predictable, even given the twist of this being the detective's last ever case and one he can't investigate without an extraordinary amount of help. But this book is not to be read for the plot, it's to be read for the relationships, for the honesty and regret and bitterness and extraordinary (platonic) love and the chillingly plausible descriptions of what it feels like to be facing the very end of life, how a person's outlook and priorities change and how one real friend can make all the difference.

Quite a nice little read.

Ford Madox Ford's LAST POST

A lot of people -- including no less a figure than Dorothy Parker -- have bagged on this final novel in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End quartet, but Last Post might actually be my favorite of the sequence. And largely for the same reasons that Parker et al have found it an unsatisfactory read.

I suspect this is largely because everyone expects this last novel to just wrap up Chrissie and Valentine's love story -- which it does, sort of -- but Last Post throws a bit of a curve ball, if I may use an American baseball metaphor about this veddy veddy British novel. For Last Post is told almost entirely from the points of view of Parade's End's ancillary characters, particularly Chrissie's much older brother, Mark Tietjens. And Mark Tietjens had some kind of stroke or attack or idiopathic something* on Armistice Day, leaving him paralyzed and speechless, communicating with eye blinks alone.

Sharing internal narrative duties are his life-long lady love, the French actress he "took up" in a very businesslike arrangement early in his youth and only married after his idiopathic violent unknown event left her potentially financially vulnerable to the machinations of Chrissie, or, really, Chrissie's estranged wife, the magnificent and malicious Sylvia.
Marie Tietjens has only been obliquely referenced before this novel, but swiftly becomes a character whose experiences and perspectives are a pleasure to share, the only Tietjens-or-Tietjens-by-marriage who actually appreciates the thousand-some acres of Yorkshire, the famously massive cedar tree and the ancient grey house of Groby. Marie has long had her heart set on someday retiring to the French countryside, marrying some nice undemanding landholder, and ending her days as mistress of a nice old agricultural establishment; since the war put paid to that and so Groby becomes her paradise instead, where she does a nice job dealing with the chickens and the cider presses and doesn't seem to mind that she also has to minister to an invalid.

Marie's pleasure is contrasted with the displeasure of Sylvia's life-long tantrum, which in this last book takes the form of renting out Groby (control over which Mark and Chrissie turned over to her earlier in the quartet) to an insufferable rich American woman who entertainingly claims "spiritual descent" from Madame de Maintenon (but who keeps insisting Marie Antionette was mean to her. Um.) and who considers it to be rich Americans' job to take over for the ancien regime, not by replacing it with democracy, but by supplanting Europe's hereditary aristocracy like a brash young understudy edging out the aging prima donna.The fact that the unseen (for the whole novel!) Chrissie is now making his living selling off the prima donna's clunky old unwanted antique furniture to furnish the understudy's homes in America is an enjoyable irony on which no one in the story comments. The hereditary aristocracy, both Tietjens brothers have been seen to observe in these novels, is pretty much played out, exhausted, never really up to the task of governing the simpler pre-War world they ruled, let alone this complicated modern one everybody sees coming.

It all serves to comment somewhat bitterly, perhaps, on how completely things both have and haven't changed as a result of the Great War. Which is really, after all, what these novels are for, pitting as they do "The Last Tory", the "18th Century" Chrissie Tietjens against the 20th century. We don't have to do much thinking to figure out who's going to win that one.

It would thus be easy to dismiss Parade's End as so much reactionary harrumphing, but that would be an error. As I've mentioned, both Tietjens brothers come around to the idea that maybe the existence of a hereditary "administrative class" was never all that great an idea to begin with, so while neither of them is eager to embrace the new world they see coming, unlike the types that nowadays bray about being conservative, the brothers Tietjens are trying neither to hang on to power nor to use what power they do have to thwart progress. The world can go harum scarum if it wants; they're going to stay in their little corner of the 18th century and enjoy it while it lasts; it looks like it can last at least until the next generation is grown up. That, they seem to say as "Last Post"** is blown over the story, will have to do.

*A doctor describes what's wrong with Mark as "fulminant hemiplegia" which is one of those Latin terms that basically just describe what is wrong (in this case, extremely sudden paralysis of half of the body) in Latin and sheds no actual light on what is wrong. Various others in the novel -- including Mark's lover and later wife Marie -- seem mostly to regard this as something Mark chose, as his final withdrawal from the stupidities of early 20th century social life and his responsibilities therein. There may be an actual medical component to Mark's problem, they concede, but it could have been overcome or at least accommodated had he wanted to, but Mark's not even going to try to overcome it, and prefers his new life as someone to be waited on hand and foot and propitiated like a god.

