THE RIDERS by Tim Winston - Reviewed by Gary Carden

The Riders by Tim Winton
New York: Scribner
$14.00 (paperback) - 374 pages


The great kite of the crucified Christ loomed and caused the crowd to vibrate. Like a pyre before him, the bank of burning candles waited.The hot pure smell of burning. A woman’s fan of blonde hair in front of him scented like roses as he walked, Billy beside him, her face glowing with hurt and understanding. He lit a candle and held it up before him. God, how his head soared and pitched, how rod-like his blood went into his veins. A candle for the birth of Christ, for the squirming of Job in his own shit, for Jonah, running like a mad bastard from the monster he knew he was.
- The Riders, p. 317

This cunningly crafted novel is likely to pose a unique problem for many reviewers. Winston’s complex and vivid narrative, replete with stunning imagery and pulsing color often distracts to the point that the reader is likely to forget what The Riders is about. In effect, almost every sentence in this novel has the cadence and beauty of poetry.Time and time again, this reviewer found himself reading paragraphs over and over for the pleasure of gliding through Winton’s complex sentences (which often resemble finely crafted necklaces composed of a network of images.

The paragraph which introduces this review is an example of hundreds of paragraphs that have the same amazing lyricism. Essentially, it is a description of the drunken Scully, the novel’s protagonist entering a Catholic church on Christmas Eve with his six-year-old daughter, Billy who has become his caretaker. Even though Billy’s face has been mangled by a crazed dog, she is desperately trying to ignore the pain in order to lead her helpless father through the back streets of Paris. Scully is searching for his wife who has abandoned him and his daughter. As his search becomes increasingly desperate, he begins to identify with Old Testament figures (Job and Jonah) and literary figures like the lurching one-eyed, hunchback, Quasimodo - a figure that his daughter feels her father resembles.

In many ways the plot of The Riders is as complex as the languages that defines it. Scully, a shy and inept Australian laborer, has had the good fortune (or misfortune) to marry the beautiful Jennifer who has “artistic aspirations” and spends much of her time in training to become a painter. Surrounding herself with a cultured (and parasitic) covey of itinerant artists, Jennifer’s obsession drives her through all of the major cities of Europe where studies under other painters. Scully supports his wife and child by earning a living as a carpenter or laborer on fishing boats. Despite the fact that he is treated with contempt by Jennifer and her friends, Scully readily accepts his role, content to be married to Jennifer.

With his wife’s tacit approval, Scully buys an abandoned farm in a remote section of Ireland and renovates it, believing that Jennifer (who is living with her artistic friends) will join him after the work is completed. On the appointed day, Scully arrives at the airport to find Billy, his six-year-old daughter - but no Jennifer. Billy is strangely mute and refuses to discuss her mother’s absence.Thus begins a heartbreaking odyssey. Convinced that his wife has been kidnapped or has undergone a traumatic experience that has made it impossible for her to keep the appointed date in Ireland, Scully decides to return all of the places where they have lived during the past six years: a Greek fishing village, an artist’s colony in Paris and a houseboat port in Amsterdam, etc.

It is a bitter and disillusioning journey. When Scully contacts Jennifer’s former friends, he not only discovers that none of them know where his wife is, but that they generally felt that she was both untalented and unfaithful. As Scully exhausts his savings, he reluctantly begins to consider the possibility that Jeniffer has abandoned him and Billy.

One of the most disturbing passages in The Riders deals with Scully’s encounter with Irma, a woman who befriends the father and child. However, after an attempt to seduce Scully fails, Irma becomes a kind of stalker, pursuing Scully from city to city and taunting him with the hint that she knows where Jennifer is. Although she initially appears to be a benevolent fellow traveler, Irma becomes increasingly destructive with each encounter. After she succeeds in stealing Scully’s “identity” and cancels his credit card, the bewildered father has nothing left ... but an ingenious daughter.

The Riders is a love story that records the death of innocence. Scully’s childlike devotion to Jennifer is gradually corrupted, undermined by the painful revelations of his journey. Perhaps, at the end of story when he returns to his renovated farm, he is “sadder but wiser.”

In addition to the story of Scully’s painful journey, The Riders contains a kind of fable which appears to have no relevance to the novel’s action - yet it may be a metaphor for Scully’s dilemma. Near the abandoned farm in Ireland, Scully finds the ruins of an ancient castle and witnesses a strange nocturnal ceremony. Hundreds of riders appear below the castle and wait, mutely staring up at the castle. There is no revelation. No one appears on the ancient parapets and so the mute riders vanish. They will return as they have done for countless nights. Although Scully witnesses the riders’ ceremony twice (once before his vain search for Jeniffer and once after he abandons the search), he decides not to participate in the future. Perhaps he has learned a painful lesson about the futility of waiting for a return that will never occur.

What does it mean? Why is the fable of the riders a part of Scully’s story? Possibly, the connection is that both Scully’s story and the ceremony before the ancient castle have to do with “unquestioning devotion.” Both the riders and Scully have wasted their lives waiting for something that will never come.

