Heavyweight

My experience reading Stephen King's 2009 Under the Dome is sort of like King's experience writing it. He made two tries, in 1972 and 1983, at a novel which featured people trapped in a limited environment. The earlier version was called Under the Dome and the second attempt was called The Cannibals. Some 37 years after King's first attempt, the thousand-page reworked final product appeared on the shelves. Among his published works, only the uncut edition of The Stand is longer.

I made two tries at reading that reworked final product; once soon after it was published and another a couple of years later. Recently, my third attempt was successful; I changed tactics this time by picking up where I had stopped earlier and shortening the novel to a workable length. The obvious joke is that the reading felt like it took 37 years, but it didn't really. No more than five at the outside.

The story is pretty well-known, especially since CBS has run a three-season adaptation of it that was just canceled a couple of weeks ago. The town of Chester's Mill, Maine, is abruptly severed from the rest of the world in late October by a transparent, unbreakable but semipermeable force field in the shape of a dome. Outside the dome, military and scientific specialists try to learn the dome's secret so they can rescue the town. Inside the dome, of course, is far more interesting.

"Big Jim" Rennie, a car and meth dealer and unsubtle stand-in for King's vision of former vice-president Dick Cheney, uses his favor-dealing and blackmail information to gain control over the city council and police force that remains in Chester's Mill. But government emergency response teams outside the dome communicate that they are placing former U.S. Army officer Dale "Barbie" Barbara in charge, provoking a confrontation with Rennie. In and around said confrontation are a host of characters ranging from colorful to bloody unbelievable as the power struggle threatens the town and efforts to find the dome's source and perhaps remove it.

There's really very little special about Dome other than its size and the fading novelty value of its situation. Most of the conflict between the characters could have any backdrop whatsoever. Big Jim doesn't need an unexplained force field to surround his town in order to try to gain control of it. A sociopathic killer losing what's left of his mind to a brain tumor doesn't need the dome to begin a sickening murder spree -- especially in a Stephen King novel. There's a hyper-devout pastor who secretly helps Big Jim move meth and another who's actually an atheist and a teenage genius who finds out how the dome is being made and so on and so forth, all in the pedestrian style that makes ambling with King a pleasure but a long walk with him a bleary-eyed marathon. Whatever value Dome might have had is lost in the logorrheic landfill of the final product of King's unrestrained typing and Scribner's unalloyed greed.

King said his initial idea for the novel came during the 1972 oil and gas crisis, bringing home to him the interconnected nature of the only world we, as humans, have at this point. The ecological issues faced by the people under the dome are seen by him as a kind of allegory for the same issues on a planetary scale. King said he wanted to talk about those issues "without whamming the reader over the head" with them. He fails at that, fortunately in a more metaphorical sense, because literally whamming the reader over the head with Under the Dome would result in significant injury and probably felony-level assault charges in most states. With the sentence being required to do community service by re-shelving Under the Dome every time it comes back into the library.