**Sort of the British version of "Taps".

Dorothy Dunnett's CHECKMATE

There was a big part of me that did not ever, ever want to read Checkmate, because that would mean coming to the end of the Lymond Chronicles, and you only get one first read through of things and I didn't want my first read of these books to end, ever.

But... Since about halfway through the third or fourth book I knew I wanted to start the series over again because I obviously had missed some things, or missed the importance of some things, or misinterpreted some things and... look, I can see why some people call Dorothy Dunnett the only author you'll ever need, because it's obvious that many a reader could be perfectly happy just reading these books over and over again over a lifetime. And I might do that, though there's still the House of Niccolo series of which to partake, yet, too.*

In order to engage in either of those reading projects, though, I had to rip off the band-aid and let the Lymond Chronicles end for me.

And I gotta tell you, guys, I kind of wish I hadn't. But not for the reasons one might expect.

I'm not going to say that Checkmate is awful; it's still Dorothy Dunnett, still a Lymond novel, which means it's way, way better than 99.999999% of the books that have yet been, or ever will be written, but...

Gosh, I wasn't ready for this grand and elegant tale to descend into melodrama. And not just melodrama but the kind of melodrama in which the reader fantasizes about slapping the hero (as the hero's amazing mother, Sybilla Crawford, gets to do -- has to do -- at one point late in the novel) and heroine silly. Because both hero and heroine -- but especially the hero -- are being whiny little emo bitches.

Married to the awesome Philippa Somerville, who has been taking no crap from him for five novels now, since the end of the fourth novel (Pawn in Frankincense), Lymond has been sort of half-assedly trying to wiggle his way out of his marriage, assuming, for the most part rightly, that Philippa, who started out the Chronicles hating his guts, would probably rather be married to somebody else; they only tied the knot to preserve her reputation after she spent some considerable time as a (still undeflowered) part of the Ottoman Emperor's harem and had to travel some considerable distance with a lot of men who weren't related to her, but without a suitable female chaperon (unless you count the mysterious Crawford by-blow, Marthe, but you really shouldn't. Ever). As Checkmate opens, he is given an offer he can't refuse by the King of France, who dangles a divorce before Lymond's jaded eyes as an inducement to stick around and put his and his company's martial talents in the service of France against Bloody Mary's dear husband Philip of Spain. So of course he accepts.

But then...

But then circumstances first lead Philippa to realize she's had the hots for him all along, and then lead Lymond to reveal that he has also, at some point, realized that they're perfect for each other, which should be great but isn't because Emo Lymond has decided that passionate love is the worst possible basis for a marriage and is actually the worst and most destructive thing that can happen to two people (which, he has a point there, IMHO) and so he still insists on the divorce. He's got his next bride -- a high-ranking French heiress -- all lined up, and Philippa, in true Ugly-Duckling-to-Swan-by-way-of-Seraglio fashion has more suitors than can fit comfortably into a massive royal audience chamber, so really, they'll both be fine.

Except, of course, they're not fine, because they're in LURVE. And also because there is still all the untidy mess of Lymond's lineage and parentage and all of the enemies he's made around the world that are still alive and people who still insist on willfully misunderstanding him and his motives and gossiping about him and plotting to kill him (and his wife, too -- their escape from a whole passel of murderers early in the novel is one of the best scenes in all of these chronicles, exciting and ridiculous and hilarious and perfect in every way until Pip has to spoil it all by saying something stupid like "Francis, you fool. This is what you should be." Which, durr, but anyway.

But amid all that I'm complaining of, there are still some marvelous bits, like the aforementioned chase, and the reunion with Lymond and his readers of so many of his former sidekicks and helpers and partners in not-quite-crime. Archie Abernathy above all, but also Jerrot Blythe and Adam Blacklock and Alec Guthrie and... the list goes on. We even get to see Lymond's older brother and learn a thing or two about him we weren't expecting. I would not have been surprised at all to finally get another appearance of the entertaining and annoying Lady Agnes from The Game of Kings. Which is to say that narratively and in terms of character arcs, the loose ends mostly get tied up very well.

And there are seriously WTS moments like a visit to a possibly haunted house where the mysterious Dame de Doubtance once lived and told fortunes and collected alchemical and other junk. And so on.

