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I have an ambivalent relationship with The Shining. As a slobbering young King fan, I read the novel first and watched the movie afterwards, and came to agree with King: Kubrick missed the point completely. The Shining is supposed to be a story about an alcoholic with anger issues who honestly struggles with his demons and loses bit by bit (given King's own subsequent struggles with addiction, there's a bit of autobiography in there) but in the movie, Nicholson plays him as a wolf-grinning psycho right from the beginning. But just last year, I watched it again (preparing for the excellent documentary Room 237) and realised I'd gotten it all wrong. King wrote a King novel, but Kubrick (whose movies are all about people who think they're the protagonist but really aren't) wrote a Kubrick movie. In the novel, we're Jack, trying to remain in control; in the movie, we're Danny, and we know that we're trapped in an impossible house with a Father who will try to kill us. Both are great horror stories, but even though the plot is identical, the stories are completely different.

So that's what's going through my head as I pick up Doctor Sleep, King's long-awaited... really? Well, long-in-coming sequel, at least. I won't lie, seeing writers follow up books I loved years later (Bret Easton Ellis, I'm glancing in your direction) always brings to mind a rock band past their prime going on a reunion tour, promising to play their big hit album from beginning to end; it's a safe cash cow that doesn't necessarily ask much of them. On the other hand, one thing I always loved about King is that he doesn't go easy on his characters. People who live through his books don't come out unscarred; kids die, adults become traumatised, friends drift apart. So what will he do with little Danny Torrence, all these years later?

Dan Torrence, as it turns out, has followed in his father's footsteps - happily, without a family. He's a drunk with massive anger issues, not helped in the slightest by his psychic visions that remain strong. When he realises he can't sink any lower and decides to make one last try to on the straight and narrow, he settles down in a small town in Maine HA! New Hampshire! Take that, everyone who thinks King is predictable!, takes a job and starts going to AA. Years pass... and then he "meets" Abra, a little girl whose powers make his look like a newspaper horoscope. And there are Monsters after her. Monsters who have always been there, who have preyed on the likes of her and little Danny Torrence for centuries. And they look just like a gang of middle-aged moderately Republican campers.

What I said about Kubrick and King earlier: the point is that any horror plot can be a great story as long as there's a idea shining through it. King has said that all of his stories begin with "Wouldn't it be fun if..." I'm not sure this one did, though; this one feels more like a "I wonder what happened to..." King has come up with a great idea for a villain (though I think he could have done more with them), Abra Stone is one of his more intriguing child characters - you gotta love a 12-year-old who fights dirty - and above all, Dan's struggle with alcoholism contains some of King's best regular-guy-trying-to-survive writing yet. But a little too often, it all feels like an excuse; the plot is clumsy, the resolutions too easy, the tension maintained far too long by simply not telling the reader what the characters intend to do.

That said, the old King fan proverb of "Well, at least it's nowhere near as bad as Cell" holds up fine, as does the novel itself - albeit with some creaky floor boards. There's an intriguing hint at times that King knows times have changed, that stories are changing, that there have been both cultural and technological shifts that change how his characters deal. If The Shining was either Jack's or Danny's story; Doctor Sleep is both Dan's and Abra's story. I can't not like that.

Oh yes. I liked this a lot more than I did Cain. It explores a lot of the same ideas, obviously - not just the biblical themes, but also the same fundamental issues: the question of how to explain the presence of evil in a world that's supposed to be good, religion as a tool for power - not just between people, but since this is a story about the supposed Son of God, there's also the role played by the big man himself.

And so the despised fish with smooth skins, those that cannot be served at the table of the people of the Lord, were returned to the sea, many of them so accustomed to this by now that they no longer worried when caught in the nets, for they knew they would soon be back in the water and out of danger. With their fish mentality, they believed themselves the recipients of some special favor from the Creator, perhaps even of a special love, so that in time they came to consider themselves superior to other fish, for those in the boats must have committed grievous sins beneath the dark water for God to let them perish so mercilessly.

The basic story is the same: Jesus of Nazareth is conceived, born, narrowly escapes infanticide, grows up, learns that he's the son of God, gathers disciples, performs miracles, is tried and executed.

