Book Review

Some people might find it surprising that Stephen King writes a lot about love. Many of his greatest stories are love stories at their center. It is love that helps to light the way out of the darkness and love lost that causes the most angst and pain. You can find it in most of his longer tales sometimes front and center jockeying for position amongst the monsters (both human and supernatural) and the nightmares. At other times it is more subtle, dancing like a mote of light in and out of the frame maybe just something caught in the corner of your eye.  But with the last two King books I have read, love has been the featured attraction, the main event as it were. 11/22/1963 was a full blown romance that just happened to have a supernatural element to it. The love between Jack and Sadie was as real and heartbreaking as any that happens when two people who want to be together, need each other, complete each other in some undefinable way are ripped apart and not allowed the happy ending we as the reader all yearn for. Lisey’s story fits in this category too.

I found this copy of Lisey’s Story at a thrift store I frequent for the bargain price of $2.99. Not bad for a hard back that looked like the spine hadn’t even been cracked. It was needed to help complete the Stephen King section of my book shelves and was bought for that purpose, finding it to be such an enjoyable read was an added bonus. It is a seemingly simple story about a widow who is trying to deal with the grief of losing her husband and if King had stopped there and just went with that I think he could have hit it out of the park. The story gets complicated when it turns out that he is a world renowned and successful author so she is not allowed to grieve on her own terms or in her own time but is constantly harassed by “scholars”(or as Lisey calls them, “Incunks”) who want his papers to further their own ends and crazy fans. This is one of King’s most personal novels as he says to us, his constant readers, the idea came to him about his own wife if he had been killed when that car hit him. This book is written by a man who loves his wife very much and tells me that if she loves him back the same way that they are a very lucky and very blessed pair indeed. Unlike Lisey whose beloved is gone, I hope Stephen and Tabitha have many more happy years left to them. This is not to say that Lisey is Tabitha or that Stephen is Scott but I‘m sure that both of them are woven through these characters.

Lisey starts her journey with us while cleaning out her husband’s office, where he would write and where it can seem the most vibrant part of him is still to some degree extant. It has been two years since famous novelist Scott Langdon died in a way that will not be specified until almost the end of the book. Her grief is poignant.

“Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.”

To lose a soul deep love is to go through life a shadow of yourself; it seems that happiness is only a myth told to children and that all you can hope for is that some days you will feel less sad then others. It also seems that time is not the healer everyone touts it to be.

“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”

“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in a while with the old watering-can and it’s so sad—”

But as is with those left behind, you have to go on and go on she does. She has to deal with a mentally ill sister who is a cutter and a crazed #1 fan that wants her husband’s papers and considers a little mutilation and rape of a widow he thinks of as a Yoko just fine if it gets him what he wants. Much of the book is told in flashback and in it we meet Scott, the very epitome of the tortured artist and his well of secrets. He can travel to another world; a world that speeds healing and is beautiful in daylight but deadly after dark. It has dangers in the form of never seen creatures called “laughers” and something called a “long boy” with a mind so alien it can drive you mad. If it looks at you it can follow you back and stalk you in reflections or possess you and turn you into nothing better than a rabid dog. The story of Scott and his family is one of the best and creepiest parts of the book.

For all that I enjoyed this book and felt that there was plenty of gold to be mined; it is not without its flaws. It seemed strange to me that she could experience so much with this man, be married for 25 years and still deliberately forget so much about him but the mind is a curious thing, especially if forgetting is for sanities sake. It is this remembering with Lisey that makes up the bulk of the story telling. We are invited into this marriage and this woman’s head as a member of the family, into the private things that make up the relationship on the most mundane levels. The most jarring thing about this and from what I have read of other reviews, the most annoying is the language of their marriage. To be honest, I felt this too. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the book I hated the word “smucking”, by the middle I never wanted to read it again and thus hear it in my head and by the end I trained my eye to skip over it. Lisey to me seemed like such a boring character with nothing of her own to offer the world (she is no Sadie that’s for sure), she gave it all to Scott and was happy to live in his shadow. I liked her but never fell in love with her and couldn’t really understand why Scott did either. Scott seemed more real and vibrant then she ever did and he spent the entire book dead. But she was a safe place for him with a heart filled with kindness and that was what really mattered, she could holler him home.

My recommendation is if you love King you will enjoy this; if you love love-stories there is a lot to see and feel here. Many times the way he writes about love brought tears to my eyes and that in itself is enough for me. It is not his best work but it is far from his worst and how can you really dislike anything so filled with love and those who are just waiting for their love to holler them home?

Book Review

To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace

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I have talked on this site about the wonderful BBC show Downton Abbey. I don’t know how many people know this but a book, To Marry an English Lord, was the inspiration for it. This show is also not the first to tackle this fascinating subject, a 90s BBC TV mini-series with Mira Sorvino called The Buccaneers (based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel) was. When I found out about the book, of course I had to have it. I finished it a while ago but am only now getting around to writing a review for it.