But mostly what there is, is being annoyed at Lymond and Philippa, suddenly acting like teenagers continually inventing new excuses for being unhappy. And let me just say that these are two people who are very, very good at everything they do, so the excuses they generate for their continued misery are staggering, and more than a little icky.

So, like so many readers before me, I have terribly mixed feelings about this last volume of the Lymond Chronicles. Yes, it gives everything a proper and mostly happy ending, but if you're not a reader who gets off on "will they or won't they" "hurry up and make out already" drama, the path to that ending is a bit like, well, like this:




But yes, I still want to go back and re-read these books right from the beginning. Perhaps even more so than before I hit Checkmate, because I am longing quite passionately to hang out with Lymond while he was still awesome and enigmatic. Sigh.

*I actually started the first book of that series as a teenager, but got bored about 20% into it. I might again, but I'm far from being a teenager now; my tastes have changed, my attention span has grown, my knowledge of the period and appreciation of the mercantile/economic side of life have deepened, so I'm thinking maybe I'll actually enjoy it this time. We'll see.

Scott Lynch's THE REPUBLIC OF THIEVES

So, it's pretty well documented now that I really love Locke Lamora, and I've been eager to read more of his adventures. Especially since this new book, The Republic of Thieves, promised finally to let us get a first-hand look at the character whose absence has been such a presence in the first two books, Sabetha, the only female Gentleman Bastard. Or, I guess, the Token Lady Bastard.

Which is to say that this is where a lot could have gone wrong at this point in this series, in which Scott Lynch has so far managed to avoid incorporating anything dumb or cliched or annoying or infuriating; a Token Female could be the worst possible thing to happen in this universe, could deform and warp everything about it -- or, if handled right, could make the series even more awesome.

It's handled right. Oh, is it handled right. Because yes, Sabetha is beautiful. And super-accomplished. And super-smart. And all the male characters pretty much just want to fling themselves at her feet, the better to look up her skirt. But Sabetha deals with it the way a real heroine should. She acknowledges it, occasionally takes advantage of it, but mostly, she calls bullshit on it, clearly and distinctly. Especially where Locke is concerned. The more he declares his undying admiration and devotion, the more she skewers him for not acknowledging that she is a person in her own right who maybe never asked for said admiration and devotion and resents the idea that because he wants to give it to her, she not only has to accept it but has to in some way reciprocate it, or owes him something in exchange for it. Which, it turns out she does reciprocate it, which just makes her angrier at his presumption that his attentions are welcome. It's all very fraught, this Locke/Sabetha business.

We get to see all of this play out in three layers of storytelling. In the novel's present we get a sequel to the first two books, being the further adventures of Locke and Jean after their high seas heartbreak. Intercut with this is another extended flashback to the Gentleman Bastard's teenage years, when Sabetha was a part of their crew and Locke, Jean, Sabetha and the wonderful and much-missed Sanza twins were sent off to do a tour of duty treading the boards in a far-off city, there to perform in a deeply allegorical play called The Republic of Thieves, which, Gene Wolfe-style, forms a third layer of storytelling as bits of its plot and text are doled out at irregular intervals to serve as a sort of meta-commentary on what's going on in the two main plots.

Weirdly, though the stakes are higher in the "present" plot, it's the flashbacks that were my favorite. One could attribute this to the presence of the Sanza twins, but one would be wrong; Calo and Galdo are barely there, hardly even bit players in the theater troop drama that unfolds, as if Lynch having killed them off, can't bear to try to bring them back to life even in flashbacks now. They have some amusing moments, sure, but they're not very Sanza moments. No. The flashback plot is wonderful because of the Locke and Sabetha show, because of the drama attendant on a messed up theatrical troupe and the built-in tension that comes with any theater story: will they pull it off?

Of course, will they pull it off is also the question in the "present" plot. Red Seas Under Red Skies, you may recall, left Locke on the verge of a nasty and painful death by poison, a poison that had been administered by a nasty wizard to both Locke and Jean but for which one antidote existed, so of course Locke trick-forced said antidote on Jean. The Republic of Thieves picks up from there with a representative of the same enemy force that poisoned the Bastards offering to save Locke's life for a price: he and Jean have to come to their city and help fix an election for the amusement of the nasty wizards. With the extra catch being that both sides get help rigging said election, and the other side's mastermind is to be Sabetha, who will once again have to be twice as good as the males because she's actually up against two males.

