Alice Teh Larsson

This is the final of four parts of my notes after I finished reading Roadside Picnic. In this final part (see parts one, two and three), I classify my notes as “Ending”. SPOILER ALERT: By the end of Roadside Picnic, Redrick Schuhart has reached the object rumoured to grant a person’s deepest wish.

He has survived the Zone again. The other guy that went with him has not.

Redrick deliberately brings the young man into the Zone, knowing that someone must die to clear the path to the Golden Sphere. Whatever Redrick intends to ask for, it has already been purchased with another person’s life.

This is where I expected his daughter to become the clear centre of the story.

Surely Redrick would ask for Monkey to be restored.

But when he reaches the Sphere, he can’t find the words. He searches inside himself for something pure and discovers that he doesn’t know what lies at his own core.

That is perhaps the most frightening thing that the Zone has done to him.

Redrick finally says:

“Happiness for everybody, free, and no one will go away unsatisfied!”

It’s a beautiful wish. It’s also not originally Redrick’s. Those were the words of the dead young man who cleared the path to the Golden Sphere, and Redrick repeated them.

That makes the ending both hopeful and deeply uncertain. Perhaps those words express what Redrick has always wanted but could never articulate: safety for Monkey, peace for his family and an end to the suffering surrounding the Zone.

Or perhaps Redrick has become so damaged that he must borrow another person’s goodness. He can’t trust his own heart, so he reaches for the last hopeful words he heard.

There is another disturbing possibility. The Golden Sphere is believed to grant a person’s deepest desire – not necessarily the wish spoken aloud. If Redrick doesn’t understand himself, neither he nor the reader can know what the Sphere might grant.

Then the novel ends. I’ll never know the answers to any of these questions. It leaves Redrick before an incomprehensible object. And it leaves me still trying to figure out what happened there.