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.
February 8th, 2025 at 9:25 pm
Best known, perhaps, for his SF novel RIDDLEY WALKER, Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was “an American writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children’s books. He lived in London from 1969 until his death.”
Taken from the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Hoban
February 8th, 2025 at 10:56 pm
Hoban was one of those writers who was different every book. He never quite won the acclaim of RIDDLEY WALKER again, and his style of book was so different each time that it worked against his developing a steady readership, but his work is well worth re discovering.
February 9th, 2025 at 8:48 am
It was made into a movie in 1985 with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley starring.
February 9th, 2025 at 11:55 am
Ah yes, thanks, Jeff. Although I have never seen it, I knew that but failed to add it to the info at the top of review. It’s there now.
February 9th, 2025 at 4:34 pm
When coincidences like this happen, you’d do best to let the rest of the world know about it. And so I am.
I just found this online. Michael Dirda on Russell Hoban:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2004/08/01/to-me-russell-hobans-perfect/dac292e8-ce8e-4654-a6a1-8407bebd9e9d/
“To me, Russell Hoban’s perfectly cadenced, slyly comic prose is ambrosia. I once asserted that he is the only living writer to have written masterpieces for every age group, from beginning readers to adults: Bread and Jam for Frances, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, The Mouse and His Child, Riddley Walker. Yet these are just four outstanding books from an oeuvre of probably 60 or 70 titles, most of them for children, with perhaps only a dozen for adults and those sometimes elusively hermetic (e.g., Kleinzeit, The Medusa Frequency). Whatever its intended age group, Hoban’s best work repeatedly explores the same themes: the search for love, the nature of creativity, the power of ancient symbols (Punch and Judy, the Orpheus legend, Indian deities) and the shimmering, shifting, unreliable nature of reality.”