Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Bag of Bones was the new King novel when I started reading him in earnest. I don’t think I got to it until high school, but I recall thinking of it as a milestone of sorts in his work, in which supernatural terrors took a backseat to more psychological fears. In truth, it’s not quite that tidy, as books like Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are clear antecedents, and Dreamcatcher, published just three years later, is classic King. Still, on rereading, I think there is a distinct maturity in Bag of Bones regarding how King went about writing novels, an increased reflection and willingness to let the narrative breathe.

Bag of Bones is billed as a ghost story, and it is, but the spirits take a back seat for much of the novel and, in truth, are the weakest part of the book. The story of Sara Tidwell is well-told and shockingly brutal in its depiction of racial violence, but the latter portion involving the storm felt like a tonal shift and a way to up the tension that had been building much more subtly before that. Really, Bag of Bones is a book about grief, and a grief of a particular sort, where a person loses the partner they meant to spend their life with and finds, with no small amount of despair, that they now have to find a way to spend it alone.

King, about 20 years married at the time of the book’s writing, writes marriage well, cutting past the saccharine hallmark pablum on one side and the hackneyed discord on the other to find a complex, beating core that is truer than most “literary fiction” I’ve read. It is this talent, I think, that separates King from his peers. The man can write a thriller with the best of them, but he populates those taut tales with real, richly evoked people. No one feels like a cog in a Stephen King novel, and you could easily imagine following a side character off the page and into their daily life.

King Leopold's Ghost

In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild chronicles the “discovery” and conquest of the Congo Free State, a massive expanse of central Africa that fell und the dominion of King Leopold of Belgium. Unlike most of the colonies obtained before and during the scramble for Africa, the Congo was not colonized by a country or empire, but by a single man. This state of affairs is made more bizarre by the fact that King Leopold never set foot in his colony, nor did he care much about it besides as a source of money and prestige.

There's no question that Leopold was an awful man, even by the standards of his day, but he was by no means a stupid one. The book describes the deft maneuverings that allowed a single man--a king, yes, but a king from a parliamentary democracy who's power was dwarfed by those of evenother royals whose rule was mostly ceremonial--to acquire a tract of land nearly half the size of Euripe over which he exerted absolute power.

The book has it's heroes, too. Chief among them us E.D. Morel, a shipping clerk who, after casually observing the flow of goods in and out of the Congo, deduced the presence of slavery in the colony and devoted his life, almost on a whim, to the wholesale elimination of this odious practice. The book is no hagiography, and Hochschild openly describes some of Morel's faults, but he remains a remarkable and principled man.

The book's perspective is predominantly European, resulting from the indifference to local African voices at the time the events, but Hochschild makes a good effort to include them where he can. His prose is sleek and engaging, and he paints rich pictures of the many characters in his story.

Bringing Out the Dead - Joe Connelly

I came across this novel through a safari of hyperlinks through Roger Ebert’s review site. In the review of one movie (I forget which one now), the reviewer referenced a Scorsese nmovie I’d never heard of called Bringing Ou the Dead. I’m hardly a Scorsese expert, but I like what I’ve seen of his, so I looked into it and discovered the source novel by Joe Connelly.

Bringing Out the Dead is narrated by Frank Pierce, a burned out paramedic who works the night shift in Hell’s Kitchen, where he encounters a seemingly endless parade of human misery. Drawn from Connelly’s real life experiecne as a paramedic, the novel nevertheless takes on a surreal, otherworldly quality, as the scenarios encountered seem too harsh, too bleak, to bizarre to be a straightforward image of life in that time and place (though maybe I’m just naive).

This sense of unreality is reinforced by Frank’s dry description of ghosts from cases past, some who haunt him mutely from the edges of perception, others who insert themselves into his reality in an endless series of loops. He encounters the same girl, Rose, about a dozen times, each instance revealing a little bit more about the original Rose, a girl who he failed to save and who has thus inserted herself into his psyche, sliding in deep like a sliver of guilt.

Some of the cases seem medically impossible, such as the corrupt garbage kingpin who (briefly) survives having his head crushed by onbe of his garbage trucks, and the cases form the dispatcher grow increasingly strange, dissolve into litanies of suicides and informed by details a 911 dispatcher couldn’t possibly know. There are moments of shocking violence described without hyperbole or ramification. At one point one of Frank’s partners runs over an injured person. Was it a ghost? A hallucination? Did the guy know what he’d done? Did he care? Frank doesn’t say.

The novel seems less interested in reporting the veracity of events than in capturing a mood. Five years as a paramedic in a poor neighbourhood is no doubt a tough gig, and the story does a good job of illustrating what burnout probably feels like. Frank’s nights as a medic seem less like an occupation than a curse, a sisyphean ordeal foisted on him from some past misdeed.

The prose is hallucigenic but believable, a tough combination in first person, where overwriting can easily become apparent. A good book overall.