Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room [Hardcover]

Zona - Geoff Dyer
Canongate £16.99
Reviewed by Leyla Sanai

A gambler trying to guess the topic of a future Geoff Dyer book would always be destined to lose. Not only is Dyer versatile in form (novels, novellas, essays, non-fiction books), but his range of chosen topics has been so eclectic to date that predicting the next would be impossible.

As far as non-fiction is concerned, Dyer's panoramic sweep has included the sacred - *history, literature, photography, jazz - as well as the profane - sex, drugs, Burning Man. Speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival he said in 2010 that the conventional notion that one had to be an expert in a subject before writing about it was one he rebelled against, and that with some of his chosen subjects, he embarked on writing the book with an interest in his topic but limited detailed knowledge, allowing the research process to educate him while he wrote the book.

Dyer was certainly very knowledgeable about the iconic Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 art-house movie Stalker before he started writing this book, having seen it repeatedly over the more than thirty years since its release. The first time he saw it he didn't enjoy it that much, but its slow, haunting scenes lodged in his mind, and he was compelled to see it again and again.

Stalker is a typical Tarkovsky film, slow, mysterious, allegorical. The central story involves a guide, the Stalker, taking a Writer and a Professor to a forbidden zone where, it is rumoured, one's deepest desires come true. There is a constant drizzle during filming, and the industrial wasteland the three travel through to reach the zone is scattered with the deserted warehouses, disused railway stations and debris of urban life - abandoned cars, telegraph poles - *that was characteristic of parts of north London, where I lived when I saw the movie. Tarkovsky was Russian Orthodox by religion, and his rendering of an inaccessible place where dreams come true had spiritual undertones.

Dyer is eloquent on how the mindless immediacy of modern living taints our appreciation of a film like Stalker. We are conditioned to not wait longer than a few seconds for anything, we become impatient quickly, and western films are quick-fire productions where action and dialogue fill the space around us constantly. This engenders impatience when we are asked by a director to sit and watch scenes where nothing much happens for what seems like long periods of time. But once we give ourselves over to the dreamy, unhurried pace, we can sink into the film and become mesmerised.

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Dyer's writing is as precise and crisp as ever. His insights are perceptive and intelligent, his mind quick, sharp and witty. On almost every page his discursive style probes into related topics. There is a lot of fascinating information about filming, such as how Tarkovsky's first choice of site was unavailable. Since the damp, drizzly urban wasteland seems so well suited to the film, it seems fortuitous that this was the case. But the river that flowed near the site of filming was a dumping site for industrial waste, and Tarkovsky's wife among others, died of cancer. The film also suffered many set-backs, including damage to the reels of film that meant that months of work had to be re-shot.

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Because this is Dyer, the book is laugh out loud funny. Some of the anecdotes are about Tarkovsky, who colourfully described various crew members as `childish degenerates', `cretins', `lightweight shallow people with no self respect', and `behaving like bastards'. Others are about other films. For example, the Turkish director Nuri Ceylan referenced Stalker in his 2002 film Distant by having the protagonist transfixed to a videotape of Stalker playing on his living room TV, while his uncouth cousin, an uninvited guest is visibly bored. *His cousin, unimpressed by the art house movie, *leaves the room, whereupon the protagonist switches to watching pornography. But the cousin returns to the room, causing the main character to switch hastily over to some brainless programme which the guest enjoys. The host grumpily announces that the TV is being switched off for the night.

Just as delightful are the snippets of autobiographical detail. We hear about Dyer's parents' frugality, in particular his mother's illogical refusal to spend a little more on buying the kind of steak she actually enjoyed eating. We find out about Dyer's *friendlessness in sixth form, and his mother pressurising his father to go out to the pub with Geoff, and his knowledge that his father would far rather stay at home and save the money. There is an interesting anecdote about Dyer's wife's one time resemblance to Natascha McElhone, the actress. It is fabulous learning more about Dyer, such as his desire not simply for a dog but for the very dog that belongs to close friends, and no other. Dyer is such a charming raconteur, so effortlessly hilarious, that it would be impossible to become bored by his side-tracks. Like David Foster Wallace, his footnotes and side-tracks are often greater gems than the main subject he is exploring.

Dyer is, as Zadie Smith said, a national treasure. Zona is another example of the way his brilliant mind takes high culture and makes it not only understandable, but creates a fabulously entertaining journey along the way.

