Roger Zelazny Book Review: Roadmarks -The miles ticked inside me like years

For what's ostensibly a Roger Zelazny blog, I don't really do a whole lot of actual writing about his works. Just the occasional allusion to his something he wrote, every so often. (Typical post: "Lily is cute, Lily is smart, Roger Zelazny shout out!") So, I'm going to review Roadmarks today.

I can't remember if Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks was the first or second book of his that I read. My father's girlfriend lived down the street from us when I was about fourteen or so. I was at her house one day in the summer, looking for something to read, and she gave me her ex-husband's shoebox full of sci-fi paperbacks. I grabbed two that looked nifty, Roadmarks (aka Last Exit to Babylon) and Creatures of Light and Darkness. Here's the cover to Roadmarks. (Zelazny wanted to call it Last Exit to Babylon, but his publishers vetoed that, so he just asked the artist to put it on the sign on the cover as a compromise.)

I'm sure I started reading Roadmarks first, but it was just confusing. There were two alternating chapters, "One" and "Two", and the book opens with "Two". So I may have put it down and finished Creatures first instead. I've read them both so many times, and it was so long ago that I first picked them up that I really don't recall. But the strange format actually makes sense. It's a book about a certain type of idiosyncratic time travel and the "One" chapters follow the main character, Red Dorakeen, in a linear progression and the "Two" chapters are scrambled up events that happened in Red's past or future.

Zelazny himself on the structure of the book:

"And since the Twos were non-linear, anyway, I clipped each Two chapter into a discrete packet, stacked them and then shuffled them before reinserting them between the Ones. It shouldn’t have made any difference, though I wouldn’t have had the guts to try doing that without my experience with my other experimental books and the faith it had given me in the feelings I’d developed toward narrative."

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And on how he had the idea for time as a highway:

I got the idea for [Roadmarks] during an automobile drive. I was coming up l-25, which is a nice modern highway in New Mexico, and just on a whim, I turned off at random on a turn off I'd never taken before. I drove along it for awhile, and I saw a road which was much less kept up. I turned onto that one, and later on I hit a dirt road and I tried it, and pretty soon I came to a place that wasn't on the map. It was just a little settlement. There were log cabins there, and horses pulling carts, and it looked physically as if I'd driven back into the l9th century. I started to think about the way the road kept changing, and I said, 'Gee, that would be neat, to consider time as a superhighway with different turnoffs.' I went back and started writing Roadmarks that same afternoon.

The gist of the story is that a Black Decade, ten legal attempts at assassination, has been declared against the protagonist, Red Dorakeen. He travels along "The Road", which is a superhighway that spans time rather than space.

The deal with the Road is that the more a path is traveled, the stronger it becomes. Red is trying to recreate a set of circumstances that he only half-remembers, in order to return to a byway that has fallen into disuse. We first meet Red when he's stopped by the local authorities while trying to smuggle modern weapons back to the Greeks in order to change history so they can win the battle of Marathon. (I thought this was kind of clever, because as you may know, the Greeks were the victors at the battle of Marathon.) An example from the book:

"Supposing you'd run over Stonewall Jackson?"

"Okay, I'm supposing."

"...And then you had turned around and come back. You would have noticed a fork in the Road where there had been none before--off there somewhere in the hinterlands--another way merging with your own, to form the route back here. Thereafter, on returning this way, you could take the branch to the place where that accident had occurred, or the other, to the place where it did not. The former would be a very bad road, however, and would probably disappear through disuse before too long. On the other hand, if it became sufficiently well-traveled, then the other might fade. This is unlikely, but if it were to occur, you would find it increasingly difficult to locate various later routes--Cs back up the Road--and there would be new ones, somewhat different from those you had known. It would be possible to lose yourself down some byway and never get back to your point of departure."

It's amazing how literate his books are, and how many levels on which they can be enjoyed. My education was appallingly incomplete when I first read the book, (it's not all that great now, but I'm continually trying to rectify that) An inn-keeper says of John Sunlight "Hands such as Modigliani might have painted somewhere or other..." a reference whose meaning I could divine from context, but which I never really fully appreciated until I saw several Modigliani paintings at the Barnes Foundation just this past weekend. The book may be the first place I ever heard the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It's certainly the first place I ever encountered Baudelaire.

Red is Zelazny's characteristic laid-back, easy-going, wise-cracking, homicidal protagonist. (Something I observe with great affection.) His foil in his travels is a sophisticated computer disguised as a copy of "Flowers of Evil".

Flowers is just one member of an excellent supporting cast. Some of my favorites are:

Mondamay was a fantastically sophisticated death machine, designed to destroy anything from a single virus to an entire planet, but he suffered a massive systems failures. He couldn't be repaired, and his creators felt a little sorry for him since he was sentient, so they left him with his hobbies and his disguises. He felt like making pots, so that's what he did.

Timyin Tin: "Timyin Tin worked in the monastery garden, apologizing to the weeds as he removed them. A small man, whose shaven head made his age even more difficult to determine, he hoed with great enthusiasm, his movements sharp and supple." I really like that description. Timyin Tin was an assassin who was captured, brainwiped and sent back in time to live as a monk in 14th century China. His memory is restored, but it does not overwrite his experiences as a monk and he carries with him a strange sort of conscience.

Sundoc and Toba: I think of them as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the work. They have the unenviable task of going out and recruiting the assassins. Sundoc is described as a "very tall, copper-haired man, whose skin was pale, whose eyes were blue." Toba is a dark-skinned ("dark as the departing night") man with the beard.

My cast:

• Red Dorakeen: Kurt Russell (or possibly Morgan Freeman if I'm feeling whimsical. "Because I'm Irish")
• Timyin Tin: Jet Li or Collin Chou (Seraph from the later Matrix Movies). My friend Tim asked me once if it was ever stated that he's Asian. I don't think it is, but since he's blending in in 14th century China, that was the impression that I got.
  
• Leila: Julianne Moore (though I'm tempted to cast Katie Sagal just for giggles)
• John Sunlight: Cillian Murphy
• Doc Savage: Gotta go with the Rock.
  
• Mondamay: Dileep Rao (Yusuf the chemist from Inception)
• Archie Shellman: My first instict was to go with some big huge wrestler. (There's never any shortage of them for this kind of role.) But he's described as "A hundred kilos and tall enough to be slim." so I don't know.
  
• Strangulena: Angelina Jolie. She's just skanky enough to pull it off.
• Sundoc and Toba: Since they are the closest the book has to comic relief, I think I'll try some stunt casting and go with Conan O'Brian and Luis Guzmán.

I always thought Zelazny's Roadmarks was the most cinematic of all his books. It lends itself to such great visuals. I'd love to see Hitler driving around in his black VW looking for the place where he won, the fight between Archie and Timyin Tin, Mondamay the potter raising his hand and setting the sky ablaze, Doc Savage throwing John Sunlight over his shoulder and ripping his shirt in the process and of course, "The death of Chadwick! By Tyrannosaurus rex! Under the direction of the Marquis de Sade!"

I would watch the hell out of this movie.