That the resulting contest, while entertaining, turns out to have even higher stakes than originally appeared the case should come as no surprise to Lynch's readers. Something big has been building through all the books; the Elderglass strewn here and there in his realms is not just set dressing but clues to the destruction or flight (or both) of an ancient and powerful race of somethings that made/built the towers and bridges and walls still standing and usable in Locke's day. The nasty wizards haven't just been pursuing the Bastards for revenge. I now feel the need to re-read the first two books to see what other signs I've been ignoring or discounting as just background color for the Bastards' antics.

But that's going to have to wait. I never thought I'd ever say this, but I'm kind of Bastarded out for a while. Hmm.

Netflix Finds: Bela Tarr's THE WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES

Hungarian filmmaker BélaTarr has made something altogether wonderful in The Werckmeister Harmonies, a film in which a lot is going on but still doesn't have a lot of plot, a film which is meant to be watched and listened to and absorbed and yes, probably argued about, but not necessarily enjoyed for the narrative.

I would undersell it to describe it as a two and a half hour music video, but in some ways that's what it is, and what the title might almost make one expect; the work of Baroque era composer and musical theorist Andreas Werckmesiter is alluded to (negatively) but is not present in the soundtrack, replaced by Strauss' Radetzsky March, Bach's Prelude No. 8 in E-flat minor from The Well Tempered Clavier and, most importantly and thoroughly, a gloriously beautiful and haunting score by Hungarian composer Vig Mihaly, in which a simple and repetitive piano motif is amplified, possibly canonically (I'm no music theorist myself) by beautiful string arrangements that alternately meditate and weep and amplify the film's stateliness (if the film grabs you) or glacial slowness (which you'll complain of if it doesn't).

What story there is concerns a tiny village on the Hungarian plain, the kind that seems suspended in a strange 20th century timelessness until the spell is broken toward the end with the brief appearance of a modern helicopter in a vaguely (and slowed down) North by Northwest-ish chase scene. It's winter, or the start of winter, and the mercury has dropped to way below freezing; the season of "nothing to do but drink and fret" has begun. To liven things up of an evening, our sort-of-hero, Valuska János (Lars Rudolph) takes it upon himself to arrange the drunks in the town's only cafe into a living, staggering orrery to explain an upcoming eclipse (which, violating Chekov's gun rules, does not occur in the film except maybe in a very metaphorical sense).

But soon more interesting entertainments are on offer: a traveling circus! Tarr both does and does not partake of the "sinister carnival" motif we see so often in film with this: the circus consists of just two "acts": a taxidermy whale and a nasty non-character called "The Prince", alluded to but never seen, who allegedly has the "power of magnetism" but seems principally to exercise that power in the form of hate speech that has startlingly violent consequences.

All of this unfolds in 39 long and languid shots, sometimes several minutes long, that will either madden or entrance the viewer. The taxidermy whale arrives slowly in a giant corrugated metal crate and we watch its ponderous arrival in real time with János as the light ripples along the crate's surface. János puts one "uncle" to bed and prepares his house for nighttime, then goes out on a newspaper delivery "run" that's really more of a stroll. He pauses with another "uncle" (I think maybe "uncle" is an honorific for your elders in Hungary?) who expounds on his theories that Andreas Werckmeister's tuning theories have distorted the Music of the Spheres (which idea János sort of demonstrated in the cafe) and are why everything has gone wrong in the world. He meets with the theorist's estranged wife (Hanna Shygulla), who insists on János drafting the old man into doing something about the growing disturbance in the town the circus has touched off. A group of cudgel brandishing men slowly march to the facility they will do their best to destroy. Etc.

Really, for me, it's all about watching the light play on Shygulla's beautifully aging features, on the shadows and hollows created in Rudolph's face, and the rhythm of the film's dancelike movements to Vig Mihaly's amazing, amazing score.

Gene Wolfe's PEACE

On the surface, Peace seems the most quotidian Gene Wolfe novel I've yet read, but the surface is never to be trusted with this guy. Oh, no. This is very likely the most elusive, occlusive and deceptive writer ever.

And this is -- and I say this as a passionate fan of all 12 books of Wolfe's maddening Solar Cycle but especially of the Book of the New Sun -- one of his most remarkably elusive, occlusive and deceptive books. And also, and this is probably because of its quotidian elements, the most tantalizing, because grounded in ordinary reality, mostly, and thus promises a certain possible relative ease of interpretation.

Not that it delivers on same. Or at least, not very much. Ahh, Gene Wolfe.

