TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Under the Dome by Stephen King M John Harrison enjoys the latest blockbuster of small-town AmericaStephen King's new novel is predicated on, and takes its epigram from, the song "Small Town", one of country-singer James McMurtry's savagely compressed and contemptuous indictments of American life. "It's a small town, son," McMurtry sings, "and we all support the team," inflecting the words with a bland, overbearing oppressiveness. Not content with this quiet pressure cooker, and determined to write what he describes as "a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal", King drops a dome over his small town – Chester's Mill, not far from the infamous Castle Rock – and clamps it there so we can watch what happens.The dome is invisible: a "force field", perhaps. Its appearance, as witnessed by drifter and frycook Dale Barbara, is sudden and unforgiving. Barbara, recently beaten up in the car park of the diner where he worked, and anxious as a result to leave town, is forced to change his plans. A human being can touch the field without harm, he discovers, though there's a faint accompanying tingle: but electronic devices, including iPods and pacemakers, explode the moment they come near it. Unyielding and impermeable, especially to energetic solid objects, it conveniently permits sound, light and radio waves to travel through. It has a slight permeability to moving air; fire hoses trained upon it, while they do not wholly penetrate, produce a faint refreshing aerosol within.Soon, everything in Chester's Mill is going to hell. Two dozen children suffer seizures. The air inside begins to heat up. The surface of the dome collects dust and pollutants, diffusing the light that falls on it so that sunset spreads "across the western sky like a great poisoned egg". Outside, the US administration gathers its wits; but an attempt to gain access by bunker-buster comes to nothing. And if the air beneath the dome is heating up fast, the political atmosphere is heating up faster still, as, increasingly panicked, the trapped townspeople, their food and propane running out, begin a grisly search for that central concept in Stephen King's fiction, the community's aggregate or "secret" will. Alternate centres of power grow up around Dale Barbara – who turns out to be more than the drifter he seemed – and Big Jim Rennie, the town's Boss Hogg.Big Jim drives a Hummer like a "rolling coffin". On his desk he keeps an autographed photograph of Tiger Woods, his "tinny testimonial to smalltown prestige and smalltown power". To Big Jim, the dome is just another political opportunity. He upsizes the police force and provokes a food riot to increase his control over the population. Meanwhile, Dale Barbara and Julia Shumway, editor of the local paper, organise a demure resistance. The ideological oppositions clarify. Soon everyone, from the sickest child to the kindliest golden retriever, will have a part in the mystery play, as Under the Dome, like The Stand before it, works through its vast biblical collision: liberal morality and a moderate green sensibility versus greed, corruption and fundamentalism.Under the Dome is nearly 900 pages long, and has a cast to match. Characters maintain separation by clearly announcing their basic traits whenever they appear. Dale Barbara regrets a crime he committed during the second Iraq war, while Mrs McClatchey smiles wanly and carries a picture of her husband. Julia Shumway, though "Republican to the core", drives a Toyota Prius. Piper Libby, the apostate minister over at the Congregational church, must control her temper, because "If she didn't, it would control her". It's hard to say whether these Post-it notes are addressed by the characters to themselves, or by King to himself, or by both of them to the reader.But if Rennie is the epitome of this method of characterisation, he's also King's cold-eyed assessment of the Bush regime, just as Chester's Mill is his guess at what America might look like over the next generation, as resource failure, pollution and global warming take their toll on a closed system run for profit. "Who in their right mind," muses one character on the third day of the crisis, "would ever have expected this sudden contraction of all resources? You planned for more than enough. It was the American way. Not nearly enough was an insult to the mind and the spirit."Under the Dome builds slowly but in the end delivers all the grue and brisance you'd expect of an apocalypse in a bottle. By page 45, someone has been scalped by a broken windscreen – "a huge flap of skin hung down over her left cheek like a misplaced jowl" – and the pedal is indeed to the metal. People's jaws are broken with stones. Entrails stream out of abdominal cavities. Brains resembling breakfast cereal spatter over floors and ceilings. Various forms of transport crash into the dome and explode. A man explodes. There are many different kinds of guns, and by the end everything but a nuclear weapon has been set off, in a kind of localised Stalingrad of the hick mind. There are aliens, home-made radiation suits and a necrophiliac with a brain tumour. There's murder by golden baseball and, for