Book review: Under the Dome

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

UNDER THE DOME Stephen King Hodder & Stoughton, £19.99

HIS latest novel gravely threatens Stephen King's status as a mere chart-busting pop cultural phenomenon. It has the scope and flavour of literary Americana, even if King's particular patch of American turf is smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone. It dispenses with his usual scatology and fantasy to deliver a spectrum of credible people with real family ties, health crises, self-destructive habits and political passions. Even its broad caricatures prompt real emotion, if only via the damage they can inflict on others. Though the book's broad conspiratorial strokes become far-fetched, its ordinary souls become ever more able to break hearts.

This book has the heft of a brick but a premise that can be summarised in seconds. On a beautiful autumn day in Maine, a transparent dome materialises over the town of Chester's Mill. Once the Dome falls, all vestiges of normal life are suspended. Things run amok. They get scary. The townsfolk become fate's playthings. And King, who can manipulate this crisis in any way that occurs to him, becomes a kid in a candy store. The premise provides so many options that his decisions about how to tell this story are of special interest. The King book that is most readily brought to mind by Under The Dome isn't an earlier large-scale apocalyptic fantasy like It or The Stand; it's On Writing, the instructive autobiographical gem that cast light on how his creative mind works. In the spirit of On Writing, Under The Dome takes a lucid, common sense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down.

Consider the book's step-by-step way of defining the Dome. King isn't about to do the easy thing, which would be to give a straightforward description of what it is and how it works. Instead, he offers a textbook demonstration of how to make action and explication one and the same. First step: a woodchuck on the ground and a pilot in the air named Chuck are sudden victims of the Dome's guillotine-like slicing descent. Second step: the book's hero to be, a short-order cook and Iraq war veteran named Dale Barbara, looks upward. He sees the front of Chuck's plane fall off and the back get crushed by the invisible barrier that, we now know, reaches sky high. Big sigh of relief here: Dome calamities, while definitely deadly, will not be (by King's high standards in this area) described gruesomely at all. Third step: Barbara, aka Barbie, waves frantically to a stranger for help. The stranger walks right toward him – and smashes into an invisible wall. So the Dome's extent is making itself known.

Then King defines the perimeter by ticking off the various roads that lead to Chester's Mill. "And shortly before noon on Dome Day," he writes, now attaching a name to this calamity, "every one of them snapped closed". With the same tight efficiency, King goes on to introduce the various businesses (restaurant, newspaper), institutions (hospital) and officials (police and town councillors) on the Chester's Mill map.

Special editions of this book also come with playing cards featuring illustrations of the main characters in this story's huge cast, among them its mega-villain, a used-car salesman and diabolically devious local politician known as Big Jim Rennie. He has been drawn to look just like Dick Cheney. The Dome traps the air in Chester's Mill. But for Big Jim, it creates an exploitable vacuum. His power grab is soon under way, and just in case that isn't sinister enough, Big Jim's son, Junior, turns out to have homicidal tendencies.

Meanwhile, King's neighbourly array of well-sketched locals intertwine in dozens of subplots, to the point where Chester's Mill really does seem to operate as one cohesive organism. All of this – along with the smog that starts to choke off Chester's Mill and make the Dome as visible as a dirty windshield – is a way of blowing smoke. It gets King through nearly 1,100 fast-moving pages without his having to answer the obvious questions: what is this thing? How did it get here? Why did it get here? What if it doesn't go away? Under the Dome can't avoid these thoughts forever. But it can postpone them with an ease that is one more measure of its author having placed more value on humanity than on horror.

Big currents flow through this book along with the small ones. There are echoes of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and Iraq that help to shape this small town's view of the wider world. Nowhere in King's immense body of work have his real and fantasy worlds collided with such head-on force.