in the secret city
Written: Jul 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: very likable main characters, interesting premise, works as the opposite of IT in some ways
Cons: takes a while for the action to get going, a bit long in spots
The Bottom Line: A bit long, but the likability of the main character and the idea of inevitability help to pull this one off.
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| rytr_1's Full Review: Stephen King - Insomnia |
The first time I read Insomnia was shortly after its release in 1994, back in my early college days when a lot of books fell by the wayside due to course reading assignments. I read the first 150 pages or so, then had to read "intellectual" authors like Walker Percy and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, and I forgot about this one until the semester had ended. The bookmark was still firmly in place, and so I (unwisely) picked it up where I left off - and was lost for the next hundred pages or so. Recently I read Dreamcatcher, King's latest, third novel-length return to the strange happenings in his fictional Derry (which is beginning to resemble a slightly more mysterious version of his own Castle Rock). I decided to go back and give this book another chance. Turns out it makes more sense than that first interrupted time I plowed through it.
Insomnia is set about nine years after the final climax and resolution of its predecessor, IT, a book faulted only by being too ambitious in scope and failing to tie up some plot threads. The earlier book was chiefly about a group of kids; this book is predominantly about a group of elderly people. Seventy-year-old Ralph Roberts becomes an insomniac shortly after his wife Carolyn's death, waking a couple of minutes earlier every night until he finds himself getting about two hours' sleep each day. He tries dozens of remedies, none of which work as anything but conversation pieces, and is about ready to go out of his mind already when he begins to see strange things. Lack of sleep tends to cause a person to experience dream-states while awake, such as hallucinations, and Ralph's eyes become open to a series of what he believes to be hallucinations - waves of color surrounding the people (and animals) he sees, ranging from beautiful to frightening as hell. He also eventually picks up clues that others may be seeing these colors (auras, as he calls them) as well - finally comparing notes with a sixty-eight-year-old widowed friend named Lois Chasse. Add to this the complicated subplot of town controversy arising from the impending arrival of a famed abortion-rights activist in Derry (for some reason she bears the same name as one of the stars of "The Partridge Family"), and you have a lot to absorb.
King makes a very good decision in the narrative of this book: He leaves almost all of it in the third-person point of view of Ralph, who is an extremely reliable narrator despite his gradual affliction. I kept picturing Ralph as being an elderly Everyman, someone Jack Lemmon might have portrayed in a movie. He is kind, has a well-developed sense of humor, and looks for answers rather than simply giving up or choosing up sides in all the debates going on around him. Ralph winds up smack in the middle of some of the controversy when he confronts a nice-guy-turned-wife-beater named Ed Deepneau, who has somehow become a violently insane right-to-lifer, beating his wife Helen just because she signs a petition to get Susan Day ("I think I love you... but what am I so afraid of?...") to speak in Derry. Ralph even manages to keep most of his cool when he discovers the identities of the three short bald doctors he starts to see around town, and what function they perform in the grand scheme of things.
Other favorite characters? Top of the list would be the all-but-ancient Dorrance Marstellar, a ninety-five-year-old poetry reader who spends his time watching planes take off and land at Derry's airport. Old Dor knows more about what's going on in town than he's really telling; he adds a delightfully eccentric element to the scenes (too few) in which he appears. Old Dor's chronological opposite is young Natalie Deepneau, Ed and Helen's daughter, an energetic little child who evidently can see the auras just as Ralph can see them. There is another child who is important to Insomnia, although his role is never entirely explained in this novel. Brief tie-ins to King's slowly-expanding epic The Dark Tower are welcome and somehow fitting to the theme of levels of consciousness depicted here. Mike Hanlon from IT plays a smaller role here, and it begins to look like he's going to become more important later on in the pages of Insomnia but then he suddenly drops off, not to be mentioned again. There is even a reference to a certain young character from an earlier King novel who once ran into "that damn road" in a town called Ludlow...
Insomnia is not the best of Stephen King's work, but it deserves positive mention. The closing chapters are definitely more satisfying than those of the later Dreamcatcher. I love the way King describes the "secret cities" of Derry: the city of the kids who go to the Barrens to play, the city of the "Old Crocks" who move chess pieces back and forth while they share witty bits of gossip, and the dangerous city of the winos and the criminals and the insane. This analogy parallels the higher levels of understanding which become so crucial to the events of Insomnia. There is also the question of free will, which is as key to the outcome of this novel as it was in The Stand. A thought-provoking book. I'll probably read it again (in another seven years).
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rytr_1
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Location: Illinois, USA
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
I am physically (and morally) incapable of writing a biography in fifteen words or less.
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