good measure, a methamphetamine lab big enough to supply the whole of North America, a "General Motors of meth". Sometimes it works, and sometimes you feel King's heart isn't entirely in it.To keep the reader focused, King regularly quotes from "Small Town", but he can't match the ironies that undermine the complacency of McMurtry's audience. Where McMurtry's songs encourage everything in life to bleed into everything else, the us-and-them oppositions of Under the Dome are too well differentiated, too overtly polemical. In a three-minute song you can deal in fractured glimpses; in an 800-page blockbuster you must render unto plot all that is plot's. Someone has to be the bad guy. Someone has to pay. Causes are all present and identifiable, and evil is rendered safe by overstatement.M John Harrison's latest novel is Nova Swing (Gollancz).FictionStephen KingScience fiction, fantasy and horrorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
No Country for Old Typewriters: A Well-Used One Heads to Auction After five million or so words, Cormac McCarthy bids farewell to his portable Olivetti. feeds.nytimes.com |
The digested classic Faber, £8.99Nietzsche's idea of eternal return has perplexed many philosophers. You, though, will merely find my eternal returning to the idea of eternal return over the coming pages merely annoying. But is not annoyance the heaviest of human burdens? Yet does not the absence of annoyance, the lightness, confer the unbearable burden of insignificance?Parmenides would have posed this question in the sixth century had he been an east European intellectual intent on grinding his readers' noses into the superficiality of his thought. Which then shall we choose? Lightness or heaviness? Probably neither, for even the stupidest person can see this is a false dichotomy, that both ideas are equally invalid. If something only happens once, could not that make it more, not less, significant? But these counter-revolutionary thoughts have no place in the Prague Spring of 1968, so let's continue with the novel.I have been thinking about Tomas, the Czech surgeon, for some years but only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. He had first met Tereza in a small town three weeks earlier. They had met for an hour. Ten days later she visited him in Prague. They made love and she came down with flu for 10 days. Then she went home again. In his inordinately deep way, Tomas was perplexed to find himself feeling something more for her than just a physical desire of objectification, so he says to himself, as we all do at such times, Einmal ist Keinmal, what happens once might as well never have happened.One day Tereza returned again with a copy of Anna Karenina and Tomas sees her as a child in a bulrush and himself as Oedipus. Unperturbed by such pretentious imagery, he sleeps with her again and when he awakes to find her holding his hand in a transgressive act of dissent against Soviet alienation he feels obliged to marry her. Tomas has been married before and has a son whom we shall call, for argument's sake, Simon. Tomas has decided to have no contact with Simon – a decision that appears to give him few qualms and goes unquestioned by everyone throughout the novel.Instead he chose to indulge his solipsism by shagging as many women as possible, arguing that love and sex were incompatible, and in Sabina, an artist who liked to fuck in a bowler hat and with as ridiculous a line in symbolism as himself, he found the perfect mistress. This being the work of a middle-aged male novelist, Tereza naturally came to accept Tomas's dissociative state as the natural order, though she was given to the occasional intensely symbolic dream herself as she photographed Russians in the streets of Prague.For his part, Tomas's narcissism was startled to imagine that Tereza might have once slept with another man, so he suggested they move to Zurich so he could be nearer to Sabina. Tereza went along with this for a bit, but after Tomas had also shagged half of Switzerland, she got a bit fed up and went back to Prague. Initially, Tomas felt an incredible lightness that his wife of seven years had left him. But then he thought of Sophocles and Beethoven and the heaviness returned. So he went back to Prague and Tereza was quite pleased.Tereza had had a difficult life and, were this novelist was not quite so keen to be taken seriously, he might have said that Tomas had abused her as much as had her mother. But he didn't, so there we are. She too was very interested in the artificial split between lightness and heaviness and, after shacking up with Tomas for very different reasons to his, she accepted she was a metaphor for Dubcek's weakness and sadly patted her dog, Karenin.Franz was Sabina's other Swiss lover, a man of less depth and substance than Tomas, though no less absurd. Unwilling to have sex with Sabina in the same town in which he lived with his wife, Franz, unlike Tomas, failed to understand the importance of the neo-Marxist, post-Freudian bowler hat. With Franz the bowler hat was no longer a comic connection to her father and grandfather, it was a symbol of violence and public rape. Apparently. So she ridiculed his puppy-like nuzzling of