So on the surface this is just the regretfully nostalgic meanderings of an old man who lived an idyllic and improbable (to the modern reader -- c.f. how I felt reading Philip K. Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory) early 20th century small town in the American midwest, with all the Normal Rockwellian pastoral pleasures and soda shop scenes that implies. Albeit with a slightly sinister flavor, in that there's an awful lot of death and talk of death. And of course there's the way the narrative skips around in time, which may just be a dotty old man free associating but may also be a bit of a Billy Pilgrim-unstuck-in-time thing. And you can totally just stop there and read Peace as Gene Wolfe's Slaughterhouse-Five. But...

But then you notice all these recurring themes. How every single story that our man Alden Dennis Weer (usually called Den, one of the many onomastic clues that led good old Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski to spin out a whole involved theory about how Peace is Wolfe's version-cum-inversion of Goethe's Faust, with Den as Mephistopholes) tells or is told has certain repetitive elements that fractally echo other parts of the story that all relate back to Den's childhood sin of pushing a little boy down some very dangerous stairs.

And then there's that ending. Not since I first read Infinite Jest have I felt so compelled to go back to the beginning of a novel and read the beginning again because only now did I finally have the clue I needed to understand what was going on there. Except Peace is not over 1000 pages long. It's not even 300. You can read that in a night.

And Bog help me, I did. Yep. For the first time ever in my life, I read a novel twice in a row, with not so much as a short story, poem or internet article in between. And when I got to the end, even after hours and hours of figurative light bulbs popping and exploding over my head, I was still somewhat tempted to start again from the beginning*. But, as you'll see shortly, I have other reading and blogging obligations in the offing, and none of them allow for re-reading a novel almost as old as I am.

There. I almost read a book three times in a row. If that's not a ringing endorsement, nay, command, to drop everything and go read Peace at your earliest opportunity, what is?

*Neil Gaiman has famously observed that he only realized that Peace is a horror story on his second reading. And while elements of horror and ghost stories were noticeable the first time around -- I was especially seized by the theme of humans slowly turning to stone while they were still alive (there's even a mention of the Cardiff Man hoax! Hooray!) and the whole creepy carnival theme that springs up in the novel's second half -- I still don't read it so much as a horror story in the sense that term is usually used. The horror is that of guilt realized, of atonement rendered as impossible as redemption. Peace is simultaneously the most ironic and most perfect of titles for this book.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's ROADSIDE PICNIC with remarks on Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER

I recently and for the first time* saw Andrei Tarkovsky's glorious lo-fi sci-fi (before that was much of a thing) adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Stalker, and loved it so much I watched it four times before I could bring myself to send it back to Netflix.** And it turns out that I love the source material just as much, which doesn't always happen with books-adapted-to-films. But then again, this is Tarkovsky doing the adapting.

The film is a stripped down version of the book, its trio of main characters deeply abstracted and Tarkovskified from the cast of Roadside Picnic, partly due to the constraints under which the director was working -- hence the low-fi part of the sci-fi, i.e. nothing near the special effects budget that would be required to render all of the alien artifacts and gadgetry the novel's characters encounter -- and partly because Tarkovsky, as always, had his own things going on. Like creating breathtaking underwater Cornell boxes while contemplating the bitter hilarity of our mortal existence:



But what's this all about, you're probably asking?

Roadside Picnic and its adaptation concern the aftermath of an alien stopover on Earth by beings so incomprehensibly different and presumably advanced that they might not even have realized (or cared) that this planet was inhabited by at least one species that presumes itself sentient. Like careless travelers stopping for a picnic lunch, the aliens left behind a fair amount of crap, to which we humans are drawn as ants are to the wrappers and napkins and food scraps human picnickers might leave.

But what crap it is, glorious and dangerous and mysterious and powerful and did I mention dangerous? As are the Zones themselves that were visited and contain the Alien Crap (a list of which can be perused over at Wikipedia but ware spoilers!), in which the laws of physics, life and death, etc. are profoundly different from those prevailing in the good old ordinary universe as we know it and may also change from time to time.

So of course humanity is studying it (carefully) at very high levels and of course at lower levels there is a black market in Alien Crap and in unauthorized trips to the Zones to acquire more Alien Crap and also to exploit some of its properties like the Golden Sphere (which in Tarkovsky's film is changed into a Room), which grants wishes! Hence the existence of folk like our main character (and the title character of the film), Red, who is a Stalker -- a guide into and smuggler out of the Zones, who starts off his career as an unskilled research assistant, takes up a line in Stalking to make a little beer money, and then, when he gets his girlfriend pregnant, realizes he's got to keep breaking the law to keep his new family in groceries.

