Reading science fiction… reading Stephen King… who am I?! King is absolutely not my usual reading fare, but then again, 11/22/63 is not typical King (i.e. there’s no horror element).
In the novel, high-school English teacher, Jake Epping, travels back in time (through a time portal in a local cafe), to foil Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of John F. Kennedy. At over 800 pages, there was a lot more to the story than simply taking out Oswald – Jake had to test the impact of disrupting history a couple of times to understand the limits of his power before the ‘big day’ (November 22, 1963). There’s a little romance, the development of some important friendships, and various pop culture events that King skillfully weaves into the story.
The premise of the book is that the history of the world would be different if Kennedy had not been assassinated. Perhaps that’s a stretch (honestly, if there was one person you might take out in modern history, it would be Hitler, right?), but it is fair to say that Kennedy’s assassination significantly changed the course of American history. In this novel, King speculates on how events in Vietnam, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement might have been different if Kennedy had survived. Of course, we’ll never know, but there are plenty of people (from academics to conspiracy theorists) who have speculated about this very thing.
Time travel and changing the course of history is always a compelling concept – King explores it on the macro level, describing the butterfly effect in the context of Oswald, but also on a micro level (the Sliding Doors moment), when the character of Jake tinkers with seemingly inconsequential things like haggling over a used car. He discovers that changing history is not as easy as he initially expected –
…what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.
The reader understands the impact of these changes as Jake moves between the past and the present, and as he makes an increasing number of alterations to history, Jake reflects –
Did the obdurate past work against the things changed as well as against the change-agent?
Overall, I admired the complexity – and yet the ‘readability’ – of this novel. Despite the intricately developed plot lines, I had no trouble keeping track of what was happening; what was predicted to happen next; and what year I was in. Half a star off for its heft – could King have achieved the same in 600 pages? Probably.
As I was reading 11/22/63, my mind drifted to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which has a similar theme. I adored that novel, for its humour, the fact that it made me cry, but also for the beautifully developed characters. I wasn’t charmed by the characters in 11/22/63, nor did I laugh or cry but if time-travel stories are your thing, then I reckon this is a solid pick.
3.5/5
Jake buys a root beer on his first visit to 1963 –
I sipped through the foam on top, and was amazed. It was… full. Tasty all the way through. I don’t know how to express it any better than that. This fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it tasted a whole hell of a lot better.