Of course, Saramago being Saramago (unless he's also a more pretentious Neil Gaiman, which is a distinct possibility) it's not that simple. Much like in Cain, he wants to use the story of God to pick the story of Man apart. It's probably easy to dismiss that as a polemic or a screed or use snooty words like "worldview", but I think there's a lot more to it than that. This is, after all, supposed to be the Greatest Story Ever Told, and whether or not one agrees with that, there's no denying that the story is intended to be the basis of an entire society and frequently used as such; the themes that aren't already in it to begin with have been inserted into it by 2,000 years of interpretation. There's very little in Western history or philosophy that can't be seen through the mirror of the Gospels.

Which is why Saramago casts his net wide. Jesus has barely been born before he's tackled power structures in language and gender roles, the power of tradition and religion, of guilt and duty, of the very fact that the characters are trapped in a story that's supposed to be magical, with miracles and angels and that-guy-over-there-is-probably-Satan, except God has stopped showing up in person at least to regular folks like Joseph and Mary. Which is kind of ironic, really.

Things might have been so in a golden age, when the wolf, rather than eat the lamb, would feed on wild herbs. But this is the age of iron, cruel and unfeeling. The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.

Actually, Saramago really likes his irony. The whole story, of course, is one big cosmic joke; God impregnates a 16-year-old girl (or claims to, at any rate - like I said, Gaiman fans might very well enjoy both the themes and roles of gods, demons and angels in this) in order to further his own quest to rule more than just the Jews, and since he's God, nobody really has any say in the matter.

God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit.

Saramago wanders through Israel, and does a much better job of actually taking us there than in the no less polemical but far less imaginative Cain; out of clay (or well, ink, which adds up to the same thing) he creates life and sacrifices it, one eyebrow wryly raised and his mouth running in endless asides and ruminations, drifting from bedroom farce to deadly serious deconstruction of the entire idea of how a philosophy based on sin and virtue depends on evil to create good - and the more evil, the better we can tell ourselves we are.

You have learned nothing, begone with you.

WTF, God?

So, you know the story. Adam and Eve taste of the tree of knowledge for better or worse (or something like that), get tossed out of the Garden of Eden by God's henchangels, and when their sons try to sacrifice to God the old codger plays blatant favourites (only blood is a good enough sacrifice) and so Cain flips out and kills his brother. As punishment, God lets him live, puts a mark on his forehead so that no one will harm him - including Himself. So Cain is left to wander the Earth like the guy in Kung Fu, drifting from Bible story to Bible story, witnessing the sacrifice of Isaac, the fall of the Tower, the genocides of the people of Canaan, the fall of Jericho, the burning of Sodom, the trials of Job, etc etc. And he pitches in where he can, but mostly he just calls God on His various failings.

I don't know if I've been chosen, but I know one thing, something I should have understood, What, That our god, the creator of the heavens and the earth, is completely mad, How dare you say the lord god is mad, Because only a madman who's not conscious of his actions would claim direct responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and then act as if nothing had happened, unless we're talking about pure undiluted evil, rather than true, involuntary madness...

Yep, even in his last novel, written in his late 80s, Saramago is up to his usual head-on run-on sentences where thoughts and arguments come tumbling arse over tit through the narrative. And a certain old-man cantankerousness aside (and some unfortunate comments about women and Jews, which may fit the timeframe but still jar a bit) it's not like the arguments he makes here, letting Cain, the first murderer held responsible for his crime, take God to task for the sheer unfairness of the human lot in a supposedly just world. Or rather "god"; it strikes me that Saramago doesn't capitalize any names here - human or divine. Which is fitting for a story that judges god on human terms - which, assuming that what we call civilisation is a long circle of god and man creating each other in each other's image, is as it should be. The problem is that, well, it's kind of been done before, hasn't it? While Saramago cleverly plays off the OT as a story, occasionally breaking the narration to talk directly to the reader and point out that yeah, nobody talked like this back in Biblical times but it's all a translation anyway, etc, rather than a dry picking apart of it, and there is a very clever twist at the end, it's not as if theodicy is an untilled field.

Still, it's a fun, angry rant against humanity as expressed through god, and while others have tackled the same story better (Marianne Fredriksson's The Book of Eve, for instance) it's a worthy sendoff.

Re-reading this, it's even more infuriating that this novel got the fame it did for what it did. This novel should still be timely for its content; a world of riots, identity crises, political and religious fundamentalism masquerading itself even to its founders as progress and salvation... all filtered through Rushdie's humour that's never less than deadly serious and never forgets to actually understand its characters.


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