Under the Dome

I was on vacation in Santa Barbara California, which is a very nice place. It was one of those times when the vacation really is working - you have time to unwind and relax and maybe read something. So we went into a Borders Books, and several really interesting books caught my eye, but the fat new Stephen King novel had something compelling about it.

It's a story about a mysterious dome that suddenly envelopes a small town in Maine. It's invisible, like a force field and it cuts the city off from the outside world. This is on the dust jacket, so I'm not giving up any secret information, yet. Spoiler alert: I intend to do just that shortly.

My quick and dirty overall emotional response to the book is that it is very good Stephen King. It is a quick read, enveloping, unafraid to get nasty very quickly, a typical good versus evil theme, and not very satisfying in the wishing-for-a-happy-ending sense. One thing you learn if you ever read Stephen King is that there is no happy ending.

I would rank the best Stephen King to be the Gunslinger series closely followed by The Stand. But besides that I've only read Cujo, Firestarter, Riding The Bullet. As far as his movies, I've watched The Shining, Cujo, and The Stand, possibly most of Christine. I'm not impressed with the idea for Pet Cemetary, but I'm vaguely aware of that plot. Of the Gunslinger series, the first couple of stories and the way he tied it all together in the end were the best parts of that

In Under The Dome, he quickly divides the cast of characters into factions, as he did in the Stand, and to a lesser extent, the Gunslinger series (there are obvious sides, we just don't get into the heads of the bad guys in that one). As in the other novels, one faction is ignorant and only interested in exercising ultimately destructive power, the other faction is good but powerless and gets abused before ultimately triumphing, but only at great personal loss.

King likes to show that concentrating only on short term profit and doing anything to gain control of others end up being destructive to the well-being of everyone involved. While the moves of the bad people are obvious and obviously wrong, only a few people seem to a) realize how nasty the nasty people are or b) have the courage to stand up to them. This mirrors some of the frustrations of real life, where we often see liars, cheaters, or thieves win everything they could hope for and go unpunished for their misdeeds.

One of King's tired sayings in this book is "We all support the team", which is meant to say that in a small town, everyone in town supports the high school sports team, but also means that everyone should unquestioningly support whoever is in power. The coming of the dome isolates the town, making the petty power mongers in the town free from interference from the outside world. The death early in the story of the only good person in a position of power that is aware of the misdeeds of the power hungry character leaves him free to seize power and do whatever he wants.

I can't tell whether I am projecting my feelings of politics on the story, or whether my own bias makes me see things that support my bias, but I found myself thinking of the good guys as those with the same political and philosophical beliefs as myself, and the bad guys as right in line with the people I consider to be incompetent power mongers in real life.

I found that the idea of the dome was an intriguing one. Early on, you discover that the dome does not let solid objects pass, and only lets water and air pass slowly. The dome, while not a physical substance, but more of a force field, gets dirty, like a giant dome of glass would. I found that it symbolizes the greater atmosphere that we live in. You quickly see a parallel to the area under the dome and the planet as a whole. At first, they don't think anything of the fact that their little bubble could get filled with the products of combustion. People are burning propane in generators, running vehicles, and talking about burning fires. You start wondering if and when they will befoul the atmosphere within the dome. The fact that they so quickly poisoned their air made me think of the atmosphere of the planet as a whole. Whether King intended it or not, I believe he has written a veiled green advocacy book with a visceral support for those that are concerned about global warning. I'm probably reading too much into King's intent, but the story has strong and obvious parallels to the greater human population's fouling of the atmosphere, the dome just emphasizes the danger.

There was also a nesting of more powerful people not caring about the fate of people below them. When someone considers others to be so insignificant and beneath them, below the threshold above which you care about them, the actions become so incredibly cruel, callous, and inexcusable, that I really wonder if this isn't the strongest theme the book contains.