David Newgreen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
4thofeleven) wrote2010-01-03 09:50 pm
4thofeleven) wrote2010-01-03 09:50 pm
Entry tags:
Review: Under the Dome
Anyone remember Stephen King announcing he was retiring from writing a few years back? Because he’s apparently forgotten; if anything, his output seems to have increased recently.
Unfortunately, while “Under the Dome” contains a great deal of quantity, there’s very little quality in this giant book. Now I don’t mean to fall back on the standard criticisms of King’s work – I think he’s an extremely talented author, and I have nothing against long novels as long as there’s enough content to justify the length. Here, though – it’s not even that I feel the story would work better as a regular sized novel, I was by the end of it wondering if there was even enough content here to justify a short story.
What’s it about? Alright, so one October day, an impenetrable barrier appears, surrounding the small town of Chester’s Mill, trapping everyone within the ‘dome’. Now, you’re thinking, wait, isn’t that the plot of the Simpsons Movie? Yeah, it is – but that’s alright, it’s interesting to see the idea in a serious work, and it provides a good excuse to have a small town decent into chaos after being cut off from civilization without needing an apocalyptic world-spanning disaster or anything. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the execution and the resolution.
See, what King seems to be trying to set up is a version of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” - a small town faced with crisis degenerates into paranoia, witch hunts and self-destruction. The problem is that King’s villains may as well be wearing black hats and twirling their moustaches from the moment they first appear. “Big Jim”, the town’s second selectman and main villain is engaged in a naked power-grab right from the beginning, and in the scenes from his perspective has no illusions that what he’s doing is purely for his own benefit. He’s corrupt, racist, sexist, dealing meth, and he’s probably the most three-dimensional of the bad guy faction. There’s no subtlety – the bad guys engineer riots and literally shoot dogs. They’re grotesque, yes, but they lack any human qualities or motivations.
Making things worse is the political elements of the story. King’s said one of his inspirations was his concerns over developments in the US during the Bush presidency, and there’s an obvious allegory here, with the evil leader using a crisis to justify his own power-grab. The problem is that King makes the allegory even more obvious, by making the bad guy faction explicitly conservative. Big Jim and his minions seemingly can’t finish a sentence without ranting about Obama, Democrats, liberals, gays, women or terrorism. I would not have thought it possible, but King seems to have managed to create a straw-man version of modern American conservative thought. Obviously I have no love for the American Republican party, but by making the divide between good and evil so blatantly partisan, King renders already thin characters even more one-dimensional.
(For that matter, religion doesn’t come across too well either. Not something I necessarily object to, but when the bad guys are mouthing platitudes about Jesus every other page, while the closest thing to a religious person on the hero’s side is an openly agnostic minister – well, again, it weakens the story when the faction lines are so clearly drawn.)
Plot-wise, the story seems utterly unfocused – the Dome seems irrelevant for most of the story, existing purely as a plot device to explain why our heroes don’t skip town when Big Jim begins his reign of terror. Nobody seems to exhibit any real curiosity, either inside or outside the town. And for a story about a small town cut off from the world, there’s no sense of community – understandable, really. Big Jim’s so loathsome that it would be difficult to imagine anyone living with him under normal circumstances. Worse than that is that characters die in droves but seem to be forgotten before they’re cold. The town’s evangelical priest is murdered after he threatens to expose Jim’s meth lab – and while people are upset about a murder, nobody seems to act as if a long-standing pillar of the community has died in the middle of the crisis. The town’s third selectman has a whole subplot where she breaks her addiction to painkillers after Jim threatens to cut off her supply, finds the documents needed to expose his crimes, reveals them in a town meeting - only to be shot in an ensuing riot and is never mentioned again. A few chapters later, the exploding meth lab unleashes a fireball that wipes out most of the surviving characters, who at this point have been reduced to a faceless mass of interchangeable victims. It’s hard to care about the fate of this community when they’re all either forgotten or evil.
Oh, and the Dome itself? Alien children playing. Look, I know King’s not too good with satisfying endings, but this is one of those cases where just leaving it a mystery would be more satisfying for everyone.
Anyway, I’m rambling a bit now. One last issue, related to the book’s politics. As I mentioned, Big Jim’s the town’s second in command. The first selectman’s not a villain – he ends up spending most of the book stoned on meth – he’s just a puppet, naïve and a little too trusting and unquestioning, but not a bad guy. The obvious analogy is Bush and Cheney, which I believe King has confirmed in interviews. Now, I’m not sure it really helps to create allegories for the Bush administration in which Bush’s own role – and, by extension, that of the people who elected him – is so completely whitewashed. Yes, Cheney’s a bad guy – but he wasn’t the Machiavellian plotter, manipulating poor innocent Bush and the American people. Making the Cheney analogue the sole villain seems like a failure to really examine what went wrong in American politics at the turn of the century – that Guantanamo Bay, torture, extraordinary rendition and all the rest weren’t planned in the dark, in Cheney’s undisclosed location, but were announced publically with the full knowledge and support of the president and the American public. There’s little point in a social satire where all the crimes can be placed at the foot of the black hats and everyone else is innocent.
