Under The Dome by Stephen King is a must have book for your round the world cruise. It will keep your mind alert, your muscles exercised, and your intellectual standing elevated.
However, tackling "Under the Dome" to review it for you, required a game plan, a simple one to unravel the complexities of this novel. And what could be simpler than to present the review in two parts, based on the polarities of good and evil, for part one and using the story line, for part two. This then allows us to begin at the beginning with part one, the characters.
The main icon of goodness is a kind of hippie dropout. Happily, as clean as a boy scout, he has the improbable nickname of the bane of the feminist movement, Barbie. Please do not let the immense irony of this escape you: a self respecting ex-military man runs around calling himself Barbie, a source of irritation for the local good for nothings. You see, he's relatively new in town, gets a job in the local diner, earning the scorn of the resident junkie after introducing himself as Barbie. This leaves us covered in deep you know what, the "scheudenfreud" craft of Kafka's mom casting menacing auras.
With this bit of Kafka like massaging, you are sure to be a star at dinner parties for at least a year. You can wallow during the aperitif and the main course amidst oceans of psychological waters, to plumb, to sail, to fish, with undercurrents that twist and turn and overcome, like a Tsunami. Your dinner companions will marvel at the depth of your insights, your analytical prowess, and your far reaching erudition. Actually, Barbie should be the last nickname in the world his personality would accept, would announce, would answer to. Any self respecting hunk of male testosterone would have made it clear to the larger humanity that it's not going to happen. But get used to it, dear reader, and surely as the story unfolds, the sublime irony will reveal its true meaning.
Now let's take a look at the omega character, protagonist really, in the form of evil, Jim Rennie, an on your knees Christian, dishonest used car salesman, who despises his son most of the time, lusts after money, power, and revenge and prays a lot. This symbol of evil presents himself almost in the first sentence, as desirous of flagellating our symbol of good, Barbie. Aside from these interesting personality malfunctions, Rennie is a sexual bag of tricks, who has to content himself with his continual and not very nice fantasies.
And so the plot thickens and thickens and continues to thicken like a newlywed's first attempt at white sauce. After fixing the characters firmly front stage center, the minor ones emerge, and then the more minor ones, all very much Pop Eye and Olive. With the characters established, the author then uses the cuisinart approach to set the scene for the ensuing struggle between the good and evil, as the story unfolds within a unique physical framework.
This physical framework evolves as a small town New England, a bucolic rural landscape, but not with just your pretty bales of hay. Rather, it is reminiscent of a Shakespearean play within a play or a ballet cum rugby scrum. What happens is this: out of nowhere, floats down upon Carters Mill, an invisible dome which isolates everyone in town from the rest of Maine, the USA, the world and into which everyone journeying anywhere through Carters Mill on land or in the air collides and suffers the consequences, always very bloody.
Now we are all set to go forward, watching good and evil as the combatants square off. In one corner, the evil one trying to achieve his goals of revenge, power, money and in the other corner, the good one, Barbie trying to save the town and himself. This book is hugely entertaining, even compelling at times, with a kind of diarrhea of the imagination, a puppet show, with the entire little town of Carter's Mill in Maine, population 3,000 becoming the cacophony, the backdrop, the canvas for the struggle. It's all in a days work and lots of fun, watching the characters, the symbol of evil seemingly about to triumph over the symbol of good. For more enlightenment, the story line critique, you can see the June publication on American Made Yes.
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