11.22.63 by Stephen King
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11.22.63
Stephen King (www.stephenking.com) Hodder & Stoughton (www.hodder.co.uk) £19.99 |
It’s a daunting thing, sitting down to write a review of a full-length Stephen King novel, for someone who hangs on every word the man has ever written. The problem is that remaining objective – reviewing the work at a remove, as it were – is next to impossible. Regular reader(s) of the blog will know that that isn’t the type of blog I run and will, I hope, forgive me a little hyperbole here and there as I work through the monster that is King’s latest novel, 11.22.63.
The title of King’s latest novel is a reference to one of those dates that lives in the global consciousness as a day that defined the world in which we live. It may take a person a moment or two to parse the significance (especially since it appears in the US format of month, day, year), but it will come to them eventually. It is, of course, the date of the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA. King’s premise is simple, a question that most people have pondered at some point: if you could go back and change it (save Kennedy, assassinate Hitler, etc.), would you?
Jake Epping is an English teacher in a small Maine town. When the owner of the local diner – a man Jake knows only from eating regularly in his establishment – calls him and invites him to the diner, he reluctantly goes. Al has aged overnight, a process exacerbated by the cancer that is killing him, cancer that he did not have the previous evening, when Jake last saw him. Al spins a tale – a hole in time in the pantry of his diner that will take Jake back to September 1958, a visit that, no matter how long Jake spends there, will only take 2 minutes of 2011 time – and asks Jake for his help: go back to 1958 under an assumed identity, get a job, kill time for five years, and be in Dallas in 1963 to stay the hand that slew Jack Kennedy.
11.22.63 is pure King, from that familiar Down East accent, to the cast of characters that will become your friends during the course of the novel’s 700 pages, to that slightly off-kilter world that always leaves this Constant Reader slightly uneasy. No-one can tell a story like King can. In effect, this is a novel of three parts. The first section deals with Derry in late 1958. It took me a while to realise – even the tell-tale “There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first” bypassed me initially – what King was up to here, and why Al’s “rabbit-hole” came out in September 1958, rather than sometime closer to the date of Kennedy’s assassination. It was the name Norbert Keene that did it for me, the owner and manager of Derry’s drugstore; this is a city in the aftermath of the events of King’s earlier novel, It, and King uses this to his advantage, infecting a key character with the evil in which the city is drenched, and giving Jake a reason to be there for Hallowe’en 1958. King introduces some of the key players from It into the events of this novel, cementing the history of that fictional town in place. Jake’s description of the city is spot on:
On that grey street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”
When Jake finishes his work in Derry, he moves ultimately to the small town of Jodie, Texas where he becomes a part of the community and falls in love with one of his colleagues, the new school librarian, Sadie Dunhill. It is here that Jake first decides that he might not want to return to 2011. It is, in his own words, when he “stopped living in the past and started living.” This love affair, of course, is fraught with peril for the man from the future, and King proves once more that no other writer puts their characters through the mill with quite as much élan as he does.
The final section of the book deals with the run up to November 1963, and follows Jake as he watches Lee Harvey Oswald, attempting to close what he calls the “window of uncertainty” on whether Oswald was a lone shooter. As we move toward the event itself, King has a decision to make as to whether this was the case, or whether one of the many conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death provides a better version of the truth, and it is interesting to see which road he chooses. Here, King is firmly in James Ellroy territory, and it shows in the tone of the narrative, even though 11.22.63 contains a more complete form of prose, a language that is unmistakably King. This section of the novel is littered with real people, and King does his best to make them his own, a sometimes difficult proposition with people as infamous as these.
King has been very clever with his method of time travel, building some important rules into the process: the rabbit-hole always takes the traveller to the same time on the same date, so there can be no jumping back and forward through time when things get hairy. Time passes as normal in 1958 but, regardless of the duration, the traveller will only be gone from 2011 for two minutes. The most important, perhaps, is that each visit affects a reset, and any changes made during a previous visit will be lost. These three key rules play important – and sometimes devastating – roles throughout the novel.
To make matters more difficult for Jake, the past becomes almost a sentient being. It is, Jake tells us, obdurate, and it also harmonises with itself. What this means is that, as Jake starts to move through the Land of Ago, we start to see connections between otherwise unrelated characters or events – characters that share the same, or very similar names, or faces, or personalities. We also come to see quite early on that the real city of Dallas and the fictional Derry are almost one and the same, with the same underlying malice defining them both. The obduracy is something that Al warns Jake of before his first trip, but it is Jake who discovers that the bigger the change, the more difficult it is to make. The past, we come to see, does not want to be changed, and this fact leaves us worried – if not outright frightened – of what Jake will face when he tries to change one of the world’s most defining moments.
As with most of his novels, it seems that King finds it impossible not to drop self-references in to see who is paying attention, or to give Constant Reader a little thrill that they are getting more for their money than a King virgin (he has been doing it as far back as the early Castle Rock novels, seeding references to The Dead Zone into Cujo, for example). As always, it seems King is having immense fun with these “Easter eggs”. How about the late ‘50s red and white Plymouth Fury in the parking lot of the mill, the first car Jake sees when he steps back in time? The whole first section which seems, at first, to be a twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to one of King’s most divisive novels? There’s even a sly reference to The Dark Tower, when Jake sets eyes on a car called a Takuro Spirit, echoing Eddie’s observation in that alternate, Captain Trips-raddled version of Topeka, Kansas. And a tip of the hat to Ellroy’s own masterpiece in the form of a rogue FBI agent by the name of Dwight Holly.
As you would expect from a man known for his love of pop culture (he had a regular column in the American magazine, Entertainment Weekly, called “The Pop of King” which he used to talk about books, films, music, entertainment in general), the attention to detail he applies to late-‘50s/early-‘60s America is second-to-none. Everyone smokes, and it’s the first obvious sign that Jake is in a world of a long time ago: the smell of tobacco smoke is ever-present, and there are very few characters who don’t smoke during their interactions with him or, at the very least, have a pack of cigarettes close to hand. King is careful to avoid anachronisms, but the world he has created is made more real by what we see around us – the products for sale in the shops, the cars on the roads, the very pollution being pumped into the air. It’s obvious that 11.22.63 required a massive research effort, not just in getting the details of Oswald’s movements right, but also in reconstructing the pop culture of the era. King takes it in his stride and the result is a world that feels as real in 1958 as it does in 2011.
King, a native of Maine, has an obvious love for the place and one of the things he does well is ensure that the reader is there, breathing the air, eating the lobsters (or, in this case, the Fatburgers). He knows the people and their foibles, and he wants the reader to know them, too. The most important outward aspect of this is the accent, and as always, he takes some time to ensure that what you’re hearing in your head is the same as what’s coming out of the characters’ mouths:
‘Key’s inside the front door.’ Doe-ah.
And the ever-present
Ayuh!
Reading a King novel is often like sitting on a park bench with an old-timer, listening as he spins his tales and spreads his gossip, and 11.22.63 is no exception. It’s a powerful novel, King’s considered answer to the question “if you could change it, would you?” What it boils down to, though, is that the events leading up to that fateful day play second fiddle to the more important personal relationship between Jake Epping, known in the Land of Ago as George Amberson, and Sadie Dunhill. But King is a man who enjoys unsettling his readers – it’s something he does very well, so why not? – so you can expect the course of this love to run not exactly true, as it comes up against the force of the obdurate past.
11.22.63 is the latest in a long line of masterpieces from a writer who, at the age of 63, is still at the top of his game, and still producing mammoth works at the rate of about one every year. It is a beautifully-imagined and wonderfully written story that will appeal to a wide range of readers. It’s easy to dismiss King as a “horror writer”, but horror is only a small fraction of what he has produced in a career spanning almost 40 years; it’s easy to forget that the man responsible for one of the masterpieces of modern vampire fiction – ‘Salem’s Lot – or the mother of all post-apocalyptic fiction – The Stand – is also the brains behind Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. It’s also easy to forget, reading as much as I do, just how brilliant a writer he is when I’m not reading him. 11.22.63 is a solid reminder of the fact that no-one tells a story like Stephen King does. A perfect read, more than deserving of its place on my Top 10 of 2011.
MILE 81 by Stephen King
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MILE 81
Stephen King (www.stephenking.com) Hodder & Stoughton (www.hodder.co.uk) £1.99 (Available as an ebook) |
Before I let you know what I thought of Stephen King’s latest work, the short story/novelette Mile 81, I feel it’s only fair to talk a bit about Stephen King, and what you’re letting yourself in for should you wish to proceed and read my review.
