I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. The first thing that comes to mind is that it was looooooong. Maybe I should stop reading books over 600 pages or so, because that's about the time that I start to lose interest. In this case, I got about half way through the book and started wondering how long I had to go until Jake/George was going to try to stop Kennedy's assassination. I understand that he had no control over when the "rabbit-hole" opened up, but King did. So why did King choose to make his character spend five years waiting around for the big event?
I liked Sadie, and for the most part, King does a pretty good job of holding my interest by making sure that exciting things keep happening before 1963. Maybe King felt that Jake/George needed something that would really tie him down to that time period, and that's fair, but I still think that five years was a bit excessive. Nevertheless, I do have to admire King's ability to keep his reader engaged, even when his character is doing nothing more than writing a novel. That's a trick that looks a whole lot easier than it is.
As far as King's theories of time travel, I'm still a bit torn. I certainly thought they were interesting theories, but I'm not entirely sure I buy into all of it. First of all, I kind of liked his idea that the past harmonizes (which, as he points out, is just another way of saying that history repeats itself). I think the problem with this is that he only notices this when he is living in the past. If this were true, shouldn't we all be noticing these connections as we live our daily lives? Doesn't the past harmonize now as well as then (since this will, eventually, become the past)? It was interesting to me that Jake refused to believe in coincidences when he was time traveling, but that was a new development for him. Why would he believe in coincidences in 2011, but not 1960? Are his experiences in those two times really that different?
I did like the idea of the past trying to protect itself. That actually made a lot of sense, but I found it hard to believe that preventing Kennedy's assassination would cause things like earthquakes. The only thing that sold that for me was his comment that the past protects itself like a turtle shell, because the inside is soft and vulnerable. I also liked the theory of multiple strings of events being made every time Al or Jake went through the rabbit-hole. The theory that too many strings was causing reality to tear itself apart was also interesting, but I still found that it required me to suspend my disbelief a little farther than I was willing to.
No comments:
Post a Comment