So even though the novel has a lot more gee-whiz sci fi elements than the film did, it's still a bottom-up view of a world transformed by an alien visit; Red is a working stiff, not an eminent scientist or astronaut, something which critics have made much of when writing about this book over the years; this book, of course, predates the "high tech/low life" scenarios to which cyberpunk and its spawn have long accustomed us. But just as we never get tired of working stiff stories in other genres, there's still plenty of room for working stiff sci-fi, especially when it's this good.

Roadside Picnic manages to be a slightly farcical (in that dry, dark and Russian way) quest narrative, a meditation on how small and insignificant we very probably are in the universe, a family drama and a cautionary tale. With Alien Crap.

In other words, it's completely wonderful.

But what really keeps it intriguing is the novel-world's central mystery: is there an overall, coherent, logical system behind all the Alien Crap and how it works, as in did the Brothers Strugatsky plan it all out and develop it as a complete puzzle for us to solve -- one with a solution -- or is it just a whole bunch of weird phenomena that they thought would be cool and just brainstormed one night over, say, some mushroom tea a la Babylen and Andrei in the fantastic Generation P (an adaptation of some more amazing Russian science fiction, my beloved Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens, and which film contains more than a few visual and narrative homages to Stalker. It's fly agaric all the way down, yo.)? Which might mean it's still weirdly meaningful, but not in a systematic way that one can tease out with mere reason... an exercise all the Alien Crap and Zone Traps which Roadside Picnic offers pretty much irresistibly invites the reader to try.

The film, of course, has other things with which to bake one's noodle, big philosophical and religious questions without which a Tarkovsky film would not be a Tarkovsky film, as well as long, slow, meditative and dreamlike scenes like this travel sequence:
:


This sequence should be required viewing for anyone who thinks he or she could pull some lo-fi sci fi cinema. It's just three guys sitting on a railroad car watching the scenery go by, but Eduard Artemiev's perfect musical accompaniment (which I played on a loop for a while during my reading of Roadside Picnic) and the transition from gritty industrial sepia-toned film stock to full color film*** and a lush green landscape**** makes Tarkovsky's Zone feel just as strange as the Strugatsky's but in a completely different way.

 Wonderful as Stalker is, though, now that I've read the novel from which the film is abstracted, I kind of wish Tarkovsky used more of the source material, not so much the Alien Crap as  the novel's social dimensions: the novel takes us inside the Institute which studies the Alien Crap and has a lot to say about the difficulties being encountered in figuring out how it works, why it works, what some of it might be for; it also spends some time with what must surely be the organization behind the Professor's mad scheme in the film, with those who oppose the exploitation of the Zones and regard them and their products as EVIL. Too, a movement within the Institute charged with policing and shutting down the Stalkers introduces a huge friendship and betrayal plot/theme that adds layers of intrigue to the novel (but also, sadly, winds up not being resolved within its text). But all that would require a different filmmaker altogether to develop. Richard Linklater, say.

It's hard, too, to read this book now without perceiving a lot of Soviet themes and thinking, spotting allegories about the dangers of Western-style materialism, for instance, as well as a certain environmental/pollution-themed cautionary tale. Careless aliens made whole swathes of our planet uninhabitable and hostile. Careless people have the same effect on other species' habitats. Species have evolved that are entirely dependent on our artificial impacts; in Roadside Picnic, we are in danger of adapting irrevocably to the impact of the Visit. Which, for all the novel's cast knows, might just be the whole point!

Oh, so much to think about, when we think about The Other...

*This to my shame, because I do consider myself a fan of Tarkovsky. But I'm a fan of a lot of things, and it takes time to get to them all!

**And no, this was not just so I could keep looking at Anatoliy Solonytsin. No, really!

***This is probably due to another one of the famous Soviet austerity/resource choking constraints that left directors like Tarkovsky having to work with little bits of lots of different kinds of film rather than a deliberate choice to do some Wizard of Oz-ish gimmicky contrast, I'm pretty sure. But that's Tarkovsky, making lemonade. But, you know, the lemonade might transform your digestive tract and eventually your whole body into more lemonade if you drink it.

****And the whole theme of a gorgeous natural landscape transformed into something still beautiful but deadly as hell strongly prefigures/predicts what would become of the environs of Chernobyl as you can observe in Michelle Boganin's 2011 Stalker-esque tour of Terre Outragee.