her breasts in coitus. Such is the existential ennui of the mittel-European. A world of missed connections between Franz and Sabina, Tomas and Tereza. The misunderstanding between lightness and heaviness, between a book of substance and a load of bollocks.Tereza took a job as a waitress after the Russians occupied the city. She regularly smelled other womens' vaginal juices on Tomas's hair, but she shrugged it off and went about her day pondering the lightness or heaviness of the Cartesian mind-body split. Was her body part of herself? She still wasn't sure after she had been fucked an engineer who may or may not have been a Communist spy in the toilet. And no one else certainly cared. She wandered up to Petrin Hill in a dream and watched herself get shot by a firing squad while Tomas looked on. Either I'm a prostitute or I'm in love.Meanwhile I was a little worried Tomas had forgotten he was also supposed to be an allegory for Soviet repression, so Tomas began taking a previously well-concealed interest in Czech politics. His Sophoclean musings had led him to write a letter of dissent on the nature of passive complicity to a radical newspaper, and he now found himself being asked for a retraction by a Man from the Ministry. Caught in the balance between lightness and heaviness, between Beethoven's Muss Es Sein? and Es Muss Sein! and between his existential Parmenidean obsession for finding the millionth part of difference in a woman and just being the figment of a dirty old man's mind, he refused.Tomas was forced to resign from his job as a surgeon and became a window-cleaner in Prague, where his main duties were having sex with 37 women a day, all of whom unaccountably desired to surrender their anus, his favourite part of the female anatomy, to him. After a year or so, a radical editor, who had admired his Sophoclean musings, invited him to a meeting at which his son Simon was present. Naturally, the cause of modernist magical realism was best served by them not discussing the 20-year hiatus in their relationship, so instead the conversation centred on whether Tomas would agree to sign a petition protesting at the Russian occupation.So why did he not sign? For one thing, the split between lightness and heaviness had been blurred in the editing of his Oedipal fixation and he did not hold the position ascribed to him. Yet more importantly, he did not sign because I did not let him for this is the moment in which the post-modern authorial intervention reminds you the characters are all my own invention and therefore facets of my own character. So rather Tomas thought of the ineffability of lightness and heaviness, the ineffability of unbearable tosh.Tomas was surprised to discover that Tereza had detected vaginal juices on his hair, having believed a good wash of his body was all that was required and in her own proto-Nietzschean way Tereza came to realise her duality was best resolved by being a doormat until Tomas's tragically light-heavy descent from being the finest surgeon in Prague was completed by his intractable attachment to being a complete Kant and they were obliged to become farmers.Sabina moved to New York where she continued to wear a bowler hat and fuck anything that moved and it was here she heard that Tomas and Tereza had died in a car crash. Franz had gone to Cambodia, bizarrely believing that his own lightness/heaviness situation with Sabina would somehow be resolved if he joined a protest. There he was hit over the head and died later in hospital, his wife believing that he did in fact love her after all. Tomas and Tereza lived their life refracted through their dog, Karenin, whom they believed had learned to smile. It was, though, a rictus as she had cancer. The only smile was on my face, having passed off the unbearable lightness of drivel as work of great heaviness.Milan KunderaFictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Bite-sized history A new Visual History of Cookery guides us through culinary imagery from the Roman Empire to the present day via paintings, photographs, illustrations and adverts. Take a look at some of the most striking images here feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty by Peter Biskind Chris Petit on an exploration of Warren Beatty's reputationWarren Beatty famously never made up his mind, but his indecision was the source of his power. By revealing so little of his hand, it fell to others to interpret his wishes and act on them. Peter Biskind shows by default how life in Hollywood operates like a Renaissance principality, and the key to understanding it is not Sun Tzu, whom movie agents are fond of quoting, but Machiavelli's The Prince.This latest biography is predictable in its treatment of Beatty, being neither authorised nor unauthorised and written in the hope of acquiring its subject's blessing. In a typical move, the star has issued a statement dumping on the book. For his part, Biskind demonstrates all the standard phases of dealing with Beatty – infatuation, adulation and manipulation leading to resentment as it dawns that the confidences on offer are as calculated a performance as anything given to camera. There's nothing direct about Beatty. Even the screen persona