This is a love letter and a head trip. Geoff Dyer’s Zona comes described (subtitled) as “a book about a film about a journey to a room” – and the sense of dislocation, of unusualness, does not let up from that cover title and the strangely backlit dog thereon.

It’s not your average journey. Dyer hauls Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1981 classic Stalker out of the basement and watches it with us, offering a running commentary and, in a circular, self-referential but rewarding way, comments upon his earlier experiences of seeing it and how this film, a key element in his cultural and intellectual development, has changed, and changed him in turn. “It exists,” he says, “in the wake of its own reputation… not only as a monument to itself, but trailing clouds of its own glory. It exists… in the wake of everything that has come in its wake…” Like Heraclitus, Dyer cannot step into the same film experience twice.

Dyer’s text can be heavy and is highly individual – this is a case of reverence even more than love – but at the same time his broader vision is generous. Personal memoir, often light-hearted, merges with seemingly casual film criticism, digressions fanning out from the central narrative (of both the film and the act of film watching) before wending their way back through the cluttered delta of Dyer’s thought experiment, and in the process an undefined literary genre takes shape.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker was shot largely in and around an abandoned hydro-electrical plant near Tallinn, Estonia. These were other times. These were days of suffering and want, of alcohol-drenched Soviet hardship. These were other times too in the literal sense – films that evolve as slowly as Tarkovsky’s seem heretical against the instantaneity of contemporary cinema, crowded out as it has been with home video, YouTube highlights, animations, short films, hand-held camera, mobile phone coverage and rapid-fire editing techniques. Long takes can be boring, Tarkovsky argued, but take on another dimension of fascination only if you make them even longer. This is minimalist music, or ambient soundscape at work – two music genres whose artists have been influenced not only by Tarkovsky but then, in turn, by David Lynch. Tarkovsky was slow cinema before the whole ‘slow’ movement took off. And Geoff Dyer is there to accompany the story of Stalker in the Zone – remarkably prescient just six years before Chernobyl – and chews the cud slowly with us, ruminating on life, fate, film, love and history.

The three central characters – ramshackle, downtrodden but philosophical men – are essentially on a journey to the heart of a metaphor, as they seek a route to the Room at the heart of the Zone – a place where one’s most inner desires are made real (warning: such desires might not be what one consciously expects them to be) – and from that ambiguous central point they journey back to domesticity – in Stalker’s case, to his wife and daughter Monkey. Although he died only as recently as 1986, Tarkovsky’s work belongs to another era, a pre-capitalist (or pre-‘consumer’) dawn, where cinema meant a pursuit of the grand tradition of Art and Meaning, in his case shot through with the grandeur of Russia and the iron pessimism of the massive Gulag of the Soviet, with no regard for the viewer (other than as an intellectual sparring partner) or any concept so tawdry as ‘entertainment’. Both the book and the film, then, are challenges, and while they might be easily dismissed by audiences unable to concentrate on anything for longer than two minutes, (and even then only if loud, bright and drenched in product) they should both be congratulated – perhaps Dyer even more so than Tarkovsky – for demanding that we concentrate, to be still and think, to ask deeper questions. Whereas Tarkovsky composed in the light of a decaying idea, the Soviet Union becoming threadbare, hungry, exhausted, bereft of strength or legitimacy, Dyer now writes against a backdrop of cultural froth and bubble, longing for some contemporary cineaste to take up the mantle of Tarkovsky, and finding only certain moments of Lars Von Trier make the grade – his recent Antichrist is considered a “beautifully shot, thoroughly stupid, film… it’s nonsense, a highly crafted diminution of the possibilities of cinema”.

For  lovers of the dense texture of ideas , this is unlike any book you’ll read this year.

William Charles