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When I was reading the last installment of the
Dark Tower series, I was amazed by the potentialities of a
character like Patrick Danville, the blind man who could draw things
to life. I remember thinking it was too bad that he was introduced
so late in the epic, a minor character, and that the idea of
creating by drawing was too good to discard so quickly. Stephen King
probably thought so too: in Duma Key, there is no Patrick
Danville, but an Edgar Freemantle, a man who discovers, after a job
accident, that he has the gift of drawing. And that like most gift,
it can also become a curse... Edgar
Freemantle is a successful business man in the building industry. At
fifty-something, he has everything he could wish for: money, an
enduring marriage, and two healthy, grown-up daughters. One day, a
minute of inattention and everything is lost, or almost: a crane
crashes into his pick-up truck, and Edgar is soon lying in hospital
with a crushed hip, some damage in the Broca area of his brain, and
an amputated arm. Beside the pain, Edgar has to deal with memory
loss, and an uncontrollable anger associated with it. After a few
months, his wife, on whom most of Edgar's anger is irrationally
directed, leaves him. One of his daughter, Lin, quickly takes side
with her mother. Only Ilse, his favorite daughter,
sticks by him. For Edgar, a new life begins, which he must learn to
get accustomed to. Following the advice of his therapist, Dr. Kamen,
Edgar decides to take up drawing, which he briefly exercised as a
child, and which he liked. He also moves to Duma Key, one of the
Florida Keys, in a house hanging over the gulf of Mexico. Edgar
immediately falls in love with the house, even though the shells
grating under the house make a creepy noise at night.
Edgar, inspired by the horizon line seen from his
window, starts to draw the sunset, aware that this is the most cliché
view he can produce. Then he has the idea to represent objects, in
front of the sunset, and his drawings take a surrealistic aspect and
become really interesting. Soon, the pictures evolve, and he starts
to paint. The people who see them find them brilliant, but he is at
first unable to believe he is really an artist. Progressively, he
also realizes that his pictures have an eerie quality, and that some
of them are quite powerful. After walking increasingly long
distances on the beach, he also befriends his closest neighbors,
Wireman, a haunted man with a tragedy in his past, and the person he
takes care of, Elizabeth, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who
carries a terrible childhood secret... I
believe I have already told too much of the story: let me add that,
in my opinion, and in the opinion of many other readers, if I trust
the reviews I have read on amazon.com, Duma Key is one of
King's best novels. I had been quite disappointed by King's last
novel, Lisey's Story, which had everything to be good but
fell quite short of my expectations, and, if Cell was good,
it is far behind Duma Key, also in my opinion. I was a bit
afraid that King should have maybe retired, as he announced he would
after the Dark Tower Series, but I am glad he didn't. Duma Key
has all the ingredients of a great King: a man with an ambivalent
gift, a powerful villain(-ess, in this case), solid friendship ties
that can overcome everything bad, and a final battle between good
and evil. King also explores new territories: first a new
geographical territory, since, unlike most of his novels, this one
is not set in Maine, but in Florida. At first I was dubious that
horror could arise as easily in sunny Florida than in the snowed
woods of Maine, but it can, and it does. On the flap of the book, it
reads that King now shares his time between Maine and Florida (the
state, in King's own words, "for the newly weds and the nearly
dead"): People of Florida, fear what lies in the sunset, because
King has brought all his nightmarish creatures with him, and they
haven't melted in the sun... Also, King explores the ties between a
father and a much-beloved daughter (which I don't think he has
before, or has he?) in a very powerful, haunting, and touching way.
Another theme is divorce: King said that Lisey's Story was is
book about marriage and Duma Key his book about divorce. The
dissolving but not quite dissolvable ties between two persons who
once shared a bed and inside jokes is another theme of Duma Key.
The oscillation between hate and love, the desire to protect and the
impulse to hurt, the good memories and the bad, everything is
there... King is very gifted at describing the different
interactions between people, and most of his novel is indeed about
that. Another theme, very present in King's novels since his
accident, is physical pain, the toll a serious accident takes on
an individual, and the courage and energy put in reconstructing
oneself after such a trial. As a consequence of all this
psychological aspects, Duma Key is a slow read, King takes
his time with character development, and the real "action" is in the
last fifth of the novel. I suppose this could bother some
readers, but for me it was a plus. What is also visible here
is how King likes to borrow things from popular culture (as he did
with Harry Potter elements in the last Dark Tower books), whether
acknowledged (the Godfather) or left for the reader to
recognize. Here, I couldn't help seeing images from Pirates of
the Caribbean at times, and one of the final scenes is inspired
by Sand Man from Spiderman. On
another level, as in many other novels (The Dark Half,
Lisey's Story, The Dark Tower, etc.), King writes about
the act of creation. Edgar is not, like many of his heroes, a
writer; he is a painter, an artist, but the result is ultimately the
same: both have this amazing power of bringing things to life, of
building whole alternative realities with the pen or a stroke of the
brush. And, as another great thinker would say (Peter Parker, aka
Spiderman), "A great power come with great responsibilities".
King shows the dark side of the creative process, questions its
legitimacy, its limits, and how much the creator is in control of
what he creates, or if he taken over by something much greater than
him (and what happens if this something is malevolent...). Granted,
the question is not new, hasn't been since Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, but as long as men will imitate God by making acts
of creation, they will question what such a power entails. This is a
subject which I personally finds fascinating. King, in an interview,
told that the idea of Duma Key came from a picture that
imposed itself in its mind: twin girls in the sunset, an eerie and
disturbing pictures. Most people are gifted with imagination and
have such visions sometimes, but how many would spin a tale around
it? The power of imagination is indeed a powerful one, and when
combined to this of storytelling, the result is ... Duma Key!
Mr. King, the Constant reader thanks you for
this powerful novel...
Rating:
© Discussing Books, 02/05/2008 |
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