This is my first Stephen King novel.
I didn’t actually read it; I listened to it on my iPod during my evening walks.
I chose this one because of its intriguing premise. We’ve all probably debated whether we would kill
Hitler if we could go back in time. In
his book, King has a time traveller attempt to stop the assassination of John
F. Kennedy on November 11, 1963.
Jake Epping is a high school English teacher who is convinced by his friend
Al Templeton to use the time portal that exists at the back of his diner. Al has used the portal and has learned the
rules. Stepping through, the traveller
will always arrive on Sept. 9, 1958.
Regardless of how long he stays in the past, only two minutes will have
passed in the present (2011). A
subsequent trip through the portal resets anything that might have been changed
on the previous trip.
Al persuades Jake to try and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK in
Dallas. When he arrives in 1958, he
becomes George Amberson. He has five
years to fill so he slowly makes his way to Texas - with a few detours along
the way. Once in Texas, he starts
following Oswald to determine if he is the person who plans to assassinate the
president. Jake/George also takes a job
at a high school and falls in love with Sadie Dunhill.
At over 800 pages, the novel is very lengthy. Much of the plot has nothing to do with the
JFK assassination. Even Jake/George’s
spying on Oswald is not central.
Instead, the focus is on Jake/George’s life in Jodie, Texas, and his relationship
with Sadie who has an ex-husband lurking in the background. I’m not certain why so much time is devoted
to this subplot. In many ways, the book
is almost romance more than speculative fiction. I kept wanting to get to how the assassination
would be foiled and what the consequences would be.
The theme seems to be that the past is obdurate. Jake/George repeats this numerous times. When he tries to make a change to the past,
obstacles are thrown his way. These obstacles
are directly proportional to the magnitude of the change being attempted. There is also discussion of the butterfly
effect which is best outlined in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” – a story
that is actually mentioned in the novel.
I had problems with characterization, especially that of the
protagonist. Jake/George is just too
good to be convincing. Virtually
everyone likes him. He’s an amazing
teacher who earns the respect of all his students. People make allowances for him that just don’t
seem realistic; for example, he has fake teaching credentials in the past yet
he is able to get and keep a teaching position.
He never has difficulty getting people to trust him, even when he
behaves strangely.
I’ve always had reservations about reading Stephen King. He is often described as the “King of Horror”
and that is not a genre in which I have any interest. For this reason, I chose to read a book which
would probably be classified as speculative fiction. I can’t say that I was overly impressed. I know King’s books have sold over 350 million
copies so I am among the minority. At the
risk of sounding like a literary snob, on the basis of this one book I can't say that King is an extraordinary writer.
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