I’ve been a die hard Stephen King fan since I discovered Skeleton Crew back when I was around 12 years old (I’m now 35). My first King novel was Pet Sematary, and from there on, I was hooked. When anyone asks who my favourite author is, I can say without a second thought that it is King – sure there are others whose work I love: Stephenson, Marshall (Smith), Gaiman, etc. – but for me, none of them will ever come close. Some might call me a rabid fan, but I like to think of myself as, simply, a fan, and a collector. Like most people in this by-no-means-exclusive club, I was devastated (and not totally for altruistic reasons) in mid-1999 when the news of King’s accident was announced, and again in early-2002 when an out-of-context quote made it look like he would be retiring before the end of that year. Now, almost 10 years later, King is still producing some of the finest fiction on offer, and for me, and many like me, the announcement of a new King work is an event in itself, and a reason to celebrate. With that in mind…
Often described as America’s best-loved bogeyman, Stephen King is, above all else, a chronicler of modern day America and the pop culture that pervades everything both inside and outside that country. I remember reading (perhaps in the foreword) that the majority of the work that went into producing the Complete and Uncut edition of The Stand was updating all of the cultural references from the original late-70s timeframe to the new early-90s one. His latest piece of work, labelled variously as short story, novella and novelette is the creepy and wonderful Mile 81, released as an ebook in the US and UK.
The Mile 81 of the title is a disused rest stop on Maine’s I-95. The building, which once housed the usual assortment of eateries and shops that one finds in American rest stops, now plays host to local teenagers looking for somewhere to drink, smoke and date in relative peace and quiet. When Pete Simmons, ten years old and with something to prove to his older brother, finds the older kids’ way in, the rest stop is as it has been for the past year: orange barrels block access from the interstate and the place is deserted, weeds already starting to push their way through the road surface. As Pete sleeps off a couple of nips from a found bottle of vodka, though, everything changes: a station wagon, make and model indiscernible under a layer of mud, crashes through the barriers, rolls to a stop on the ramp and sits, driver’s door ajar, waiting.
King has dealt with creepy cars before in the past, most famously in his 1983 novel, Christine, but also in the more recent From a Buick 8. For Mile 81, he ups the creepy quotient a couple of notches and we find ourselves watching in disbelief as the car eats the handful of good Samaritans who decide to stop and see if they can help the owners of the ever-growing fleet of cars building up on the disused off-ramp. Ridiculous as the premise might sound, in the hands of King, and his matter-of-fact storytelling, it’s no less believable than, say, that red and white ‘58 Plymouth Fury, or a Saint Bernard that suddenly goes rabid. As ever, King’s grasp of how ordinary people think and speak is impeccable, as in this example of the last thoughts of one of the car’s victims as it is snacking on his arm:
He could see glistening fingerbones from which the flesh had been sucked, and he had a brief, nightmarish image of chewing on one of the Colonel’s chicken wings. Get it all before you put that down, his mother used to say, the meat’s sweetest closest to the bone.
Of course, no King novel would be complete without the ubiquitous references to the world around us. Expect references to everything from Boardwalk Empire and American Vampire to Justin Bieber (ten-year-old Pete is the eldest of the three main characters). There’s even a sneaky little self-reference or two for the eagle-eyed Constant Reader.
Mile 81 would fit perfectly between the covers of Skeleton Crew, King’s first – and probably best (let’s face it, The Mist is worth the price of admission alone) – short story collection, or it’s follow-up, Night Shift. It’s a short, sharp gruesome tale from a man who is as comfortable with the short form as he is with the long (and the extra-long). It’s more in the tradition of those old all-out horror stories he used to write (The Mist, The Bogeyman, The Mangler), than the quietly disturbing ones he has been producing in recent years. There’s something about the story, how it’s told, the pace and style, that let’s you know, from the start, that King loved every minute that he was writing it. It’s an infectious feeling and I challenge anyone to read the first chapter and not have to finish it in a single sitting. This is classic King and should appeal to fans both old and new. It’s at once scary, funny and extremely insightful. And it’s just enough to tide us over until November 8th, until we can get our hands on 11/22/63.
Incoming- THREE STRONG WOMEN bTHREE STRONG WOMEN by Marie N'Diaye (from MacLehose Press)
- THE FRIENDS OF EDDIETHE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V Higgins (bought)
- SKAGBOYS by Irvine WSKAGBOYS by Irvine Welsh (bought)
- A COLD SEASON [signeA COLD SEASON [signed, limited edition from PS Publishing] (bought from publisher)
- THE BLACK PATH by Ås
- Goodis [Library of AGoodis [Library of America] edited by Robert Polito (bought)
- ALIF THE UNSEEN by GALIF THE UNSEEN by G Willow Wilson (from Atlantic Books)
- A GAME OF THRONES GrA GAME OF THRONES Graphic Novel by George R. R. Martin et al (from Harper Voyager)
- TORN by Casey Hill (TORN by Casey Hill (from the author)
- BLOODMAN by Robert PBLOODMAN by Robert Pobi (from Arrow)
- THREE STRONG WOMEN b
