Friday Imaginary Review: the Strugatsky Brothers, ‘Roadside Picnic Revisited’ (translated by Lev Knyazhinsky: Job Books 2022)
The Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972) — made into the 1979 movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky — is surely the most famous of the Soviet duo’s many SF novels. It is certainly, by some margin, the brothers’ best-selling and most widely translated novel: there are, it seems, some 60 editions of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries. Arkady died in 1991 and his brother Boris in 2012, which means that the appearance of this posthumously published sequel has caught everyone by surprise. It has been published as by both brothers, although there are theories (according to the introduction by Leningrad SF author Lev Knyazhinsky) that Boris drafted it alone after Arkady’s death, either by himself or else working from a plan the two brothers had sketched back in the 1980s. It is likely we will never know for sure.
If you only know the Tarkovsky movie, the specificites of the original novel may surprise you. The book is divided into four sections. Strange ‘zones’ have appeared around the world, apparently after an alien visitation, inside which conditions are dangerous and often fatal for humans. The zones, though, contain many artefacts, some deadly, some useless, but some very valuable as advanced technology. A group of people known as ‘stalkers’ risk the zone to try and retrieve this last type, for money. In the first section of Roadside Picnic Redrick ‘Red’ Schuhart, an experienced, wordly-wise young stalker, repeatedly enters ‘the Zone’ in search of such artefacts. One such trip leads to the death of his friend, which causes Red much grief and gets him into trouble with the police. His girlfriend Guta is pregnant but, despite the danger of mutation and deformity involved in carrying a Stalker’s child she resolves to have the baby. In part 2, Red undertakes a new trip into the zone with a man called Burbridge, known as ‘The Vulture’, who loses his legs to a corrosive gunk called ‘hell slime’. Red drags him out of the zone, saving his life. We discover that Guta has given birth to a healthy but unspeaking and hair-covered child, known as ‘monkey’. Red meets with army personnel interested in obtaining the ‘hell slime’ for military purposes: but rather than give it them Red surrenders himself to the police. Part 3 is set years later: Monkey is now a (still hairy, still unspeaking) teenager and Red is finally coming out of prison. He meets his dead father, since corpses buried in the zone are coming back to life, or coming back to an ambling harmless fraction-life. Burbidge is now running a business that takes tourists into the zone, wants his legs back. He has heard that there is a golden sphere inside the zone that grants wishes, and wants it to restore himself to full health. In Section 4 Redrick is persuaded to go into the Zone one last time in order to retrieve this ‘Golden Sphere.’ Burbridge has given him a map to locate the device, and insists his own son Arthur accompanies him on his expedition. But Redrick knows that they both must cross a device called the ‘meat grinder’, and it’s not clear either of them will survive.
What is ‘the Zone’? The original novel offers little by way of explanation, except to say that it was a consequence of ‘the Visitation’, which people assume was alien in nature. One character, Dr. Valentine Pilman, makes the following comparison, from which the novel takes its name:
A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess — apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.
Roadside Picnic is not a lengthy novel, but this sequel is considerably shorter: barely a novella. Perhaps this is because it is, in effect, unfinished, and the Strugatskys, or perhaps just Boris, intended to flesh out certain sections. Or perhaps it is exactly the length the authors intended. Certain sections are so brief as to be bafflingly opaque, although at the same time there is an elliptical and sometimes baffling quality to the original novel too.
We start some years after Red has disappeared into the zone never to return. His widow is now living with Richard Noonan, and her daughter ‘monkey’ has improved, becoming more human, although her communications are laconic and riddling. We are reminded in the opening chapter that (in the original novel) Red had agreed to go back into the zone one last time to lead a young man called Arthur to the Golden Sphere that, allegedly, grants wishes (in Tarkovsky’s Stalker this ‘sphere’ is a room). This is where the original novel ends: Red assumed Arthur wanted to gift his legless father back his legs, but in fact, when they find the sphere, Arthur rushed towards it crying out “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!” But Red had tricked him: the sphere is ‘guarded’ (if that’s the right word) by a device called the ‘meat grinder’ that snatches up one, but only one, visitor each visit, wrings their body and kills them: Red, knowing this, has sent Arthur in ahead of him, because he, Red, has a wish of his own: he wants his mute, mutated daughter to be a normal girl. The very last paragraph of the original novel finds Red going up to the sphere to make his wish but finding himself, in the moment, overtaken by Arthur’s global altruism. As the novel ends it seems he will wish for what Arthur wanted as well.
The sequel makes clear that the Golden Sphere grants the true wish of the visitor, not whatever he or she expresses or declares — it reads the subconscious desire of the person, which is what makes it so dangerous. And it emerges as we read this sequel that Red’s true desire was not for world peace and happiness; it was not even, or not wholly, for his daughter to be made normal. His true desire was for his daughter, and his wife, and for the life the three of them experienced together, and that life — and the daughter’s very existence — only came about because of the zone, and because Red worked as a stalker within it. The twist in Roadside Picnic Revisited, then, is that Red appears to have used the power of the Golden Ball to bring the Zone into being as such — the zone and all it contains, including the Golden Ball. In Roadside Picnic the various people dealing with the Zone believe it to be the consequence of a careless alien visitation, but this sequel puts that interpretation in doubt.
In its final sections Roadside Picnic Revisited moves in increasingly recursive circles. One chapter recapitulates the entirety of Roadside Picnic in abbreviated form, only this time with the spectral panoptic presence of Red watching all the action, shaking his head sadly over his former self’s blindness and foolishness, and sobbing at his ruthlessness in allowing Arthur to go unknowingly into the meat grinder. In another chapter we are taken inside ‘monkey’s mind, and it is implied — though this is never spelled out — that everything including Red himself, and therefore not just her own paternity but the creation of the zone that enabled the alien powers she mutely possesses — are functions of her own imagination. This in turn leads to a new artefact from the zone: a device so small it can insinuate itself undetected inside a human being. This, we learn, was ingested by Red during one of his early stalker visits, and thence insinuated into the DNA of monkey. At the novel’s end we see Monkey herself moving with simian grace through the architecture of the zone, finding an open courtyard and giving birth to the golden globe. This, abruptly, is where the novel ends.
Readers will have questions, not least among them: is this where the Strugatskys wanted the novel to end? Do we have a fragment, or a completed piece? But perhaps such uncertainty is the fitting idiom for the sequel to one of the great masterpieces of imaginative dubiety.
