Putting you in the picture
Jake Michie
ROSE MADDER by Stephen King Hodder, £16. 99, pp. 402 or some the name of Stephen Icing calls to mind three things: his ubiquitous photograph, groaning shelves at W. H. Smith, Heathrow, and piles of twitching corpses.
King is an easy target for the snobs. Not only does he boast the physiognomy of an unholy union between a lumberjack and a chipmunk, he sells by the acre (a bad sign, obviously), and finally, unforgivably, he writes horror novels. Or does he? A curso- ry inspection of his oeuvre, and especially those books made into 'major motion pic- tures' , reveals a surprisingly restless diver- sity. For every super-natural tale of man's pursuit by dogs, cars and vampires there is a decidedly terrestrial story of obsession or childhood or spiritual redemption; for 'So that our having brought you into the world won't have been a total waste, dear, your father and I have decided to donate your organs to a more deserving
youngster.'
every Cuja there's a Misery, for every Chris- tine and Salem's Lot there's a Stand By Me or a Shawshank Redemption.
At the outset of Rose Madder we find King resolutely earthbound. Rose McClendon Daniels lies slumped in the corner of her apartment. Bloodied and ter- rified, she eyes her policeman husband, Norman, as he oozes lies down the tele- phone. Norm is explaining to the ambu- lance service that his wife has had an accident. What he neglects to mention is that the 'accident' consisted of him repeat- edly punching his pregnant wife in the stomach. She loses the child ('the next one'll be fine,' Norm threatens) and endures nine more years of cigarette burns and sexual assaults with tennis rackets at the hands of this monster of misogyny before finally scooping up his credit card and fleeing.
At heart, Rose Madder is a thriller; a story of flight and pursuit. Rose, cowed and still almost `willing to be maimed or killed for the continued privilege of knowing where the tea bags were in the cupboard', struggles aboard a Greyhound bus and travels as far as $59.70 will take her, which is to an unnamed city and a shelter for bat- tered women. Norman, psychotic with humiliation and bad chemicals, will do any- thing to find her and talk to her 'up close', including, quite literally in one case, biting someone to death. Following the trail of clues that leads Norm to his wriggling prey is clammy work indeed and is splendidly handled, King, as always, keep- ing his prose clean and his plot well-oiled. Which makes it doubly disappointing to have all this craftsmanship ruined by a work of art.
In an apparently innocent early scene, Rose pawns her wedding ring for a second- rate painting of a ropy blonde in an Attic setting. Next thing you know, however, she's 'stepped into' the canvas and is con- ducting elliptical conversations with her phantasmagorical alter ego (the epony- mous Rose Madder). At first, we imagine (with King's collusion) that this is a prod- uct of Rose's fancy, and the action contin- ues apace, but by the end all the protagonists are blundering about in this wretched daub and its dreary symbolic fur- niture (Norm transmuted into a Minotaur, poisoned fruit, defiled altars etc.). The hocus-pocus grates so badly against the gritty tension that the suspension of disbelief is lost and the climax fatally diffused.
King has given us one sort of book and then pulled it from our grasp and rudely replaced it with another. This is not unusu- al in itself (his work is very addictive after all). The difference this time is that he doesn't wait until you've finished. Whether this is indicative of boredom, confusion or clumsiness who can say? But since he's probably polished off another couple by the time this is published, burial would be premature.
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