They say an artist produces their finest work in the first ten to fifteen years of their career. Something to do with that hoary old chestnut, "the hunger of youth". Or, as Simon David Williamson so memorably put it: "Well, at one time you've got it, and then you've lost it... and it's gone forever." I really don't know about that in general (take Clint Eastwood - you really gonna tell me Firefox is a better film than Mystic River?), but in the case of Stephen King the theory seemed to hold some water. The author's canon is front-loaded with classics and I had, without really knowing it, resigned myself to the reality that he would never write anything else that could sit truly comfortably upon the shelf next to Salem's Lot, The Shining, It, and of course, The Stand. Those four have always been the benchmark for me, populating the highest of grounds with the likes of The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary and Carrie scattered about a few feet below them.
Under The Dome, published last year, probably is not destined to join the former group; after one read I'm not going to commit either way. But what is certain is that it is his most absorbing, muscular novel since It, not to mention the most ambitious. (I'd like to make it clear at this point that I am not including the Dark Tower books here, mainly because I've not read the last three having found the fourth, Wizard and Glass, rather dull. Yikes!)
The premise is simple: what would happen if a small town suddenly became encased - exactly along its borders as they would appear on a map - in an invisible, impenetrable bubble? As you may have noticed, and much to King's surprise, this is the exact same plot device used in The Simpsons Movie, and so the publisher has been at great pains to promote the fact that he first attempted the novel in 1976 and, according to the author himself, subsequently "crept away from it with my tail between my legs". The Dome, you see, is big.
The inside back-cover trumpets that it took over 25 years to write (erroneously, if he first attempted it in 1976, but anyway), as if King had been working on it all that time. God knows what sort of gargantuan manuscript we'd have on our hands if that really were the case because as it is the thing clocks in at a very weighty 877 pages - more than the original, edited version of The Stand, in fact, and it is that previous epic concerning the good and evil within mankind that Under The Dome most resembles.
To call it a companion piece is, I think, correct: both books deal with the idea of a complete breakdown of recognised structure and what might occur thereafter, though the scales of each differ completely - one takes place in a single small town, the other an entire continent. Both, though, feature the rise of evil in the aftermath - although unlike Randall Flagg in The Stand, Big Jim Rennie, the town of Chester's Mill's Second Selectman, is all too human. He plays the situation for his own political gain and - like Flagg - wants absolute power. Rennie is "Born Again", and the theme of fundamentalism that runs throughout may invite some to imagine King is in allegorical mode here: Chester's Mill is the U.S.; Rennie is Dick Cheney to First Selectman Andy Sanders's George W. - Sanders is a puppet, an incompetent who Rennie controls in order to get what he wants from the town, without ever having to stick his own neck on the line. Sound familiar? If that doesn't convince you that King was thinking of a certain presidential administration of recent vintage, he has an airliner crash into the Dome just to ram the point home. No-one ever said subtlety was the author's strong point.
To say King's prose has gotten tighter as his career has progressed is not exactly news; it would be a bigger surprise if it hadn't. But I've always felt that the charm of his earlier novels - besides demonstrably being the work of an author who has yet to become "Stephen King: Cash Cow" - lay in the somewhat loose approach to narrative. His attitude seemed to be, why write a scene in three pages when you can easily do it in ten? This was of course a stick his lazier critics often used to beat him with, but I've missed it myself as his work has become pacier and more direct. Having said that, Under The Dome fairly rockets along and is all the better for it. Particularly when it comes to the book's big set-pieces, of which there are many - one in particular rivals the blistering opening chapter of Cell for adrenalin-fuelled savagery on an apocalyptic scale, and another involving a simultaneous prison break and the mother of all town meetings would have Michael Mann twitching uncontrollably in appreciation.
King has stated that he expects to continue writing until he is physically incapable (and even then he'll probably start using a Dictaphone), but he may only continue to publish for another ten years. I don't know if Under The Dome will in time be regarded as one of his absolute classics - we'll decide on that in a couple of years, shall we? But if this is the start of an Indian summer in the man's career, I hope that prediction is conservative. There's no-one to fill the void, you see... not on this kind of form.
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