The fantasy
of time travel has always intrigued us. In modern times, perhaps beginning with
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine,
on to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, we have read fictions that
explore the weird but familiar world of time travel. Similarly, the popular
medium of television, through such shows as Star Trek, have explored the
imaginative possibilities of this fantasy. Stephen King praises writer Jack
Finney for his book Time After Time as an outstanding example of a time
travel novel. In 11.22.63, Stephen King tries his hand at the genre with
excellent results.
Probably
anyone old enough to be in school on November 22, 1963 has indelible images
from that day seared into their brain. This is the date that John F Kennedy was
assassinated. It was a national trauma in my lifetime matched only by the
trauma of 9/11 for traumatizing our collective and individual psyches. I
remember vividly my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Handley, coming in and saying to
us “I have some bad news. The president has been shot." That was all the
information we received at first, and when the bell rang, we were sent to
different rooms for our reading groups. Mine was on the main floor of the old
fifth and sixth grade building, where a large old-fashioned radio sat in a small
room. The volume on the old radio was turned up probably as loud as it could
go. I recall the announcer saying “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the
United States is dead." The station then immediately played the national
anthem. My own reaction was one of shocked disbelief. Some of my
classmates cried. I don't remember if I did, or if I prayed, but probably both. I think all were stunned. The following days were filled with
a national grief and a ritual funeral that attempted to grasp the gravity of
what happened.
What had
happened, was that a lone, misfit of an individual by the name of Lee Harvey
Oswald, had shot the president with a high-powered rifle. Oswald was later
arrested only to be shot and killed himself a couple of days later by another
misfit. This account of a lone gunmen acting out a deranged fantasy didn't
seem to fit with what ought to have happened, that some deep conspiracy of
great power must have been necessary to create so momentous an event. Thus, up
sprung conspiracy theories that have spun almost endlessly since that date. Oliver
Stone's JFK gave cinematic voice to those theories, but in the end, the
conspiracy theories don't jibe with reality.
In an
interview about writing this book, Stephen King says he initially started the
draft in 1973, ten years after the assassination, but he reports that he put it
away because of the demands on his time and the freshness of the wound that he
was attempting to address. Now, a couple of years short of the 50th anniversary
of JFK's assassination, he came out with a book that deals with this momentous
date, the issues of time travel and what might have been, and the differences
between the world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In it attempting to
address all of these different concerns, King has done a masterful job creating
a sense of time and place in the recent—and to some of us, remembered—past.
King does this in large measure through characters that we come to know and
care about. I have to admit this is the first work of fiction by Stephen King
that I've read (earlier listened to his book On Writing), and I must say
ability as a story teller is well displayed here. (I have seen some movies
based on his work, such as The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption,
and Stand by Me, all of which I found compelling.) I'd avoided King
because I had always thought of them as a horror writer, but I see now that
this does not do justice to the scope of his abilities.
The conceit
of the book surrounds the discovery of a time warp in a small Maine town in
2011. An owner of a diner discovered the time warp some time ago and visited
the past (always the same date and time in 1958), going back and forth in time.
He eventually decides that his mission should be to avoid the assassination of
JFK, and thereby avoid the national trauma that the Vietnam War visited upon
the nation. (I think him terribly optimistic about this prospect.) However, he
cannot get himself to the time and place necessary to confidently intervene to
stop Oswald, so he recruits the main character, Jake Epping, to go back in his place.
Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, reluctantly agrees to go back in
time to try to derail this horrific event and other tragedies. In doing so, he
travels to what in to us is now the strange world of the late 1950s and early
1960s in America. Epping’s self-imposed mission is made much more difficult by
the fact that he falls in love with a woman who has her own past to deal with.
King doesn't
dwell on weird theories of physics in support of his time travel conceit, but
he does provide some common sense observations on what it might be like, such
as the conclusion that the past doesn't want to be changed. No doubt true, but
that doesn’t stop us from pondering the possibilities. Besides being a topic of
interest for fiction writers, the “what if's” of history have tantalized
serious historians and social scientists as well as fiction writers. What if
Winston Churchill had not become prime minister in Great Britain in 1940? What
if Hitler had successfully invaded? The number of possibilities are nearly
endless once you crack open the past with an eye to changing it or imagining it happening differently. When we think philosophically and analytically about the
past, we come up against the cold fact that the past is closed and fixed, while
the future is open and uncertain (at least to some degree). When we try on
mentally changing the past, we find, as the protagonist Jake Epping does, that
things don't fit easily. The waves of consequence that emanate from any single
fact disburse through the past creating a butterfly effect that can have nearly
infinite repercussions.
I’m very
glad I read this book because I found a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing. As
we approach the anniversary of the assassination of JFK, there some other books
I want to read as we try (continually, as with all good history) to assess JFK,
the man and his presidency. Because his life and presidency were cut short at a
time of such great change and trauma that we know came to pass in the United
States during the period of about 15 years after his death, we wonder what
would have happened had the assassin's bullet not struck. The fact is, we can
never know, but we can wonder and ponder and argue these possibilities. It's
not something worth doing because we can change anything in the past, but by
casting the strongest possible light on the past, we can use the reflection to
see a bit further where we might be going—and want to go—in the future.
By the way, if you are interested, the initial character who discovers
the time warp and decides to look into the Kennedy assassination in the hope of
avoiding it, thought there was a "95% chance" that Oswald acted
alone. King, in an interview, opines, after having researched the matter very
thoroughly, that that probability is close to 98 or 99%. History sometimes
lurches in unforeseeable ways based on the acts of the least formidable of
individuals or the random events of nature. This event seems to be such an
instance.
