- King, Stephen. 11/22/63. New York: Scribner, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4516-2728-2.
-
I gave up on Stephen King in the early 1990s. I had become
weary of what seemed to me self-indulgent doorstops of novels
which could have been improved by a sharp-pencilled editor
cutting them by one third to one half, but weren't because what
editor would dare strike words by such a celebrated (and
profitable to the publisher) author? I never made it through
either
Gerald's Game
or
Insomnia
and after that I stopped trying. Recently I heard good things
from several sources I respect about the
present work and, despite its formidable
length (850 pages in hardcover), decided to give it a try
(especially since I've always been a fan of time travel
fiction
and
purported fact)
to see if, a decade and a half later, King still “has it”.
The title is the date of the assassination of the U.S. president John
F. Kennedy: November the 22nd of 1963 (written in the quaint American
way). In the novel, Jake Epping, a school teacher in Maine, happens
to come across a splice in time or wormhole or whatever you choose to
call it which allows bidirectional travel between his world in 2011
and September of 1958. Persuaded by the person who discovered the
inexplicable transtemporal portal and revealed it to him, Jake takes
upon himself the mission of returning to the past and living there
until November of 1963 with the goal of averting the assassination and
preventing the pernicious sequelæ which he believed to have
originated in that calamity.
Upon arrival in the past, he discovers from other lesser wrongs he
seeks to right that while the past can be changed, it doesn't
like to be changed and pushes back—it is
mutable but “obdurate”. As he lives his life in
that lost and largely forgotten country which was the U.S.
in the middle of the 20th century, he discovers how much has
been lost compared to our times, and also how far we have
come from commonplace and unperceived injustices and
assaults upon the senses and health of that epoch. Still,
with a few rare exceptions, King forgoes the smug “look
at how much better we are than those rubes” tone that so many
contemporary authors adopt when describing the 1950s; you get
the sense that King has a deep affection for the era
in which he (and I) grew up, and it's apparent here.
I'm going to go behind the curtain now to discuss some of the
details of the novel and the (remarkably few) quibbles I have
with it. I don't consider any of these “big spoilers”,
but others may dissent, so I'd rather err on the side of caution
lest some irritated time traveller come back and….
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.As I got into the novel, I was afraid I'd end up hurling it across the room (well, not actually, since I was reading the Kindle edition and I'm rather fond of my iPad) because the model of time travel employed just didn't make any sense. But before long, I began to have a deeper respect for what King was doing, and by the end of the book I came to appreciate that what he'd created was largely compatible with the past/future multiverse picture presented in David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality and my own concept of conscious yet constrained multiverse navigation in “Notes toward a General Theory of Paranormal Phenomena”. If this gets made into a movie or miniseries (and that's the way to bet), I'll bet that scene on p. 178 where the playground roundy-round slowly spins with no kids in sight on a windless day makes the cut—brrrrr. A few minutes' reflection will yield several ways that Jake, given access to the Internet in 2011 and the properties of the time portal, could have accumulated unlimited funds to use in the past without taking the risks he did. I'll avert my eyes here; removing the constraints he found himself under would torpedo a large part of the plot. On p. 457 et seq. Jake refers to an “omnidirectional microphone” when what is meant is a “directional” or “parabolic” microphone. On p. 506 the author states that during the Cuban missile crisis “American missile bases and the Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.” This makes the common error in popular fiction that a higher number indicates a greater alert condition or closeness to war. In fact, it goes the other way: DEFCON 5 corresponds to peacetime—the lowest state of readiness, while DEFCON 1 means nuclear war is imminent. During the Cuban missile crisis, SAC was ordered to DEFCON 2 while the balance of the military was at DEFCON 3. On p. 635, the righthand man of the dictator of Haiti is identified as Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, boss of the tonton macoute. But Baby Doc was born in 1951, and at the time would have been twelve years old, unlikely to wield such powers. If the ending doesn't make your eyes mist up, you're probably, like the protagonist, “not a crying [person]”.There is a poignant sense of the momentum of events in the past here which I have not felt in any time travel fiction since Michael Moorcock's masterpiece Behold The Man. Bottom line? King's still got it.Spoilers end here.
