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Credence, clear water, Revival

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00047-4

2215-0374

Jonathan Barnes,

Themes in Literature Analysis

It is surely an unlooked-for side-effect of fame that the eminent are often expected to become spokespeople for those elements of their lives which have caused them pain in the greatest degree. Consider Stephen Fry's campaign to increase public awareness of the bipolar disorder from which he suffers or, following his diagnosis, Terry Pratchett's pleas for a more temperate national approach towards the treatment of Alzheimer's. In the case of Stephen King, the cause has ever been that of addiction, and his firm, clear-eyed argument for increased tolerance and human understanding has continued for more than three decades. He knows whereof he writes—afflicted by alcoholism since his youth, at the apogee of his 1980s success he was so regular a substance abuser that there are whole books, he says, which he simply cannot remember writing. He emerged into hard-won sobriety only after an intervention by his wife and family, without which, he has admitted, he would certainly now be dead. This personal struggle has often been reflected in his work, the fiction featuring a procession of protagonists battling all manner of addictions, from the homicidal alcoholic of The Shining to the psychopathic romance fiend in Misery to the doomed, bibulous poet who is the protagonist of The Tommyknockers. The hero of King's new book, Revival, is fruit from the same, troubled vine: Jamie Morton, a heroin addict whom we first meet as a little boy in rural New England in the early 1960s. Morton's life is tough but honest, his family large, his parents poor and hardworking. The course of his scrappy, difficult existence is changed forever with the arrival of the town's new minister, Charles Jacobs, a preacher and family man who also nurses a bizarre ancillary interest in the mysterious untapped possibilities of electricity. Jacobs' faith is soon destroyed by tragedy (not the first of King's men of the cloth to have found themselves in such a condition: “behind Saint Paul's darkened glass”, bellows a distraught Jacobs from the pulpit, “there is nothing but a lie”) but the boy and this strange, driven adult have forged an immediate bond that will keep them orbiting one another for the rest of their lives. King's chronology is long and patient, and he returns us to these characters at irregular intervals. While Jacobs grows steadily more unhinged, we meet Morton in various guises, from twenty-something junkie to a quiet, industrious middle age in which he is afflicted nonetheless by an ominous sense of unfinished business. It would be unfair to reveal here too many of the shifts and convolutions of this thoughtful, rather elegantly constructed novel. Suffice to say that the journeys that both men take in their lives are full of quiet and largely plausible surprises. For the bulk of the narrative this is the homespun, relatable King of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile rather than the gore specialist of Pet Sematary or Dreamcatcher. It is also—on the level of the individual sentence—among his most aesthetically pleasing works to date. Often dismissed as a mere storyteller, King's command of language produces many examples of precise, unshowy phrasemaking: Jamie imagines a dead woman's “blond hair…growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark”; a too-enthusiastic handshake is like that of “a politician hoping for a vote”; air conditioners possess a “silky whisper”. Fans of King's work (those whom he addresses in his prefaces and afterwords with the seriocomic salutation “constant reader”) might be unsurprised to discover that much of the author's careful layering of plot and patient, incremental stoking of atmosphere is all but undone in the final pages—a lurid flourish of Lovecraftian body horror that, after so subtle and sustained an acceleration, seems disappointingly bathetic. What is perhaps more unexpected is the book's eventual dismissal of the question of addiction. Although King is unflinching in his description of the life of a heroin addict (“in the men's room I cooked up and delivered half my goods into the hollow of my left shoulder”), Jamie is cured—by Jacobs and his electricity—of his compulsion well before the story's halfway mark. Were it not for the writer's long tradition of grappling more forcefully with this theme, so fanciful a dramatisation might seem disturbingly cavalier. In the context of Revival—by a conservative count, King's 58th novel—it seems more like the act of a man who has grown tired of his unsought mantle as a bard of addiction, a spokesman ready at last to speak of new subjects and of different things.