Fancying a short story collection, ---- or at least a collection of novellas, I thought I'd give four past midnight a try, and as I've just finished the langoliers, here are some thoughts.
Interestingly enough, this is the one story in the collection I have both read, and watched the miniseries of (I actually watched the series’ first in this case). Unfortunately, after finishing the langoliers, the next disk fouled up and the RNIB talking book service never sent me replacements, so I never got to read the rest of the collection, which fact I intend to remedy now, though first its time for the Langoliers.
I have to say, at the start I was finding this one slightly hard going. King was switching viewpoints so much, even within one conversation, I almost felt like I was reading Frank Herbert. Also, we had the unfortunate problem that so many characters just felt so typical.
Brian is the standard competent Stephen King everyman; albeit as a Stephen King everyman he has some nasty things in his past like losing his temper and slapping his wife who has now died, leaving him with a lot of confusion.
Indeed, I was rather surprised Brian's past didn't come up more in the story, though it did at least give him a pretty major flaw he was obviously trying to atone for.
Nick is a walking cliche, since however much he says he's not James bond, he blatantly is, albeit a rather thuggish, nose twist first, ask questions later sort of James bond, and Yee gods! King really should bloody try to bloody right bloody English people without so blatantly resorting to the jolly old clichéd dialogue what what?
This was a particularly spiffing wheeze, when old kingers went and got his bloody aphorisms in a twist? I mean didn't the bloody old man cotton on to the fact that to "put the wind up", someone is to scare, them, not to jolly well unnerve them? And that said old expression isn't actually employed in such a fashion in old blighty you know?
Okay, fun as that is, I'm going to stop now, but I think people get the point; though Btw, I have never heard the descriptive term “buggerdly”, in my life before, but definitely intend to use it more in future .
Bob is the explaining old mentor, and Craig Toomy was a standard arse hole from the second he woke up, while both Laurel and Bethany were pretty standard King wet tissue female characters (especially Bethany with her repeated faints and crying).
Only Albert really seemed real at the start, mostly due to the wonderful contrast between his hilarious "fastest Jew in the west" cowboy fantasies, and just being a rather nice natured music student.
So, at the start that was where I was.
However, as the story went on, things started to change, since this is a good mystery which gets progressively more unnerving as time goes on, cities with missing lights, dead sound, tasteless food.
also, while the characters don't really develop, or show many new traits, King played a lot of them so well they just came to life a lot more. Nick showed fear and a softer side, Bethany had her rather lovely blossoming feelings with albert, not to mention her fight with toomy after she was grabbed (albeit this was the only time she didn’t respond with tears), Albert has his own rather sweet hero’s journey, and craig toomy graduates from annoying corporate arsehole to wonderfully paranoid psychopath!
Actually, King cutting to toomy's backstory mid way through is one of these author things that writing resources tell you not to do, and yet King pulls it off by being just so good at prose and metaphors; (I liked the repeated deep sea fish image), especially when you realise the all-important meeting toomy is obsessing about is actually the end of his career.
Laurel's feelings for Nick, and her hole "going after badboys", thing sadly didn't get as much attention as it needed, but by the time we were at that point we were fully through the looking glass and into the land of weird. And wow! did things get weird!
Actually, I just plane love the time premise to this one! It’s one of those ideas that seems so simple you wonder why nobody has thought of it before. Even for someone who has gone through an inordinate amount of the whoniverse, and so has seen a hell of a lot of stories about time travel, time moving slowly, or quickly, or getting stuck, or going round corners, or doing all sorts of other crazy things, this one stands out! Since the idea of the present moving on, and the past running down behind before being eaten by monstrous reality munching balls is just so fantastically strange!
King also just plays it so plane horrifically.
I remember being disappointed at the actual appearance of the Langoliers, when I read this before, but this time around, they were as awesomely scary as expected, especially with the way they chewed through the world itself!
Then we have the ending, Knick’s sacrifice, and that wonderfully transcendental moment when the future catches up, and its just a perfect capper to everything they’ve been through.
Okay, all of this is great, but you notice I’m sort of avoiding the elephant in the plane here.
The blind elephant, the very very blind elephant! The very very blind elephant who is blind, because its eyes don’t work, and it is therefore blind and does blind things blindly!
That! Elephant who is actually a little girl (a little blind girl no less), called Dyna!
I’m actually tempted to write a hole article on Dyna, just because she’s probably the best example I can think of how not! To write a blind character.
King has always had a tendency to hammer on descriptors, ---- we’re told fairly often about Ben being fat or Eddy having Asma in It. Sometimes, this can be pretty jarring; I did rather wince when King kept mentioning dick Haloran’s “black hands”, or “black face”, in the shining, which seemingly had little to do with his actual skin tone.
However, dyna is blind! The narrative repeatedly tells us she’s blind! She wears huge dark glasses because she’s blind, which again the narrative keeps reminding us of, ---- a narrative which seems pretty omniscient much of the time, and doesn’t do this with other characters, (Albert’s yarmulka is mentioned a few times, far less than Dyna’s glasses, but he’s not constantly called Jewish).
Chapter titles have things like “the little blind girl’s warning”, indeed she gets called “the little blind girl”, endlessly. This was particularly amusing for my lady, since she remembered an occasion when she was twelve, and described someone as “the big black dude”, her teacher admonished her, and asked her how she’d feel if people called her “The little blind girl”, whereupon she pointed out people called her “the little blind girl”, all the time!
Again, when the characters were doing this, no problem, fair enough, but when it’s the omniscient narrator who frequently dips into Dyna’s head? No! Naughty narrator!
Aside from that, everything she does is blind.
Okay, I could understand someone freaking out, waking up in an empty plane, but what does Dyna do? She stands up and loudly declares that she needs some help because she’s blind!
She then gropes blindly along the seats, expecting to blindly poke someone’s face, while reminding herself what her blind teacher taught her, and reminding the audience how blind she is. She begins to go into blind panic (pun intended), because she’s blind.
Actually, this made the hole freak out, screaming fit about the wig almost superfluous.
This scene could’ve been so good if written differently.
Dyna wakes up, realises her aunt isn’t there. Sits for a while waiting for her to come back and ignores lack of people sounds. She then decides to go and look for her aunt, so starts counting rows forward on the plane, slowly she realises there aren’t any people, so puts a hand over one seat back? No people, another? No people.
She begins to get edgy, and starts to make her exploration less careful.
She throws embarrassment to the winds and asks for help out loud, but freaks when she gets no answer, then! She finds the wig and loses it completely.
Start! With dyna as a competent blind person, then slowly show that competence eroding under stress, as the full impact of her situation kicks in and you have something much more horrific.
but No! King, the mast of horror, just makes her a poor, terrified, little blind girl!
When she meets Laurel, she blindly grasps her hand and is constantly lead around, because she is (as we remember), a little blind girl! Who is blind!
Indeed, after that first freak out on the plane, she only once in the story actually walks on her own, and even then, she does so blindly with her elbows stuck out and her hands over her ears, because of course, blind people have weird enhanced hearing, as part of their weird blindness!
Only once did Dyna actually feel real to me, when she heard whispered comments about her hearing and mimicked them back, showing a little more sas and something approaching personality, however she had to completely undo this by going into a ridiculous sobbing fit about not being crazy just afterwards, because as well as being blind, she’s also a little girl and therefore must cry!
And what about backstory and motivation?
She’s of course going to have a sight saving operation, since manifestly the only thing all blind people think about all the time is being able to see.
She has weird mystical blind powers, and finally gets to tragically see before she goes off to heaven, ah, how heart warming! The little blind girl got to see something, indeed her last words are how wonderful it is just to see!
This isn’t to say a blind person desiring to see is a bad thing, ---- I certainly would love to get my sight back, but it is not the only! Thing! On someone’s mind! Indeed, I honestly can’t think of any other details of dyna (even her last name), other than the fact she is, ---- you’ve guess it, blind!
Nick Andros in the stand had a lot of character and personality. Yes, he got some mystical communication with Tom cullan at the end, but only after doing, feeling and showing a heck of a lot of other things, being in short definitely a character who was also deaf, rather than just “the deaf guy!”
Really, Dyna has to be one of the single worst examples I’ve ever seen of a blind person in fiction.
Indeed, she’s very much a “blind! Person!” and certainly not! A person who is also blind!
Bad! Bad! Bad! BAD King!
I won’t say Dyna completely spoiled the story for me, but she was a pretty huge minus, which is a shame, since if King had just done a better job at writing an actual character rather than a walking set of touching blind assumptions, this one really could have worked.
Okay, ranting hat coming off now, though I am as I said, very tempted to write an article on this.
We’ll next see what secret window, secret garden has to offer.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)