Sat 8 Feb 2025
RUSSELL HOBAN – Turtle Diary. Jonathan Cape. UK,hardcover, 1975. Random House, US, hardcover, 1976. Reprinted many times. Film: Rank, UK, 1985, with Glenda Jackson & Ben Kingsley.
So it’s a sweet and sad little caper novel.
William’s in his mid-forties. He’s a bookstore clerk. Used to be an ad man. Used to have a wife and kids. But that’s all gone now. He lives alone in a London rooming house. He’s aimless and alone.
Naera’s also in her forties. She’s written a series of popular children’s books about personified small animals, living in a hovel, drinking tea, daintily and quaint. She also is alone, and suffering writer’s block.
During their solitary wanderings, they visit the zoo. In the reptile building three full grown sea turtles share a small tank.
There’s some genetic homing device within the soul of a sea turtle, beckoning them to breed on some faraway island to which they’ve never been. But somehow, they know the way. And will go there, danger and distance be damned.
To Naera and William it suddenly seems of the utmost importance that these sea turtles be released to the sea to achieve their predestined teleology.
Naera and WIlliam finally meet when Naera seeks an obscure sea turtle book at William’s bookstore. And they covertly hatch a plan to kidnap the sea turtles and release them to the sea.
Which they do. Releasing the sea turtles at the simulated Cornish fishing village of Polperro, formerly a real fishing village, now surviving on tourism and verisimilitude.
And then they part, William and Naera, released back into the world. With no preprogrammed teleology. To map their way on their own. Without a compass.
A minor classic.