Under the Dome by Stephen King

Since Jim just wrote a very good and mostly spoiler free review of Under the Dome a week or so ago, I'm going to refer you to his review for the normal things like a plot summary. Most of this review is going to be taken up with my thoughts on the themes brought out in the story, there will be spoilers.

Under the Dome is, I believe, King's longest single novel, beating out The Stand by just a few pages, and it was solid. Fast-moving, exciting, even a little touching at times. If you've read King before, the things you love and hate about his writing are all here: heroic children, religious overtones, lots of folksy dialectical dialog, a large cast of idiosyncratic characters, a psychic child or two, and people getting killed in awful ways. It's a good book, but the most interesting things occur below the surface.

I SPOIL THE ENTIRE ENDING BELOW. HOVER OVER THE TEXT TO SEE IT.

After all human efforts fail to raise or destroy the dome, it's discovered that the force that created it is--drum roll--not of this world. That might not not be so strange on its face, since King has explored extraterrestrial life before, but in this case, the creatures wreaking the havoc don't appear to be extraterrestrial so much as supernatural. The antagonists--vague eyeless, leathery creatures--have more in common with Lovecraft's elder gods than with aliens or with the concept of an Old Testamental Abrahamic God, as King seems to indicate in his other novels. The creatures as described in terms of children massacring an anthill, incapable of feeling guilt or sorrow for what they do. Their ways are inexplicable and unexplained: the dome itself, in the end, appears to have been nothing more than some deistic prank, a giant lens placed over a town full of ants. It's interesting that King never attempts to answer the questions that would seem to be the thematic core of the work, except to say that there are no answers. Sometimes, the book leans toward God working in mysterious ways, but ultimately it goes a step further: the alien children, in this universe, are God, and nothing we do can induce guilt. We can only hope for pity.

As a result, I thought the story was a little bit of a downer. It's not really humanistic--nearly everyone in Chester's Mill is dead by the end of the book, and those that are saved are saved mostly by sheer luck, nor is it optimistic about any sort of supernatural intervention. The only ones who care about us are us, and there's nothing we can really do.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

So, I've been stuck without writing a review for quite a while because I was intimidated by the prospect of reviewing what is quite possibly the most notoriously long novel ever written, War and Peace.

According to Tolstoy, War and Peace isn't actually a novel. I'm not sure exactly what his criteria was, and I can't say that I entirely agree with him. In my estimation, War and Peace is definitely a novel, albiet an epic, sprawling one with a cast that numbers in the hundreds. Supposedly, there are over 200 significant characters in the novel, including Czar Alexander and Napoleon himself. The estimate isn't difficult to believe, considering that, in one of the appendices, all characters with lengthy story arcs are listed, and that list includes over 70. When you lump in the supporting characters, War and Peace probably has more characters in it than this blog has readers.

War and Peace may be the best known book that no one knows anything about. Except for Woody Allen's summation (“I sped read War and peace in 15 minutes. It involves Russia”), I knew nothing about it either. After actually reading it though, it's easy to see why no one knows much about it. Whereas most books can be succintly summarized in a few words, War and Peace defies such capsulization. Boiling a book with no main character, no main plotline, and numerous philosophical digressions down to a paragraph isn't easy, but here goes. War and Peace is about Napoleon's failed attempt to conquer Russia, and how the war affects individuals in the nation, from nobles, to soldiers, to servants. As a description, the above is accurate, but it in no way captures the scope of the novel.

The stories of the characters in the book, from the fickle Natasha to the haughty Prince Andrey to the compassionate but searching Pierre to the meglomaniacal Napoleon, all intertwine in unexpected and sometimes inconsequential ways. Characters will appear in scenes together who do not know each other. Sometimes the actions of one character will affect another one without his knowing. Much like the real world, the lives of the characters are influenced by people they will never even know. Think Short Cuts with a larger cast, and you'll have an idea.

The writing itself surprised me. In a book that's over 1400 pages long, you'd expect that the writing would be padded with page-long descriptions of trees or long-winded statements about the minutae of a meal, but War and Peace never falls into this trap. The writing (and the translation) is sometimes beautifully rendered, but it rarely slips into the sort of self-indulgent tangents that pad out works by authors of modern bricks, like Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Virtually everything serves a purpose, and it makes War and Peace move along at a much faster clip than you'd expect.

All said, it's certainly one of the best novels I've ever read. If I had to make a complaint, it would be that the last 50 pages are Tolstoy's thoughts on the war, and, while they're interesting, they would have been better served as an appendix. After reading 1350 pages about these people, having the last 50 pages talking about military theory is a bit of an anticlimax. Still, it does litle to diminish the power of the book, and it was well worth the time it took to read it.