Stephen King: The Stand
May. 11th, 2009 07:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowfoxWell, I finally managed to finish Stephen King's The Stand last night - it took me a fortnight, although I cite its length (at 1,325 pages, with ultra-thin margins and small-ish type) and the fact that I read three other books in the same period as mitigating factors.
This is the first King novel I've read, and whilst, overall, I liked it, I did feel that it was in something of two halves: the book sets out with the inadvertant escape of a military 'flu virus that unhappily proves to be wildly more efficient at killing people than the government had anticipated.
The story then follows a few of the 'lucky' survivors, cataloguing howthe world America goes to pieces around them. Although we have a mentally redarded guy (Tom) and a deaf-mute dude (Nick) amongst this band, it's notable that we only really have the one woman (Frannie), and very few non-white people. To characterise all the major protagonists as Good Ol' Boys is to do King a disservice, and the book was first published in '78, when such details may have seemed less glaring, but at times it did feel a little like that's where we were headed.
Anyway, up until this point, the novel's following George R Stewart's own epic, Earth Abides, which similarly charts the impact of an (this time unnamed) epidemic laying waste to (American) civilisation. Stewart got there first, mind (Earth Abides was published in 1949), and there's an important difference between the two. Whilst obviously hypothetical, Stewart stayed firmly within the rational for his tale, whereas King chose not to.
Now, the second portion of The Stand, in my eyes, goes way over into the magical/mystical/theological sphere, as it uses the aftermath of the epidemic to pitch the Good Guys, guided by Mother Abigail, a 108 year old fervent Christian against the Bad Guys, notionally led by the mysterious, and sinister, Randall Flagg, known also as The Dark Man, or the Walking Dude, or whatever.
Sill, at this point, the book can be spun as a tale of the rational - people can believe what they wish to believe, and you can write events from their respective perspectives, using religion as a processing filter so that escape becomes a miracle and so on. And this could've worked, I'm sure.
However, what King does is move the tale away from the plausibly rational, firmly into the realm of the fantastic: collective preomonitions in dreams, an all-seeing eye (explicitly linked to the Eye of Sauron, so fair do's to King for coming clean on the inspiration), injury cured by the laying on of hands, a man levitating through power of thought and so on.
Ultimately, then, this book is about a battle between God and the Devil, using the plague survivors a their proxies. King himself referred, somewhere in the introductory babble, to the story as a 'Dark Christian tale', but to my mind, explicitly working in supernatural miracles into the telling actually undermined the power of the story.
From a personal (and, obviously, an avowedly atheist) perspective, I think that the tale would have been more powerful if, instead of cast-iron mircales, we'd been presented with the characters experiencing massive strokes of luck, and themselves interpreting their good fortune as support from their chosen sponsor. Not to negate the idea of a supernatural authority, but rather to leave things less cut and dried, and to leave the reader wondering 'well, what if...?'
As it stands, the events in The Stand ramp up and up until it becomes too far fetched to seem plausible, and for me it loses some of the chill of its cautionary tale because of this.
Nonetheless, it was a good read, and I will be trying some of his other stuff soon.
This is the first King novel I've read, and whilst, overall, I liked it, I did feel that it was in something of two halves: the book sets out with the inadvertant escape of a military 'flu virus that unhappily proves to be wildly more efficient at killing people than the government had anticipated.
The story then follows a few of the 'lucky' survivors, cataloguing how
Anyway, up until this point, the novel's following George R Stewart's own epic, Earth Abides, which similarly charts the impact of an (this time unnamed) epidemic laying waste to (American) civilisation. Stewart got there first, mind (Earth Abides was published in 1949), and there's an important difference between the two. Whilst obviously hypothetical, Stewart stayed firmly within the rational for his tale, whereas King chose not to.
Now, the second portion of The Stand, in my eyes, goes way over into the magical/mystical/theological sphere, as it uses the aftermath of the epidemic to pitch the Good Guys, guided by Mother Abigail, a 108 year old fervent Christian against the Bad Guys, notionally led by the mysterious, and sinister, Randall Flagg, known also as The Dark Man, or the Walking Dude, or whatever.
Sill, at this point, the book can be spun as a tale of the rational - people can believe what they wish to believe, and you can write events from their respective perspectives, using religion as a processing filter so that escape becomes a miracle and so on. And this could've worked, I'm sure.
However, what King does is move the tale away from the plausibly rational, firmly into the realm of the fantastic: collective preomonitions in dreams, an all-seeing eye (explicitly linked to the Eye of Sauron, so fair do's to King for coming clean on the inspiration), injury cured by the laying on of hands, a man levitating through power of thought and so on.
Ultimately, then, this book is about a battle between God and the Devil, using the plague survivors a their proxies. King himself referred, somewhere in the introductory babble, to the story as a 'Dark Christian tale', but to my mind, explicitly working in supernatural miracles into the telling actually undermined the power of the story.
From a personal (and, obviously, an avowedly atheist) perspective, I think that the tale would have been more powerful if, instead of cast-iron mircales, we'd been presented with the characters experiencing massive strokes of luck, and themselves interpreting their good fortune as support from their chosen sponsor. Not to negate the idea of a supernatural authority, but rather to leave things less cut and dried, and to leave the reader wondering 'well, what if...?'
As it stands, the events in The Stand ramp up and up until it becomes too far fetched to seem plausible, and for me it loses some of the chill of its cautionary tale because of this.
Nonetheless, it was a good read, and I will be trying some of his other stuff soon.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-11 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-11 08:17 am (UTC)Still, thanks for the suggestion of It, which I shall bear in mind :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-05-11 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-11 03:55 pm (UTC)