What is the most devastating watershed moment of your
lifetime? Would you change it if you could? Can you be certain the world would
be better today if you did?
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 grapples with these questions in a mesmerizing thriller.
- Author: Stephen King
- American Lit, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Fantasy
- Published: 2011
- My edition: Scribner (eBook)
- Setting: Maine, 2011 and Texas early 1960s
- Awards: 2012 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel
- Also by this author (that I’ve read): The Stand; Dark Tower Series
In 2011, Jake Epping, a divorced high school English teacher from Maine, discovers a time portal, that always takes him back to 1958. No matter how long he stays in the past, when he reverses his path through the portal, he returns two minutes later than the moment in 2011 when he left.
And Jake has the chance to re-write history. He just has to hang out in the past for five years or so, until the title date of November 22, 1963, the date of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Stopping that would be a good thing, right? He can’t go back far enough to stop Hitler. He probably wouldn’t live long enough in the past to stop 9/11, but getting Lee Harvey Oswald, that would be well within his sights (pardon the macabre pun).
No brainer, right? It’s almost his duty.
But Jake learns several nuances of time-travel. Some of these nuances even have real-world names, like the “butterfly effect”: (in chaos theory) whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.
If you mix the butterfly effect with time travel, well just buckle up. There is no possible way to predict the outcome. And under no circumstances fall in love whilst redirecting the course of human history.
Throughout the story, Jake observes that the past is obdurate. It is almost a consciousness that resists Jake. The bigger changes he attempts to make, the more the past resists. I believe this was King’s main point. The past is obdurate. Some people say everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe the past has a conscience, but I do believe it has a sentient director, and he doesn’t need our help.
That’s my point, not King’s, but I don’t think his was far off. He makes a strong case, that even if we have the capability, we shouldn’t go messing with the past.
My rating 4 ½ / 5 stars
You probably know that King’s novels are all interconnected; some very bluntly, others more subtle. There’s a fairly blunt allusion in this novel. Jake makes a stop in Derry, Maine, the setting for IT, for some lesser time altering, and he learns there was a string of murders, children mostly, some years back. One of the locals tells him…
Other folks say he [the murderer] was a local who dressed up like a clown to keep from being recognized.
I love it when I catch those allusions. I’m certain I miss many.
King often references other writers. When Jake was describing the town of Derry, and the despairing malaise he sensed, he compared it to Ray Bradbury’s fictional town of Greentown, from the Green Town Trilogy, which includes Something Wicked This Way Comes, Jake states…
But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown too.
Love that. Jake, the fictional character, had read real life Bradbury’s fiction.
Elsewhere, Jake’s love interest in the past, Sadie Dunhill, mentions a short story by Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder, that is entirely about time-travel and the butterfly effect.
And in the course of the novel Jake reads Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, and Oswald reads Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
Finally two quotations:
Sadie reminiscing with Jake about their past…
How we danced!
And Jake sometime later to someone else…
Dancing is life.
This was an absolutely riveting read. I don’t think I’ve ever read an 800+ page novel so quickly. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by King. I’d welcome your views on Stephen King, and recommendations for what to read next by this prolific author.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment