You read a Steven King book for a few reasons:
You’re stuck in a flat on the 37th floor by the
one-night-stand who accidentally dead-locked you in - and it’s the only thing
in the bookshelf to keep you entertained until they get home.
You’re in an airport in Soviet Uzbekistan and you found one
of the books chocking up the wheel of an abandoned Tupolev and you’ve eight
hours till the next flight out.
Bubba from the prison library hands it in through the bars.
Whatever the reason, you don’t read a Steven King book to be
enlightened or delve into any larger philosophical realms. You read it to pass
the time in a slightly more interesting way than trying to pick your nose until
it bleeds.
King’s latest, 11.22.63 has a premise and tries to
delve: Save the world by saving JFK. It also plods into the murky world of
conspiracy theorists who are still certain of magic bullets and Lee Harvey
Oswald’s incompetence.
He’s tried something less ethereally spooky and more down
the straight Sci-Fi lines than his normal stuff by doing this time travel book
and he’s not that good at it. His strength with the supernatural, spooky and
gory sort of overwhelms his ability to have a bit of logic and internal sense
to a world that is being affected by time travel. He was trying to be serious
and really, he’s better at the semi-amusing possessed cars.
To be fair, it’s a tough trick to pull off, particularly
around an event that is so well documented and scrutinised. Subsequently, he
has too much source material to work with. There are huge chunks in the middle
of the book where our hero is surveiling Oswald that simply don’t need to be
there. It’s well known that Oswald moved around a lot and there was a lot of
life’s messy backwards-and-forwards in his increasingly dysfunctional marriage.
Even if our hero’s movements do dovetail in with these events to give the
appearance of a story that is believable and logical, they do not make for good
story telling. Real life shouldn’t interfere with a Steven King book and there
is far too much of the mundane in this monster.
Like the last book from him, Under the Dome, the
covers are far too far apart and I wonder if editors aren’t afraid to edit
King. I wonder if there is such an aura around him now that no-one but the most
foolhardy attempts to tell him that quantity is not necessarily quality. Also,
like the last book, there is absolutely no deeper explanation as to how the
enabling “magic” happened. It’s akin to a doctor saying, “In an unlikely turn
of events, you have contracted Pernicious South American Bum and Gum Rot” and
you asking, “How is that possible? I’ve never been to South America?” and him
saying, “I have absolutely no idea in the world - but it sounds awesome so I’m
sticking with the diagnosis.”
There are elements of the book that are likeable (the main
character’s voice is pleasant. The female lead, if shallow, is ok) but King
makes a mistake he warns against in his own advice on how to write. He “tells”
rather than “shows” on too many occasions.
If you ever want to be beaten over the head with a
repetitive phrase, this is the book for you. He must have typed the words, “The
past is obdurate” a thousand times. Again, in the quantity is not quality way,
repeating things endlessly does not necessarily make them true. It just gets
people to agree because they can’t bear to hear it one more time. Writing a
book about repeating the past till you get it right, is not necessarily the
right thing to do either.
