Bubble trouble

UNDER THE DOME

By STEPHEN KING

1,047 pages

Available at National Bookstore

I was reading US Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s assessment of the government’s response to the recent attempted underwear bomber. She told Maureen Dowd: “We have a determined enemy and you can’t put the United States in a big Tupperware Container.”

Or can you?

This kooky scenario must have been cooking up in writer Stephen King’s brain ever since 9/11 like a bad batch of meth: what if you could place not all of America, but a quintessential slice of it — say, a little postcard-perfect town in Maine — inside a big translucent container?

Under the Dome posits that very solution to the war on terror, along with every other troubling aspect of modern life — a huge impenetrable bubble descends over Chester Mills, Maine, forcing everyone there to deal with suddenly living in a fishbowl. It turns out a fishbowl is not the healthiest environment for humans.

At first, the 2,000-plus residents of Chester Mills try to find a way out; then they seek the government’s assistance; then they start blaming the government; then they commence to blame each other. Paranoia and anarchy, fueled by fear, hatred and religious zealotry, turn the picture-postcard town into a metaphor of society at large, under siege.

If only The Simpsons Movie hadn’t been there first. Yes, even though King grappled with this sprawling, The Stand-length work for decades, under different titles (The Cannibals was one version), he ultimately chose to put it aside, only dusting it off once again during the George W. Bush years, reframing it with a political message, and releasing it… a full two years after Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie grappled with a giant dome descending on Springfield on big screens worldwide. One imagines King’s immediate exclamatory response to this development, poised over his trusty word processor: “D-oh!!!”

Actually, Under the Dome brings back King the epic storyteller — even though he vowed to “quit” writing several years ago after a life-threatening encounter with a speeding truck on a winding Maine road. You may fault King for not being very scary anymore, but the Maine resident does love to tell a story — a long story — and he displays the usual knack for jumping right into things: A husband is giving his young wife pilot lessons, and is just about to pass outside the town limits of Chester Mills when their Cessna crumples mid-air and body parts start raining down near hitchhiking Dale “Barbie” Barbara, a former soldier who realizes very quickly that something strange is going on, and tries to be the voice of reason and quick-thinking if reluctant heroism as the town goes completely bonkers.

King, even in his advanced semi-retirement, is no slouch when it comes to making a deal: the doorstop-size tome (which he proudly announced to reporters would “kill a lot of trees”) has been picked up as a coming TV mini-series, produced by no other than Steven Spielberg. Not only that, King has allowed a somewhat unprecedented amount of viral hype to herald the release of Under the Dome, with online sites offering bed and breakfast stays, maps and travel tips for the fictional Chester Mills. It’s not clear if King or his publishers had anything to do with this Internet tie-in business, but it obviously serves to hype the book. Also hyping the book’s release was a price war that erupted between Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target, big outlets that sold the book at up to 75 percent off. With such cutthroat tactics the norm now for big-name authors, no wonder people like King prefer to live under a dome.

If all else fails, those who are of the conspiratorial or paranoid bent might consider scoffing up enough copies of Under the Dome to erect around themselves a tidy castle of hardcover pulp fiction, at least enough to keep away a few of life’s slings and arrows for the time being.

Actually, King and the Homeland Security chief (who famously commented, after security had failed to detect the Nigerian man who later attempted to light up plastique sewn into his underwear before alert passengers managed to subdue him mid-air, “the system worked”) have something in common: they both believe that embalming the US public in more expensive, high-tech but ultimately ineffective security measures isn’t the solution to terrorism, or even people’s fear of terrorism. That solution may have been the Bush administration’s preferred tactic, though they often managed to manipulate public fear levels for their own political advantage. Now it seems like we’re back to square one.

Undoubtedly, Americans are still concerned about terrorist attacks, and the seemingly lax response to the current slip-through bomber. But Americans, it should be noted, continue to fly, to travel, and in large measure to shrug off the added time spent waiting in airport security lines. They, too, have learned to live in a bubble.