Unfortunately, while “Under the Dome” contains a great deal of quantity, there’s very little quality in this giant book. Now I don’t mean to fall back on the standard criticisms of King’s work – I think he’s an extremely talented author, and I have nothing against long novels as long as there’s enough content to justify the length. Here, though – it’s not even that I feel the story would work better as a regular sized novel, I was by the end of it wondering if there was even enough content here to justify a short story.
What’s it about? Alright, so one October day, an impenetrable barrier appears, surrounding the small town of Chester’s Mill, trapping everyone within the ‘dome’. Now, you’re thinking, wait, isn’t that the plot of the Simpsons Movie? Yeah, it is – but that’s alright, it’s interesting to see the idea in a serious work, and it provides a good excuse to have a small town decent into chaos after being cut off from civilization without needing an apocalyptic world-spanning disaster or anything. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the execution and the resolution.
See, what King seems to be trying to set up is a version of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” - a small town faced with crisis degenerates into paranoia, witch hunts and self-destruction. The problem is that King’s villains may as well be wearing black hats and twirling their moustaches from the moment they first appear. “Big Jim”, the town’s second selectman and main villain is engaged in a naked power-grab right from the beginning, and in the scenes from his perspective has no illusions that what he’s doing is purely for his own benefit. He’s corrupt, racist, sexist, dealing meth, and he’s probably the most three-dimensional of the bad guy faction. There’s no subtlety – the bad guys engineer riots and literally shoot dogs. They’re grotesque, yes, but they lack any human qualities or motivations.
Making things worse is the political elements of the story. King’s said one of his inspirations was his concerns over developments in the US during the Bush presidency, and there’s an obvious allegory here, with the evil leader using a crisis to justify his own power-grab. The problem is that King makes the allegory even more obvious, by making the bad guy faction explicitly conservative. Big Jim and his minions seemingly can’t finish a sentence without ranting about Obama, Democrats, liberals, gays, women or terrorism. I would not have thought it possible, but King seems to have managed to create a straw-man version of modern American conservative thought. Obviously I have no love for the American Republican party, but by making the divide between good and evil so blatantly partisan, King renders already thin characters even more one-dimensional.
(For that matter, religion doesn’t come across too well either. Not something I necessarily object to, but when the bad guys are mouthing platitudes about Jesus every other page, while the closest thing to a religious person on the hero’s side is an openly agnostic minister – well, again, it weakens the story when the faction lines are so clearly drawn.)
Plot-wise, the story seems utterly unfocused – the Dome seems irrelevant for most of the story, existing purely as a plot device to explain why our heroes don’t skip town when Big Jim begins his reign of terror. Nobody seems to exhibit any real curiosity, either inside or outside the town. And for a story about a small town cut off from the world, there’s no sense of community – understandable, really. Big Jim’s so loathsome that it would be difficult to imagine anyone living with him under normal circumstances. Worse than that is that characters die in droves but seem to be forgotten before they’re cold. The town’s evangelical priest is murdered after he threatens to expose Jim’s meth lab – and while people are upset about a murder, nobody seems to act as if a long-standing pillar of the community has died in the middle of the crisis. The town’s third selectman has a whole subplot where she breaks her addiction to painkillers after Jim threatens to cut off her supply, finds the documents needed to expose his crimes, reveals them in a town meeting - only to be shot in an ensuing riot and is never mentioned again. A few chapters later, the exploding meth lab unleashes a fireball that wipes out most of the surviving characters, who at this point have been reduced to a faceless mass of interchangeable victims. It’s hard to care about the fate of this community when they’re all either forgotten or evil.
Oh, and the Dome itself? Alien children playing. Look, I know King’s not too good with satisfying endings, but this is one of those cases where just leaving it a mystery would be more satisfying for everyone.
Anyway, I’m rambling a bit now. One last issue, related to the book’s politics. As I mentioned, Big Jim’s the town’s second in command. The first selectman’s not a villain – he ends up spending most of the book stoned on meth – he’s just a puppet, naïve and a little too trusting and unquestioning, but not a bad guy. The obvious analogy is Bush and Cheney, which I believe King has confirmed in interviews. Now, I’m not sure it really helps to create allegories for the Bush administration in which Bush’s own role – and, by extension, that of the people who elected him – is so completely whitewashed. Yes, Cheney’s a bad guy – but he wasn’t the Machiavellian plotter, manipulating poor innocent Bush and the American people. Making the Cheney analogue the sole villain seems like a failure to really examine what went wrong in American politics at the turn of the century – that Guantanamo Bay, torture, extraordinary rendition and all the rest weren’t planned in the dark, in Cheney’s undisclosed location, but were announced publically with the full knowledge and support of the president and the American public. There’s little point in a social satire where all the crimes can be placed at the foot of the black hats and everyone else is innocent.