Two of the turtles at the aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...' I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.
—William G. in Turtle Diary (p. 12)
Note: Turtle Diary was made into an excellent film starring Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. You can read about it on the Turtle Diary film page.
William G. works in a bookstore; Neaera H. is an author of children's books. Two lonely, embittered people who don't know each other, but whose thoughts are gradually verging toward similar territory. William G. is forty-five, lives alone in an apartment, haunted by thoughts of the family he's been separated from by divorce, especially the daughters he no longer sees. In a particularly poignant moment early on he observes, "There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don't see them anymore."
Neaera is forty-three, and unmarried; thinks of herself as the sort of spinster woman who has "resisted vegetarianism" and doesn't keep cats. She's tired of writing books about cuddly animals, and guardedly contemplates her married friends who "wear Laura Ashley dresses, and in their houses are grainy photographs of them barefoot on continental beaches with their naked children." She's resigned to her aloneness, and at one point observes, "My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life."
Thoreau might have been thinking about these two when he made his famous observation that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Separately, they regard their unhappy existences with a wry, bittersweet irony that makes their reflections sometimes charmingly droll, other times quietly heartbreaking.
There's no particular reason why their lives should intersect, except that they share a fascination: turtles, particularly three green sea turtles in the Aquarium of the London Zoo. Each begins making repeated visits to the zoo to gaze at the turtles swimming gracefully in their tank, and ponder the irony of creatures capable of making a migratory journey of thousands of miles--who "have it in them to find something"--being prevented from doing so. And separately, they make the same inquiries to the Head Keeper, who "seems a right sort of man": suppose someone wanted to kidnap the turtles and set them free, how might they go about it?
Soon, William and Neaera's lives begin to intersect in earnest, as the keeper proves surprisingly receptive to their inquiries. Though he's been rebuffed by the higher-ups at the zoo, he feels that after twenty or thirty years in captivity, the turtles deserve their freedom. With his cooperation, soon William and Neaera are bundling the turtles in a van and setting off for the coast.
At this point, the predictable thing would be for the story to veer into romantic territory as the two find the solution to their mutual loneliness in each other; the reader is all but expecting it. But Mr. Hoban doesn't do the predictable thing; he's more honest and less sentimental than that. Exactly how things do unfold must be left to the reader to discover, but it's not destroying any significant suspense to say that ultimately, William and Neaera are indeed altered by the mission they embark on, and the synchronicitous intersection of their lives. And that Mr. Hoban winds up the story with his usual sure touch and moving insight.
Neaera acquires a water beetle in a tank, and a bit later gives us the following bit of tongue-in-cheek children's book copy:
It was a lazy summer afternoon,
and Victoria Beetle was enjoying a quiet cup of tea
when she heard a knock at the door.
She looked out of the window
and saw Big Sam Bumblebee the gang boss.
"If he thinks he can try on that
protection lark with me he'd better think again,"
said Victoria, and she picked up the poker.
Now compare that conversation with this quiet, remarkable observation on p. 53 of Turtle Diary:
I was on South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriage passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.
"A story about the recovery of life...Like other cult writers--Salinger for instance, or Vonnegut--Hoban writes about ordinary people making life-affirming gestures in a world that threatens to dissolve in madness."
"Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony."
--Time
"This wonderful, life-saving fantasy will place Russell Hoban where he has got to be--among the greatest, timeless novelists."
--The (London) Times
"Russell Hoban is our ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other. He can take themes that seem too devastating for contemplation and turn them into allegories in which wry, sad humour is married to quite extraordinary powers of imagery and linguistic fertility that makes each book a linguistic departure." --Sunday Telegraph
"The marvellous energy of Mr. Hoban's writing, simultaneously dry and passionate, justifies everything he does."
--Times Educational Supplement
"Russell Hoban is an original, imaginative and inventive. Though some of his work has been compared with that of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, he is his own man, working his own vein of magical fantasy."
--The (London) Times
Back to The Head of Orpheus: a Russell Hoban Reference Page (home page).
Russell Hoban's other novels and collections: