So back he goes to a world where everyone smokes, where the food is tastier, the people friendlier, where the gunshots that changed America are more than five years away.īut Jake quickly discovers disturbing signs that the past is asserting itself against the threat of change.
Divorced and childless, Epping has his own, less-cosmic reason to undo the past: preventing a horrific act of violence that still darkens the life of a friend in town. In Epping, an English teacher, Al has found the right guy to finish the mission he’s too sick to complete. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” Al tells Jake, “this is your chance. $35) (Scribner)Īl, who began with the modest goal of buying hamburger meat at 50-year-old prices, had taken on a very different task before illness sent him back home to the present: trying to prevent the murder of John F. ‘11/22/63: A Novel’ by Stephen King (Scribner. But it hasn’t really happened overnight in fact, he has been gone more than four years and has traveled through a time portal that connects the present to Sept. Somehow, overnight, Al has aged years and contracted a fatal illness. In this case, it begins in Lisbon Falls, Maine (of course), in a diner whose proprietor, Al Templeton, summons Jake Epping for an urgent meeting. The suspension of disbelief required here happens almost before the book begins. He is, instead, offering a tale richly layered with the pleasures we’ve come to expect: characters of good heart and wounded lives, whose adventures into the fantastic are made plausible because they are anchored in reality, in the conversations and sense of place that take us effortlessly into the story. Dick (“ The Man in the High Castle”), or the Charles Lindbergh presidency of Philip Roth (“ The Plot Against America”). This does not belong on the What If? shelf that has given us the Nazis-win works of Robert Harris (“ Fatherland”) and Philip K. Not until 800 pages have gone by in “ 11/22/63” does King offer up an account of the world as it might have been, and even then it has a cursory, I’m-doing-this-because-I have-to feel to it.
Kennedy not been assassinated in Dallas, put those expectations aside. First, the (possibly) bad news: If you’re expecting Stephen King to provide an alternative history of what America would have been like had John F.
0 kommentar(er)
