Van Hise Review Of: THE STAND
From ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS
The article on The Stand takes time to focus on a character that might be dumbed down: Harold. Van Hise writes, “Harold is one of the most interesting characters in the book.” I totally agree! I find myself amazed at the depth of insight King brings to Harold. He also credits Nick Andros and Tom Cullen with stealing the show, saying, “and they’re what makes reading the book a truly memorable experience because they have all of the best scenes.”
About Flagg, Van Hise suggests that for all the build up, he’s not really that scary.
“When he does emerge as a full time character near the end of the book, his awesomeness is greatly diminished and he seems no more dangerous than your average, run-of-the-mill gangster. Although genuinely portrayed as being an agent of Satan, his strength seems to fade under close scrutiny and his characterization becomes superficial and mild and not at all as frightening as we had been led to expect from earlier appearances in the book, and this is really disappointing.”I don’t know about that. I remember reading The Stand for the first time, and finding Flagg very frightening. I didn’t know what he might do. Only after reading the book do I look back and go, “humm, he was kind of a flunkie!”
OKAY VAN HISE. . . WHAT COULD BE WRONG WITH THE STAND? HUH? Oh, he has a few things to note. . . I cut them down to neat bullet points:
- Too long. (He was reading the abridged version!)
- End of the world saga’s are “trite.”
- King's work in The Stand does not "equal himself." ie, it's not as good as The Shining.
I do agree with this; Van Hise writes,
“The concept of a battle fo good versus evil (with all the good people in Boulder and all the bad people in Vegas) is an interesting new wrinkle, but it is never brought off. We are constantly led to expect the penultimate conflict, and instead it’s all terribly low key, and on a subdued personal level, and with a little irony thrown in. We are expecting a climax at least as powerful as what King served up in The Shining, and instead we get one which is as weak and diluted as the movie version of The Shining, which ended before the the climax could ever begin.”The ending is unexpected! King defiantly seems to be moving the story toward a war of some kind, and instead simply lets evil self destruct. I’ve often wondered why Larry and the others needed to go take their “Stand” and be sacrificed, if evil was just going to collapse on itself. I guess to prove God’s righteousness in destroying them. There is actually a whole theology behind that thought! Anyway, I too would have liked to have seen a war between Boulder and Vegas.
This is funny: Van Hise writes,
“In an interview a while back, King mentioned that before The Stand was published, his editor at Doubleday made him take out 300 pages from the story. If the book is unwieldy at 800 pages, I can’t even imagine what it would have been like had it hit a thousand pages. As it is, when I finished it, I felt that I had completed an ordeal, lie running an obstacle course which had occasional pleasant diversions. This is not to say that I'm sorry that I read it, because there are some extremely memorable scenes in this book, it's just that I wish there had been more, and that one of them had been the ending."
No comments:
Post a Comment