Can you hear me now? - Cell by Stephen King
By Brendan Newton, for THECOMMENTARY.CA
Wednesday, 24 May 2006
Stephen King's latest novel Cell (Simon and Schuster, 2006), was released the same week that hockey's Mario Lemieux announced his retirement for at least the second time. Basketball greats Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson were also noted for multiple retirements and comebacks. Professional wrestling's Hulk Hogan has had numerous final matches and subsequent comebacks in the last thirteen years. This is not restricted to athletes. According to many scholars, none other than William Shakespeare retired from the stage, saying farewell with The Tempest, only to write (or at least co-write) several other plays. Retirement just doesn't seem to stick with some people. If they have the drive, the talent, and the capability-they'll be back.
A few years ago when King had finished his Dark Tower opus, he had expressed uncertainty in several interviews about whether he would continue writing. Retirement inevitably came up. King suggested he might be, "done with writing," "having killed enough of America's trees." He also suggested that while continuing to write, he would not necessarily have it published, despite howls of "how-could-you-do-that-to-your-loyal-fans" from some readers.
Knowing how prolific King is, retirement rumours ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks to the apparent ease with which he finds inspiration for his stories, nothing save death, would keep his tales from coming. Indeed, since the final Dark Tower book was published, King has produced two more novels, Cell among them, and has another on the way entitled Lisey's Story, to be release in October 2006. (Cell includes a hand-written excerpt from this novel, about the widow of a renowned writer. It looks terrific, and I'm looking forward to it.) We have not seen the last of King.
His latest, Cell, is a 350-page (in King terms, that's short) novel concerning something going horribly wrong with those great conveniences/annoyances of modern life, cellular telephones. I have to say that this one didn't grab me from the beginning the way most of King's books do. King bluntly opens the narrative by stating that the apocalyptic event known as 'The Pulse,' the destruction of civilisation, happened on the first of October at 3:03 pm. We are then introduced to our hero, a struggling artist, Clayton Ridell, "a young man of no particular importance to history." Estranged from his wife and son, Ridell has just sold a graphic novel to a publisher in Boston. The most important thing about Clayton is that-like King, and incidentally this reviewer-he does not own a cell phone.
On first reading the first few pages are somewhat clunkily written. However, one assumes that King was going for a sort of Twilight Zone opening ('Consider, if you will, a normal man, on a normal day . . .'), establishing the mundanity of the situation before destroying the world. On second reading you see in King's introduction the embodiment of what the writer Orson Scott Card said, that King is perhaps the best writer who best recorded North American life in the second half of the twentieth century. King highlights the ubiquity such things like Starbucks Coffee's cups, iPods, and cellphones. They've become integral parts of our world, when they would have been the stuff of science fiction when King's career began in 1974. Very quickly, things go very wrong with cell phones, as Clayton witness several normal people transformed into violent savages-or 'Phoners' as they come to be known-who kill with their bare hands. Apparently, some sort of signal, or 'pulse' radically changes people's brains. We never find out its source, or its exact nature, but it is suggested that it reduces people to their most base nature, one of unihabited violence. Boston is soon in flames, but Clay manages to excape the city with Tom McCourt, a mild-mannered gay man, and a teenage girl named Alice. Both, surprisingly tough allies, accompany Clay to Maine in search of his wife and son. (A muted, but noticeable presence in the novel is Clay's desperate hope that his son is still alive and fully human.) They encounter a world dominated by 'Phoners,' who have evolved in strange ways, developing a sort of telepathic hive-mind, as well as other psychic powers. King's best novels usually include an unforgettable and disturbing villain, and Cell is no exception as Clay's group encounters a sinister Phoner known as The Raggedy Man who appears to be acting as the Phoners' leader. Clay's group eventually finds itself headed to a final encounter with the creepy Raggedy Man's "flock" of Phoners in the dark woods of Northern Maine
It is tempting to compare Cell to King's other post-apocalptic novel, the epic, The Stand. While there are similiarites-both books feature a sudden event which wipes out most of humanity, leaving only a small group of disparate survivors who need to work together, a memorably sinister villan who appears in the hero's dreams, and a scene in which the heroes are captured and taken to a final confrontation with the said villain-the book differs in terms of its length (Cell is shorter), and Cell is free of supernatural forces. While The Stand explains its post-apocalyptic world in terms of God versus The Devil, everything in Cell's world is given a scientific (or at least pseudo-scientific) explanation. This gives the book a harsher, more naturalistic edge than some of King's other works; in this regard it is more like the books King wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. The only sense of "hope" in the novel comes from the love that develops among Clay's group, as well as Clay's love for his son, but unlike most of King's other works, there is not supernatural force personifying that love. If there is a work of King's that Cell most closely resembles, it is the novella "The Mist" from the short story collection Skeleton Crew, in which a mysterious rip in time and space unleashes horrific monsters on the world. Both works are fairly short tales about an apocalyptic event, the nature of which is never fully explained, which focus upon the ways in which the surviving characters deal with the world in the aftermath of the event. The two work's main characters are also very similar, as both Cell's Clay Riddell and "The Mist's" David Drayton are visual artists who are guided through bizarre post-apocalyptic worlds by love for their families.
Cell is short considering King's usually 'literary elephantiasis,' which sees book stretch out to 600 pages or more. Cell's relative brevity is the source of its greatest strength, as well as its greatest flaw. The narrative flows well without any needless interruptions, sucking us in early and not letting the reader go until the tale is done. It is as though having finally finished his great Dark Tower epic has freed King up to write more directly. (Speaking of which, there's a minor but killer reference in Cell that's sure to delight Tower junkies!) However, the book's brevity also means that the novel just isn't as spellbinding as King's longer books, where the length allows for greater character development, a more established sense of place and time, and a generally richer experience for the reader. As much as I like Cell's characters, I just can't say they feel like old friends, as say, Mike Noonan, Bobby Garfield, or Roland Deschain and his Ka-tet. To be fair, King didn't set out to write a big, character-centred novel. It seems probable that he had an idea about something going horribly wrong with our society's ubiquitous cell phones, and then decided to write a short, violent novel dealing with that idea. He achieved this goal, and it's a very fun quick read, but not one of my favourites.
King clearly has many more stories to tell, and that's bad news for America's trees but good news for America's readers. In Cell, he has produced a novel that, while it does not have the depth and richness of some of his previous works, it is a good (albeit very violent) read, that will inevitably prey on the reader's mind the next time they hear a ringtone.
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