I was one of those teenagers who read all the Stephen King I could get my hands on: Carrie and Christine and Cujo and IT, 'Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary, The Tommyknockers and The Shining, as well as all of the short story collections like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew and The Bachman Books. And like a lot of my peers, the ne plus ultra of the King canon to me was The Stand: epic and thrilling, I stayed up late, night after night, until I could finally discover just what it was Randall Flagg wanted -- and whether he would get it. The Walking Dude's boot-heels click-clocking their way down the blacktop rang on in my imagination for many, many years after. It was, therefore, an unfortunate mistake that I reread The Stand a couple of years ago because it didn't really hold up to my memory; it was just okay the second time around. But what did strike me on the reread was what an incredible job King did of capturing the era -- everything about The Stand is pure late 70's .
Under the Dome is another book of epic proportions, thrilling and propulsive in its devices: As I explained to my kids, it's so easy to stay up late reading Stephen King when his chapters are only 2 or 3 pages long and end with cliffhangers or doomy foreshadowing; just one more chapter, just one more, and then it's much, much later than you realise. Like The Stand, it is also a time capsule of its era and could be interesting to reread in 20 or 30 years just to see how times have changed. If only I could have turned off my brain and surrendered myself to the story, I might have enjoyed Under the Dome immensely. However, for the same reasons that books like Gerald's Game and Rose Madder caused me to abandon King in the 90's (one-dimensional characters and unsatisfactory endings), I can't say that I really enjoyed this book -- even though I devoured it. And unlike earlier works, this was the first time that I felt like King was preaching to me, and that really turned me off.
The short synopsis: A small town in Maine is suddenly trapped within an invisible barrier of unknown origin. Before the citizens even think to panic, the de facto leader, Big Jim Rennie, stirs up trouble in order to entrench his powers and cover his own illegal activities. Can a small group of resistance fighters stop or at least elude Big Jim long enough to investigate the source of the dome, and hopefully destroy it, before either he or it kills them all? Exciting, right?
What I did like: The mystery of the dome itself; the eerie premonitory nature of the kids' seizures (Stop the Great Pumpkin! Stop Halloween!); the struggle for survival after the big fire (and especially the menace inherent in an anyone-can-die scenario); the inclusion of current cultural touchstones (24 hour news, meth and OxyContin addictions, waterboarding, the president with the "terrorist" middle name, rich megachurches); and the fairly equal number of men and women on the heroic side (though perhaps there should be a criticism that pretty much all the bad guys are guys?)
What I didn't like: The solution to the mystery of the dome ("God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn't that funny?"); I really did like The Chef, but he seemed like a total ripoff of The Trashcan Man from The Stand; pointless deaths (and especially why did Andrea kick her pill addiction just to be gunned down without the Vader file ever being revealed?); and if this was meant to be a social critique like Lord of the Flies, it missed its mark -- characters didn't devolve to their base natures under pressure, but immediately took advantage of the dome to rape and murder and steal. And then there's the big epiphany at the end: *spoiler* The dome is the aliens' equivalent of the magnifying glass that Rusty and his friends used to use to fry ants. In her experience with the "box", Julia feels:
She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.
I was uncomfortable with those barbaric actions (that resulted from a childish lack of empathy) being equated with Barbie's time in Fallujah -- after their comrades were killed, the soldiers questioned and then beat and then (one of them) killed the innocent Iraqi, and while their actions were vengeful and illegal and unquestionably wrong, they weren't acting like children who couldn't imagine that the Iraqi had a "little life of his own". I also didn't like that Julia was reminded at this time of her own experience with being bullied as a child -- being beaten and spit on and having her pants taken by girls who thought she acted too smart for her own good. In an exchange with Barbie:
"(Y)ou thought you deserved what happened to you."
"Deserved is the wrong word. I thought I'd bought and paid for it, which isn't the same thing at all."
Are they really saying that Julia had the bullying coming to her? By extension, is King saying that the town of Chester's Mill had the dome coming to it? And I need to ask, since he brought up Fallujah, is King saying that America had 9/11 coming to it? Not that they deserved it, but that they had bought and paid for it. And if that's not the same thing, I don't see the distinction, because the author himself said in interviews that Under the Dome is certainly meant to be political:
From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is. It's a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it. I don't like books where everything stands for everything else. It works with Animal Farm: You can be a child and read it as a story about animals, but when you're older, you realize it's about communism, capitalism, fascism. That's the genius of Orwell. But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. We're a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. There's nothing like ours. We have to conclude we're on our own, and we have to deal with it. We're under the dome. All of us.
And:
I was angry about incompetency. Obviously I'm on the left of center. I didn't believe there was justification for going into the war in Iraq. And it just seemed at the time, that in the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration was like this angry kid walking down the street who couldn't find whoever sucker punched him, and so turned around and punched the first likely suspect. Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people. I put a lot of that into the book. But when I started I said, "I want to use the Bush–Cheney dynamic for the people who are the leaders of this town." As a result, you have Big Jim Rennie, the villain of the piece. I got to like the other guy, Andy Sanders. He wasn't actively evil, he was just incompetent—which is how I always felt about George W. Bush. I enjoyed taking the Bush–Cheney dynamic and shrinking it to the small-town level. The last administration interested me because of the aura of fundamentalist religion that surrounded it and the rather amazing incompetency of those two top guys. I thought there is something blackly humorous in it. So in a sense, Under the Dome is an apocalyptic version of The Peter Principle.
As a novelist, I believe that Stephen King has a right (and duty) to not only capture the culture he finds himself in but also to try and shape that culture in the way he sees fit -- if he was angry about the Bush/Cheney years, he was right to write about it. But like he said in that first political quote, his intention wasn't to wham me over the head with his beliefs, and I feel whammed; I've seen the man behind the curtain and the Great and Powerful Oz has lost the power to shock and awe. By putting the following words into Big Jim's mouth as he's trapped in the fallout shelter, King is tipping the reader off as to how proper people think by contrast (you know, not like the ones whom Obama dismissed as "bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them". Sounds a lot like Chester's Mill…):
"Oh dear, the sky is falling, oh dear, the sky is falling!" Big Jim declaimed in a strange (and strangely disturbing) falsetto. "They've been saying it for years, haven't they? The scientists and the bleeding heart liberals. World war III! Nuclear reactors melting down to the center of the earth! Y2K computer freezes! The end of the ozone layer! Melting ice caps! Killer hurricanes! Global warming! Chickendirt weak-sister atheists who won't trust in the will of a loving, caring God! Who refuse to believe there is such a thing as a loving, caring God!"
Wham!
Parenthetically, I tried to watch the Under the Dome miniseries this past summer but couldn't get into it. Why can't they film a Stephen King story? Since I recorded it, I may try again now that I know where it's going…or maybe not. And ending on a more positive note, I did enjoy 11/ 22 /63 very much.