Certainly, The Riders is a unique novel. Winton blends poetic description, Irish ballads, an odyssey through the back streets of Europe and a mysterious fable that reads like a variation of “Waiting for Godot.” Filled with dazzling passages of lyric narrative, The Riders easily demonstrates why Tim Winton is considered one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

Review of Stephen King's Under the Dome

Under the Dome by Stephen King
New York: Scribner - 2009
$35.00 - 1,074 pages

“And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help - for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou and I.”
Omar Khayyam



Before I had read twenty pages of Stephen King’s new opus, I found myself thinking about Thornton Wilder’s "Our Town" - not because the small town, Chester’s Mill in Under the Dome resembles Wilder’s Grover’s Corners, but because ...it doesn’t. Although Chester’s Mill is small (less than 3,000 people), provincial and - like Wilder’s classic small town,-it has a generous number of eccentrics, misfits and delightful young people; however, appearances are deceptive. There is an underlying darkness and a raw, cynical attitude that never surfaced in Wilder’s Our Town. It is as though Chester’s Mill represents Grover’s Corner’s fifty years later.

Chester’s Mill has become a tarnished, corrupt little town in which the superficial veneer of civilized behavior strains to hold the town together. All that is needed is a catalyst - an unforeseen crisis that will test the town’s moral and spiritual resources (or reveal their absence). That catalyst is the Dome.

The Dome appears on a beautiful summer day when the inhabitants of “the Mill” are pursuing the innocent pleasures of any all-American town. Kids are fishing in the Prehistle Stream; a Seneca V drones over the town and an old woodchuck scampers along the shoulder of highway #119 checking out the litter for tidbits of fast food. Then, in an instant, an invisible barrier crashes down, causing a number of instant fatalities (including the old woodchuck).

The Dome encapsulates Chester’s Mill like an inverted bowl. Nothing can penetrate it, including birds, planes, cars and ballistic missiles. In a short time, the town’s boundaries are marked by a litter of debris (human and animal) as well as the wreckage of crashed planes, cars and trucks. All attempts by the “outside world” (military and scientific) to breach the Dome fail. Eventually, the town is faced with life-threatening issues: lawlessness and the possible depletion of food, water and clean air.

In a sense the plot of Under the Dome resembles the description of an inhuman laboratory experiment. As the inhabitants of Chester’s Mill struggle to survive, they begin to resemble microscopic life forms in a petri dish. Within a week, the town government undergoes some radical changes: incompetent, mildly corrupt officials becomes increasingly oppressive. The police force begins to “beef up” by employ young men with a penchant for blue uniforms and the approval of the town’s political leaders who readily endorse brutality. As this pleasant village morphs into a Facist nightmare, the growing violence is orchestrated by a sinister being - “Big Jim” Rennie, a scripture-spouting used car dealer (“You’ll be Wheeling, if Big Jim is dealing!”). Rennie is also one of the three Selectman (the New England equivalent of a governing board) and since his fellow Selectman are his puppets, he is in total control. He also perceives the Dome as an opportunity that will enable him to acquire total power.

If King’s message were not obvious enough, he makes numerous references to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, an English novel noted for its depiction of a group of English schoolboys who revert to savagery when they are marooned on a desert island. In addition, King occasionally paraphrases writers noted for their grim appraisal of mankind’s inherently brutal and godless nature. (T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, for example). Under the Dome also resembles Albert Camus’ The Plague, a novel, in which the inhabitants of a beleaguered town discover the disease that is destroying them is an outward representation of their inner (spiritual) decay.

King presents Chester’s Mill as a microcosm of America. Although he acknowledges the courage and nobility of a small number of characters who struggle against the tides of lawlessness, it becomes increasingly obvious that their the town is doomed - primarily because their essential goodness makes them incapable of understanding the nature of their enemies or the crimes they are willing to commit to accomplish their ends. In a sense, Chester’s Mill’s week-long ordeal is a holocaust in miniature. All of the evils of the Third Reich, including the bigotry, the lust for power and the willingness to brutally crush all resistance, blossoms and flourishes under the Dome.

Since Under the Dome contains over sixty characters (and three memorable dogs), any discussion of personalities and their interaction becomes a daunting (impossible) challenge . In addition, there are at least a dozen sub-plots that wind their way through this dark tale. A few of the most intense include: a serial murderer with a brain tumor(“Big Jim’s” son); a newspaper editor that finds herself reduced to distributing photocopies when her office is burned; a minister who addresses her prayers to a deity she calls “Not There;” a veteran of the war in Iraq who finds his worst nightmares resurrected in Chester’s Mill; a Jesus-haunted fundamentalist minister who struggles to reconcile his conflicted roles: the secret operation of a crack mill industry, and his fervent religious beliefs; a town Selectman who becomes increasingly inept due to an Oxycontin addiction; a lecherous academic who finds a kind of redemption in the Chester’s Mill hospital, and a brutalized rape victim who decides to pursue her own version of justice.

Under the Dome is vintage King. The novel’s tension builds slowly like a train that chugs out of the station and then gradually accelerates until it reaches a dizzying speed. Although this novel’s awesome number of characters makes it hard to keep track if them, King has provided his readers with a complete cast (along with a map of Chester’s Mill) in the book’s preface. The dialogue is brisk and colored with an assortment of dialects (including a misplaced New Orleans denizen) and a whole gaggle of teenage skateboarders who speak a delightful but bewildering jargon. All of the characters are deftly created. In short,this is a hell of a book.

What’s not to like? Well, yeah, there is one thing. The weakest link in the whole novel is .....the Dome. King’s final revelation .... it came from outer space! The somewhat whimsical departure of the Dome at the end of the book, lack credibility. Frankly, I don’t think this is a significant flaw. King’s raw and gritty tale of a small town descending into the heart of darkness needs a catalyst so that all of his bells, whistles and sirens could be launched. Any King reader knows that he/she is expected to “willingly suspend his/her disbelief.” In this case, that includes the acceptance of the Dome as being created by... Are you ready for this?.... juvenile delinquents from outer space. Sounds reasonable to me!