refracts into Warren Beatty "playing" Warren Beatty.The author admits to being besotted with his subject while acknowledging that no one under 40 has any idea who Beatty is, being both a prescient and a dated figure, canny in his exploitation of stardom but too secretive and indecisive to have left much of a trail. He was famous for being famous before it was fashionable to be so, notably as a global escort during an early, iffy career as a method-acting pretty boy. The fabled mystique isn't so hard to explain if it is accepted that Beatty's dominant interest was the private pursuit of sex with as many different women as possible. He was smart enough to expand his power base by becoming a producer and lucked out early with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) when he fluked into 40% of the gross after Warners wrote it off in advance as a loss-maker. At the height of his celebrity, for 10 years after that, no one could touch him.The work was informed by techniques of seduction and control, turning the women and the career into reflections of each other, with actress lovers drafted into the pictures. He was never an obvious predator yet, according to Biskind, he racked up a total of 12,775 women, "give or take", in a 35-year period before settling down to uxorious bliss in 1991. This unfounded figure has pinged round the news circuit unquestioned: in effect, the calculation means Biskind believes Beatty had what amounted to a different woman for every day of his life, give or take the extra days in leap years; I should coco.The book is misleadingly subtitled the "wild times" of Warren Beatty when the modus operandi was quite the opposite: everything was dedicated to control, including the inducing of female orgasm. However much Beatty acted like a heat-seeking missile towards women, in all other areas he withheld himself: scripts were endlessly rewritten; take after take was indulged during shooting. The real climax was the deal, leaving the performances with an air of afterthought. Conditioned by vanity, the films frequently ended up lost in a wilderness of mirrors and an irresolvable mess in the cutting room. The three big hits (Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait) were matched by three stinkers (Ishtar, Love Affair, Town and Country) and too much in-between dross; one of the few interesting ones, (McCabe and Mrs Miller, Beatty more or less disowned because he thought the director, Robert Altman, had muddied his screen presence.In amounting to less than the sum of its meddling, the work bore diminishing returns, ageing about as well as the Carly Simon song supposed to be about him, "You're So Vain". The studios were bound to turn against someone so profligate and vague about scripts and costs. Dick Tracy (1990), though in profit, marked the start of the perception that an ageing, tiresome Beatty was not worth the cost or bother.Working with Beatty could amount to a form of nightmare kidnap: playwright Trevor Griffiths, desperate to extricate himself from Reds, on the grounds that his children were motherless after the death of his wife in a plane crash, was told: "You can't go home. Once you sign on with me, you surrender all rights to your life." When the films bombed, Beatty was expert at apportioning blame, usually to the hapless director.Most Beatty stories trail off into unreturned calls. Given such a furtive life and so many unwilling to talk, the book falls to conjecture and old gossip, the best joke being at Beatty's expense. Beatty and Bob Dylan were dating housemates, and Dylan, no open book himself, found Beatty so secretive that he became convinced he was a freeÂmason. The lack of entourage was deliberate (he didn't want anyone to know where he was going) but underneath it all Beatty was always a bit of a square: Julie Christie rightly chastised him for making fluff such as Heaven Can Wait (1978) when Europe had ÂFassbinder.A more interesting between-the-lines portrait is there to be drawn from the given material, involving depression, agoraphobia, hypochondria and insomnia, a sense of hostage, too many women who used to go out with Âsomeone else famous, tiresome sycophancy, too much hot air, too much room service, too many mirrors, with earnestness, pomposity, dullness and above all pettiness as the dreary extensions of vanity. Ruthlessness was a product of boredom and a form of self-protection. Beatty's revenge on critic Pauline Kael, whom he professionally courted, hired and dumped, involved, according to one collaborator, "manipulation on a level unknown to man". Only one observer notes Beatty's sentimentality, as the corollary of ruthlessness, which may yet be the key to the man.The interest in power extended to Democrat party politics (fudged), but if Beatty fancied himself as a combination of Howard Hughes (subject of an endlessly delayed project) and Monroe Stahr, the actual templates were more suburban, more banal and of their time: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence ÂPeople and Hugh Hefner's Playboy Âphilosophy.Chris Petit's The Passenger is published by Pocket Books.FilmWarren BeattyRobert AltmanChris Petitguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |