something wicked this way comes . . .
UNDER THE DOME STEPHEN KING (Hodder and staunton €19.99)
Saturday November 28 2009
It's a bright, sunny morning in the Maine town of Chester's Mill. A local woman is enjoying a flying lesson, a former soldier is making his way out of town following a savage beating and the son of the town's local gombeen man is on his way to a girl's house to kill her.
And then an invisible barrier suddenly envelopes Chester's Mill -- the flying lesson takes a decided turn for the worst when the plane crashes into the unexpected barrier, which arrived with such swiftness that any animal who happened to be in the way of its arrival is cut in half as if with a laser beam.
Yup, we're back in Stephen king country and fans won't be disappointed with his latest back breaking epic -- nearly 900 pages of it -- Under The Dome.
King has always been a disgracefully underrated chronicler of the American collective psyche.
Arrogantly dismissed as just another populist, second rate hack who has made his massive fortune peddling tales of phantasmagorical horror to adolescents, his detractors are either unwilling or incapable of seeing that he is one of the most important writers in the history of American literature. Indeed, he is someone who is truly deserving of being considered up there with Bellow and Roth.
That might seem like heresy to some, but anyone who has actually read King's vast body of work -- this is his 48th novel, and when you throw in his fantastic, discerning non-fiction work such as On Writing and Danse Macabre you will see that he is as scholarly as he is prolific -- will know that few if any of his contemporaries have managed to both capture and then articulate the prevailing public mood. Even when he does it through the medium of ghosts, ghoulies and vampires.
With the invisible barrier -- the Dome -- firmly in place, nothing can get into Chester's Mill. And nothing can leave.
And so, Dale Barbara -- aka Barbie -- short order chef and Iraq war veteran, finds his attempts at putting both the beating and the town itself behind him are thoroughly thwarted while the locals begin to experience a weird sort of open air claustrophobia.
King has always excelled at exploring the psychological minutiae of small town Americana and with Under The Dome he gets to play with notions and ideas similar to Jose Scaramanga's Blindness and Paul Auster's The City Of Lost Things -- it takes an ordinary, run of the mill town and pushes its inhabitants to the extreme.
And, King being King, the results aren't pretty.
He has often been accused of having little faith in human nature, but when you're writing horror, there's not much point in having a cast of Boy Scouts and here, in spades, we see King lashing into various elements of modern society.
Big Jim Rennie, the town's main mover and shaker is secretly delighted with the appearance of the Dome. A pious, avowedly religious man with some interestingly tawdry secrets -- King sure loves to stick to religiously motivated hypocrisy, it's a recurring theme throughout his work -- he sees the crisis as a chance to place himself centre stage in the town. He even secretly reckons that he could get himself on the cover of Time Magazine if he plays things right.
And as Rennie's grip on the town turns into a martial law inspired stranglehold, with deputised thugs donning uniforms and the local newspaper placed under threat, we get a microcosm of how the author sees America at large.
Picture Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld running your town with untrammelled power and no possibility of outside help and you get a good idea of Under The Dome -- part political allegory, part social commentary and full on weird mystery -- what is the Dome? Where did it come from? Who controls it?
This has been compared to The Stand -- it is not. It's not as good and by its very nature lacks the global sense of cataclysm that gave The Stand such chilling attractiveness.
But that's not to say that King's latest is not a stunning adventure through his imagination and, most importantly, it's a rollicking good read.
Highly recommended.
- fiction ian o'doherty
Irish Independent
