If the best modern literature can throw up, if he is the closest we have to Charles Dickens, modern literature is nowhere near good enough, but if the best Stephen King can write, and 2011’s “11-22-63” is his best novel since “The Stand”, there is hope for all of us. From its shipshape construction, to its astounding feat of historical research, through its through the rabbit hole searching out of the USA from 1985 – 1963, “11-22-63” does what the best novels do, and even more difficult in the fantasy alternate reality world, it makes us believe the unbelievable.
In the 1970s I was more of a reader than I am now and by the 80s I spent so much of my life writing that I didn’t have the time for reading that I did then and among the many writers I lost interest Stephen King was high on the list. But I’d heard that he had written a follow up to “The Shining” called “Dr. Sleep”, (reviewed it here) and didn’t much like it but when a friend said I should read “11-22-63” before dismissing him as a former master who had given himself into sentimentality, I picked up the years novel.
With no real explanation for the how, King sends a divorced, childless school teacher Jake Epping through the rabbit hold and back in time 53 years to the Massachusetts of 1958. Like all good fantasy writers, King sets up very strict rules for his alternate reality.
1. You can change history but the past is obdurate and doesn’t want to be changed.
2. Every time you return to the present the changes will happen but you will also age the correct amount of years. SO if you are 60 years old when you leave the present and spend five years in the past, you will be 65 years old when you return.
3. If you then return through the rabbit hole you will reset all the changes you’ve made.
With these rules firmly in place, King sends Epping into a stunningly detailed to the minutest insightful aside into an America of incipient racism, cigarette smoke, and payphones. On a mission to save President Kennedy from assassination, Epping builds an alternate life for himself in the Texas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, falls in love, spies of Lee Harvey Oswald, and attempts to change history.
The problem, if it is a problem, is it is two books in one and so the middle of it seems like a long detour. But it is a wonderful detour filled with hope, friendship and love as Epping returns to teaching. Still, King isn’t a Dickens, and his characters while real enough don’t have the full breath of life to them.
Best of all is the ingenious way King deals with the most obvious problem with the novel: we know how it ends, JFK will always always always be dead by the last page and without giving away too much, King does what has to be done to pay off the 800 previous pages with a truly alternate future.
Not many writers could take us back the 1950s with such a firm, controlled hand. King proves himself a gifted storyteller who has never moved into the greatest leagues of all due to his inability to get deep enough under the skin of even his greatest characters.
Grade: B+