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Geoff Dyer's books are, by now, divided fairly easily into two categories. There are the novels, and then there are the Other Ones, the books that are the main reason why people admire him. His novels are mixed; The Colour of Memory is a touching and skilful debut, but there are things about it that make you think that he really ought to be doing something else. The Search is basically an attempt at being Italo Calvino. Paris Trance updates The Colour of Memory with a hint of mid-30s crisis. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is the only Dyer book I've not been engaged enough by to finish. It read like travel notes that had been at best hastily converted into something resembling a novel.

But the other books: ah, the other books. Dyer's first book, long out of print and which he unfairly dismisses as 'short and dull', was a critical study of the work of John Berger, and Dyer is one of the few English writers who've picked up Berger's technique of writing personal and idiosyncratic non-fiction books, or book-length essays, that have something of the same poetic resonance as the films of Chris Marker. (Berger, Marker, Dyer - OK, 'Marker' isn't Marker's real name, but there's something action-y about all their surnames.) Even Dyer's Berger book had a touch of the personal about it; he notes that Berger, on 'Ways of Seeing', had the kind of haircut that mostly footballers had at that point in the early 70s. But then he started to write books like But Beautiful, a tender and quasi-fictional meditation on jazz. Then there was The Missing of the Somme, a book nominally about World War One but really about the gap Dyer perceived between the experience of WW1 and that of his own generation, and how he and his friends fantasised about it but were also genuinely moved by the sacrifice involved. Then there was Out of Sheer Rage, perhaps Dyer's funniest book, and after The Search the one most obviously influenced by a continental writer, in this case Thomas Bernhard, whose manic, exasperated tone Dyer adopted for a book about his failure to write a serious critical study of DH Lawrence - although the book is itself so full of insight into Lawrence, as well as into Dyer, that we don't miss the book Dyer claims he failed to write. (Not the least of Dyer's achievements in that book is to demonstrate the unexpected and bizarre harmony between Lawrence and Bernhard.)

Besides them, there's been a book on photography, a travel book and two collections of Dyer's essays, journalism and occasional pieces, a form he excels in. Over the years, the Dyer persona has become more apparent. The Dyer persona is that of a forty- and now fiftysomething, slightly nebbishy slacker; a bit bumbling, rather inept with women but basically romantic; liable to get himself into serious gymnastic trauma in the toilet of an Amsterdam coffee shop while trying to change his wet trousers when stoned; but also someone with an informed and acute love of different kinds of music, photography, books, travel, friends and various kinds of recreational drug. And now, film. Zona is a book about what would appear to be Dyer's favourite movie: Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker'.

I have never seen Stalker. And for all that Dyer writes about it with fantastic attention, affection and the kind of judicious distance you get when you're writing in your early fifties about a film you first fell in love with aged 20, I don't think I ever will watch it. But this is not really a book about Stalker. It's about the kind of attention we bring to the films we love, and the different ways we watch films at different times in our lives. Although Dyer gives us a very close account of what happens in the movie, he makes it easy for us to share his experience without wishing it were ours; I don't think I need to watch Stalker to understand and appreciate this book. It's not a critical introduction to the film, so much as a meditation on what happens when we watch films that we love. And that's why it's a great and fascinating book, I think; one of the best pieces of film writing I've ever read, the more so because it does not demand that we see, or have seen, the movie in question.

In sum: a brilliant, intelligent, passionate and also at times very funny piece of writing about what appears to be a very dark and serious film indeed. Once again, Dyer finds his subject in the gap between himself and what he's writing about. That he makes that gap so fascinating is a testament to his talent, but it's also where we get to enter the book, because Dyer is almost unique amongst writers about art, photography, film, literature and so on in that he doesn't write academic or even journalistic criticism. He writes about as someone who loves the stuff, the way the rest of us do. Being a smart guy and a good writer he takes this love seriously, unpacking and analysing it over the course of a book, and we learn something about what we get out of listening to the music and looking at the pictures and reading the writers. In this attention to common experience, Dyer is genuinely Berger's inheritor-and yes, I know Berger is still writing, and writing well, at that. We need more like both of them. In the meantime, Zona is brilliant.

yes they're making a film of this book about a man watching a film - even more interesting is the rumour of a movie tie-in book to follow that film being essentially a novelization of the film about this book about a man watching a film...I'll probably wait until it comes out on DVD, I mean paperback.