Fishbowl View
Stephen King, Under the Dome, 2009
King's latest novel is an allegory on global warming and the rise of the religious right in America. Bless. I say allegory in the loosest, most charitable way since King hammers his point home so forcefully that there's even a photo of Sarah Palin in the office of the main bad guy - a corrupt religious bigot called Big Jim Rennie who will stop at nothing to take control of a little town in Maine when the citizens get cut off from the rest of the planet by a mysterious dome. And although some air is capable of getting through the dome, it gets increasingly hot, animals die and plants wilt while the Maine countryside beyond the force field grows cooler with autumn. With the threat of resources going scarce, one (uneducated, evangelical, evil) group moves to take control of the city, leaving another (liberal, humanist, good) to fight for freedom and their own lives.
The idea came to King in the 70s but got shelved after 80 pages or so. Perhaps the rise of Fox News and alarming stories on climate change made him fish it out again. Like the air inside the dome, there's a staleness to the novel. Ideas from his previous work are re-used with diminishing results: the epic battle between two groups of people (The Stand), alien technology that has a particular effect on people (The Tommyknockers), insane cops (Desperation), and so on. There are, however, some striking scenes which are a reminder that beneath the plodding plot lies genuine imagination and inventiveness. I also noticed for the first time how similar King is to Joyce Carol Oates: apart from their productivity, they share a fascination with the mundane and the kitsch in American life which is sometimes more interesting than the forced, high-schoolish gore - in King's case - that is wheeled out every 50 pages or so to guarantee his place in bookstores' horror sections.