This was quite a pithy read and filled with witty anecdotes. It seems that, as always, when the wealthy have more money than they could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes, they choose not to do good with it but to buy more outlandish things. Instead of Islands or private planes or throwing 200K birthday parties for toddlers, the noveau riche daughters of the new world bought titles. They didn’t buy them directly, like going down to the local “Titles R Us”, they had to marry those who could confer them.

At the end of the 19^th century, many sons of the nobility had run down manor houses and a lifestyle of shooting weekends, gambling, and yachting to pay for. The rub was that they no longer had the money needed; these old family scions always exceeded their income. That is where the young American ladies came into the picture. The old money in America was not accepting of the new wealth of the up and coming captains of industry. The gorgon guarding the gates of social acceptability was the indomitable Mrs. Astor, who treated New York as her personal property. It was her that drove so many of the young, obscenely wealthy young ladies across the pond. There, new money was not a hindrance, NOT having money was. Some of the marriages were successful like Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill. Some were a disaster like Consuelo, Duchess of Marlboro. This book takes us into the world of balls, Worth gowns, strict etiquette (at this time the manners were as confining as the clothes), shooting weekends in the country, professional beauties, and the London Season. Sitting at the apex of this small but vicious society was the one they all fought over for recognition and patronage; the person that if he looked your way you deem yourself a success. It seems strange that a fat, pop-eyed, dissolute, libertine was the arbiter of the fashionable world at the turn of the last century. Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the future King, was everything his father was not. He drank too much, had numerous mistresses, was a spendthrift and a constant source of embarrassment to his mother. Sometimes I think the only reason she lived so long was to thwart his ambition to be King. It was while he was waiting that he swirled at the center of this curious phenomenon of our countries shared history.

This was a light, quick read but enjoyable and if you watch Downton Abbey it is definitely worth picking up. I have heard that Julian Fellows the creator of Downton is going to make a prequel series about a young Cora meeting Lord Crawley and their relationship. Lady Mary and her sisters, and all the other children of the marriages of this sort, were the product of women like Cora. Now it’s time to see the genesis, and like Downton, it will be fashion porn. You will read some interesting facts and many of the ladies come off far better than the men they marry. It also takes you deep into the way wealthy people of this time lived. I found myself amazed at how they imprisoned themselves in the rigid society they had constructed. They were never free to speak their mind or socialize with anyone not approved of. Every gesture, every article of clothing, every word, was watched with the steely unforgiving gaze of a hundred eyes. Men and women had to change clothes for every event and it would take hours. I honestly don’t know when they had time to sleep. They had clothes for breakfast, clothes for midmorning riding, clothes for luncheon, clothes for tea, clothes for dinner, clothes for balls, the opera, and court. And god forbid you be seen in anything twice. These wealthy men and women had enough money to do whatever they wanted and choose to construct invisible prisons of propriety around themselves. Those that were happiest were the ones who were strong enough to live life on their own terms; they were few and by far the most interesting.

I have the paperback version of this book, pgs. 403 with many pictures and additions.

Dream a Little Dream

I sometimes like to wonder what I would do if I had unlimited money. I have wild visions of traveling the world first class and expensive clothes but realize that those things, while fun, are not what I really want. If money was completely a non-issue I know exactly what I would do, after I traveled the world of course. I don’t want to die without seeing some of the places I dream about although as the years pass that is probably what will happen.

There is a no-kill animal sanctuary in Arizona called Best Friends. It is on many acres and takes in all kinds of animals and offers them safety, healthcare and training as well as the chance to be adopted to loving forever families. No animal is turned away and if no one adopts them they will live out their lives on the property until they cross the Rainbow Bridge. If you have never heard of them check it out. http://www.bestfriends.org/home.aspx 

My dream would be to open a place like this and even take it a step further. I want to buy substantial acreage south of the border, maybe Brazil or Costa Rica. There I would build a sanctuary much like the one in Arizona but it would also be a school for impoverished young people. All of the animals would need veterinary care and many extremely poor children in these countries have limited access to education and job prospects. My sanctuary would offer scholarships to teach them to become world class veterinarians and vet techs for no monetary cost to them or their families. They would have to live on-site in dorms like a college and attend classes and help with the care and feeding of the animals and the grounds. At the end of their training, I would ask only that they stay and work for 1 year as payment and then they are free to take their skills anywhere they choose. For me, it would be extremely important that my students would be sought after the world over. So not only would my animals get the best of care, those who leave my facility will have the sky be the limit for them. My sanctuary would also be green, completely off the grid and self-sustaining with its own gardens and orchards. I would also like to have cabins where people could stay and vacation and maybe take home a new family member. It would be a peaceful, warm, and serene place and hopefully a mecca for local artists and craftspeople to sell their wares. There is so much good that could be done with a place like that. It would be a little piece of heaven and if I ever hit it big I wouldn't let anything stop me from making it a reality.