Under the Dome is one of Stephen King’s longest novels – at 336,114 words – and one of his more typical. His stories tend to be about people trapped in an increasingly lethal environment: an empty hotel in The Shining; a prison in The Green Mile; in Salem’s Lot and here, a small town in his native Maine.
One fine October day, the town of Chester’s Mill is cut off from the world by a transparent and unbreakable dome. I was initially reminded of The Simpsons Movie, in which President Schwarzenegger orders a similar dome to be placed over Springfield after Homer pollutes its lake; and so were others on the internet. “I have never seen the movie,” King replies on his website, “and the similarity came as a complete surprise to me.” But it doesn’t matter, he argues, because unless there is outright plagiarism, “stories can no more be alike than snowflakes. The reason is simple: no two imaginations are exactly alike.”
Just so. Like Springfield, Chester’s Mill has dozens of memorable characters, including a town drunk, feckless young stoners and corrupt police – and like Grampa Simpson, some of the characters experience precognitive visions. But though he is by no means averse to jokes, King’s intentions are quite different. What interests him, as always, is evil and cruelty, which he explores step by squelching step, wading ever deeper until the reader is fully immersed.
Evil in Chester’s Mill is personified by “Big Jim” Rennie, used-car salesman, crystal-meth manufacturer and sanctimonious fascist, who uses murder, riot and arson to turn the town into a police state, with himself as dictator. As with Annie Wilkes, the nurse/torturer in Misery, who says such things as “the cock-a-doodie car”, one immediately knows Big Jim is a baddy by his euphemistic style of cursing, which somehow sounds more obscene than the real thing.
The chief goody is Dale Barbara (“Barbie”), short-order cook at the Sweetbriar Rose, who knows about evil from his military service in Iraq. When the dome descends, Barbie is promoted to colonel and given command of the town by a concerned President Obama, but Big Jim (a Palin supporter) frames him and throws him in jail, where he is threatened with waterboarding: “it was how these things went; how they went in Fallujah, Tikrit, Hilla, Mosul and Baghdad. How they also now went in Chester’s Mill, it seemed.”
The sci-fi aspect of the story – the origin and purpose of the mysterious dome – is kept for the most part on the back burner, which was a disappointment to me, as I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief in such stuff, but when it does emerge it has an ingeniously metaphysical plausibility. The focus remains mainly on the human element, the “little lives” of characters engaged in an epic moral battle.
“I have tried,” explains King in an author’s note, “to write a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal.” Whenever he faltered, he recalls, his editor “jammed her foot down on top of mine and yelled (in the margins, as editors are wont to do), ‘Faster, Steve! Faster!’” Author and editor have succeeded, and Under the Dome has terrific pace, whizzing from one cliffhanger to the next on narrative wires strung to an admirable tension. Which I think acknowledges that audiences are less interested in reading for depth and more interested in Michael Bay movies in book form.
Critics are likely to dismiss the literary quality of King’s work. This strikes me as unfair. He is certainly no Proust, but nor is he a Dan Brown, possibly a Shakespeare, crude but popular. Besides his evident ability to create compelling plots and monstrous characters, he can turn a good simile (seen from inside, the blue of the dome “has a yellowish cast, like a film of cataract on an old man’s eye”). And he can write consistently good sentences, such as these, which sum up the spirit of his work: “When dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of night thoughts became zombies.”
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