Not, thank God, blind! (The Shining - Stephen King)

Member Name: Shuyanin59

Product:	The Shining - Stephen King
Date:	18/09/05 (554 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gripping, enthralling and thought-provoking read

Disadvantages: Warning: wide-spread use of low language (which is absolutely justifiable, though)

[Introduction]

The fact that this novel was on the list of top ten horror novels posted at penguin.co.uk about a year ago played a decisive role in my decision to take it for my summer vacation, and I did enjoy it as much as you can enjoy a sophisticated mixture of a horror story and a realistic account of a family drama, which it proved to be in the end.

My acquaintance with horror stories is rather limited by modern standards, but it has hardly ever been disappointing. Thank God, I was born in the USSR, and there was no other way for me to satisfy then my teenage unrelenting urge to learn about ghosts, undead corpses and suchlike things, than to read books by such Russian, American and English classics as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Green, Edgar Poe and Mary Shelly. Nowadays Russian teenagers get pails and pails of TV horror garbage easily, anytime, anyplace to poison their minds or to frighten them out of their wits.

Modern world seems to be filled to capacity with war, terror, fear, injustice, conflict and pain for a man to bear, and to add werewolves, zombies, witches and ogres on top of that would be too much, too much of a bad thing. I thought so when I was young. I did not believe in ghosts then. I was agnostic rather than atheist. Now that I am a middle-aged married believer I am convinced that a modern man has to come face to face both with the dark forces of the material world around him and with the palpable presence of as destructive and gruesome impulses within and without, which take root in our disturbed coexistence with the other world on this planet. And it is exactly this situation that Stephen King, the renowned American writer, puts in the limelight in the acclaimed novel I am going to write about.

Things rule, O.K.? The mind
Is left behind:
Dazed and amazed,
Not, alas, blind.
- From Things by C.H. Sisson.

[The Plot]

The plot is set in the early 1970s, in Colorado, the USA. Jack Torrance s marriage with Wendy is nearly on the rocks again. He has been fired from a position of an English teacher in a prestigious prep school in New England. But the woman loves him (as does his only son Danny, aged 5) and hopes her husband will overcome his fondness for the bottle by some effort of the will, and then the three of them will begin a happy life together from scratch. What seems a fortunate opportunity to achieve the dream comes up when Jack, with the help of his benefactor, gets a temporary job as a caretaker at Overlook Hotel for the winter off-season. He will be able to take his wife and son with him and, last but not least, to go on working on a drama (Jack pursues a writer s career). The only predicament is the fact that that the 110-guest-room hotel is in the mountains, and in the winter months it is cut off from the rest of the world because of heavy snowfalls.

A lot of folks got a bit of shine to them. They don t even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feeling blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don t even study for, they got a good idea about how people are feeling as soon as they walk into a room, – Dick Hallorann, the hotel s cook, the fourth central character in the novel, explains the nature of Danny’s special gift to the boy himself (p.81). But, contrary to most people, Danny, a budding clairvoyant, is painfully aware of it as he grows up and tries to come to terms with himself.
It is his inborne aptitude, the shining, that is destined to play a crucial role in what lies ahead for the Torrances. The seemingly empty chairs in the dining hall, the uninhabited guest rooms, the whitewashed walls, the vacant elevator and the deserted playgrounds, in short, the seemingly untenanted hotel itself is in point of fact only half asleep. And the boy s appearance in the Overlook seems to set the hidden, dreadful machinery of the hotel into motion, searching for the weak link in the trio in order to make him or her blind, in a sense, and mindless, and then destroy them all and eventually seize Danny s shine.

[Results and Discussion]

As a work of art, The Shining lies at the borderline between the realms of dark horror literature and that of family drama. In my opinion, the author scores a remarkable success in the two overlapping spheres of the novel.

Besides, the book is an undisputed achievement in terms of its immaculate structure and the author s masterful use of quite a number of devices that help the reader to look at the unfolding developments from the point of view of all the major characters. Stephen King succeeds in making the switch of perspective run in an apt, smooth and well-timed manner throughout the over-400-page-long, action-packed story.

I would like to draw your attention to the noble theme of self-sacrifice in the name of friendship that comes in when Hallorann goes to the rescue of the family deep in trouble toward the climax of the novel. That part of the story reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said in one of his poems: That which is truly human, that is godlike, that is God.

The success of the book with the public paved the way to a number of TV and cinema filmings. I consider the work of Stanley Kubrick starring Jack Nicholson a dismal failure. Kubrick s film is actually a failed attempt at a variation on the book, so wide is the gap between the script and the novel. On the other hand, I remember to this very day one of the opening scenes of some (British I believe) TV filming of the novel: the dusty basement, the crouched figure of a man reading a scrapbook under a shaky lamp on a string (three dots). It was in the wee hours of some sleepless night on my business trip to Saint-Nazaire (France), and I was too tired and overwhelmed to watch the programme on ARTE channel to the end. But as little fragment as that proved enough to make an indelible mark in my mind (three dots).

[Conclusion]

And I warn you that you are more than likely to sacrifice your sleep, your favourite TV or radio programme, or a walk with your dog and even your hobby (such as posting opinions at dooyoo) to treat yourself to anything from fifteen minutes to three hours or more of an absorbing and brilliant read.

Summary: You are likely to sacrifice anything to parcel out time for an absorbing and brilliant read.