“’For we saw as if through a glass darkly,’ Piper Libby said. She was weeping. ‘But now we see as if face to face.’”
“ … a little girl who made the mistake of thinking she was big when she was small, that she mattered when she didn’t, that the world cared when in reality the world is a huge dead locomotive with an engine but no headlight.”
“Great events often turn on small wheels.”
“They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life.”
When the massive bulk of Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” arrived under my Christmas tree, I took one look at its heft and wondered just how in the hell I would find the time to tackle it. Then, someone I trust told me that once I started this particular tale, I would find and make the time. He was right.
King’s story about how a invisible, impenetrable, semipermeable, unidentifiable wall of glass suddenly settles over a small sleepy town captivates you from word one and never lets you go. It could be argued that some of the Chester’s Mill town’s characters come across as a bit too stereotypical, cliché-ish and over-the-top, and even some of the kids’ jargon feels slightly forced. But Big Jim Rennie was almost eerie as a direct reincarnation of Rush Limbaugh, although King himself notes that the Andy Sanders-Rennie (“‘The advice is this: Never give a good politician time to pray.’”) relationship (they are First and Second Selectmen, respectively) was meant as a direct reflection of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney dynamic—and it is hilarious (and at the same time, terrifying) in its accuracy. Also, King said that “Under the Dome” was partially intended as a statement about the environmental and ecological issues we now face as well, with the message being that we are all essentially living under the same dome, so we should be wary of what we fill it up with.
I could see some readers taking issue with how long it took the “good” townspeople to understand that they needed to work together against the “bad” police force and Rennie, but then again, in a small town, there is a level of disbelief involved in seeing people who have known each other well throughout their entire lives behave in such aggressive and evil ways. At first, it can hard for even the reader to believe that there are people this purely evil, corrupt and even sociopathic, especially in such a small town, but our headlines are littered with folks like Pat Robertson and Limbaugh that are exactly this way, so the cynical aspect of me scoffs at surprise and suspends disbelief willingly. In that vein, there is room for some of the strange, bad decisions made by people like Rusty Everett, Piper Libby, Brenda Perkins and even the coincidentally placed Dale “Barbie” Barbara (a decorated military veteran working as a short-order cook at a town in middle-of-nowhere, Maine?).
Personally, I had shifting impressions of just how large the town of Chester’s Mill was supposed to be; the map and the perception created by King of how many of the same faces keep running into each other would seem to suggest a very small satellite town of Castle Rock. The population is described as 2,000 (and 15,000 in tourist season) in the beginning of the book, and it didn’t feel quite that big to me in the reading, and the map is both poorly constructed (with some missing landmarks) and falls short of capturing the true size of the town. I also took issue with some of the rape and sexual imagery, even though some of it could be considered essential to the plot. I certainly thought that Barbie plowing Julia Shumway in an orchard near radiation seemed slightly unnecessary and forced.
So what did “Under the Dome” remind me of, in terms of other King works and cultural references? Well, it was reminiscent of “It” somewhat, with the theme of the kids working as a close-knit team to deal with very adult issues in a challenged neighborhood and community. Sticking with that theme, Joe (“‘Chester’s Mill has been a town since 1803 -- we learned that in school. Over two hundred years. And a week to wipe it off the face of the earth. One fuckin week is all it took. How about that, Colonel Barbara?’”) makes a reference about how enterprising kids usually save the day in Steven Spielberg movies (see: Round, Short), at the same time lamenting that he couldn’t be that kid for the town. However, the town drunk fills a heroic role at one point, which is kind of similar. From that standpoint, the story was even evocative of the epic “Lord of the Flies” in many ways: what happens when traditional societal mores are violated in a time of upheaval and anarchy descends? I recognized some aspects of “Tommyknockers” as well, and the author himself even compared the earliest versions of this story to “Needful Things” (minus the social comedy). King also makes a self-reference, something he’s increasingly done as his career has progressed into the twilight stages, by alluding to “The Mist” and using Shumway’s words to describe his own professional fears (“Maybe a novelist, although it seemed to her that writing novels was pretty risky; what if you spent all that time, wrote a thousand-pager, and it sucked?”).
Among the many things done well were the building of not only character, but an entire community -- I’ve long contended that no one, possibly ever, does this as well as King. He somehow managed to capture the essence of small-town Americana -- and its inevitable under-the-surface secrets -- almost perfectly, in so many subtle ways. The description of the fire and its aftermath as cataclysmic (“This is the end of October and in Chester’s Mill, October is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.”) was very vivid and surreal (sidenote: how did Barbie know to order all those fans?), yet very real. Also, the case can be made that the sad and stunning death of Piper’s dog, Clover, was the clarifying moment and turning point of the book.
Also, the scene of Ollie Dinsmore dying in a scrubbed-out window of the Dome as his new friend, Private Ames, tries helplessly to do anything was very touching and emotional -- for my money, Ollie’s side story was most underrated and well-done secondary plot line of the book. And as usual, King finds a way to weave an unforgettable scene that includes terror and tension, and he does it well enough that you find yourself actually cheering for ghosts.
Some of “Under the Dome” devolves into watching a trainwreck in slow motion, especially when the machinations of Rennie begin clicking into place and Barbie (“But maybe was a gulf better men than him had fallen into.”) is racing the clock before the arrest that he’s awaiting occurs. At one point, I feared that events were possibly leading up to an eminently predictable Barbie-Rennie endgame, but we were thankfully spared that dramatic cliché.
The difficulty in writing a book like “Under the Dome” becomes apparent when you consider that King started and stopped it multiple times over the course of some 35 years. The first chapter was initially written long ago, but King balked under the responsibility and sheer size of it. Indeed, even this version’s manuscript checked in at some 1,500 pages and weighed 19 pounds. He was able to scale it down to just under 1,100 pages, but one can see how the creation of a plot that includes so many different themes -- ranging from anarchy to agnosticism and lots in between -- that can afflict a small town can be almost unbelievably burdensome. Also, there appeared to be some editing mistakes and a few grammatical errors, leading me to surmise that the act of slicing, whittling and cutting the manuscript down was not only a huge job, but also one that might have been somewhat rushed. You could tell that the technical information regarding the Dome’s effect on weather patterns, chemical dispersion and nuclear attack were highly detailed and rigorously researched; in fact, King noted that the need to ensure the accuracy of such data was so vital to the story that it helped play a role in delaying its release for 35 years or so.
There is apparently now some discussion of “Under the Dome” being turned into a cable series; despite its length, the reader still didn’t want it to end, so that might actually work and it might actually make sense for TV. In some ways, allowing the story to build while King himself matured over the last 35 years or so helped turn the tale into a truly modern vehicle; indeed, there are several viral sites attached to the Dome, from Big Jim’s Used Cars to Sweetbriar Rose Diner to the Chester’s Mill Democrat to Burpee’s Department Stores to Dipper’s Roadhouse to WCIK Christian Radio to Chester’s Mill itself. A talented artist even helped lend some personality to the story through some vivid illustrations.
In the end, never has a 1,100-page book been devoured so quickly by me. Rarely has King so acutely sketched a villain that inspires such deep hatred by a reader. And never have you wished for a dome to keep an entire town locked in for just a few pages longer …
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