“When the small town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, is surrounded by an invisible force field, the people inside must exert themselves to survive.” - from the Amazon synopsis.

From this premise, fans of Stephen King might expect much; in fact - as this novel has been touted as being a quarter of a century in the making - expecting something along the lines of a magnum opus doesn’t seem too far fetched. Comparisons with The Stand abound – although, as that novel is seen among fans as King’s generally acknowledged classic, this smacks more of publicity-speak than anything.

What we have instead is a book that reads as if it were either a pre-Carrie attempt at ambitious novel writing, or a straggler limping along the margins of a once-illustrious career. All criticism is subjective, of course, and one opinion can only be that. For my money, everything King wrote from Carrie through to Pet Sematary is flawless. Then it gets a bit patchy, with only Thinner, It, Misery, Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne and the original four Richard Bachman books standing out in a twenty-book run. After that, it gets really patchy, and only Bag Of Bones, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, The Colorado Kid and Duma Key raise themselves from the mire of the next twenty books. In fact, all of King’s worst efforts come from the second half of his career. I think that’s a fair summation that most fans could agree on.

Under The Dome has many problems, easily the biggest of which is a bafflingly poor roster of characters. Developing a multifaceted and believable cast is King’s forte, and something he’s done seemingly effortlessly from his first book. There’s not one character in Under The Dome who rises above the good guy/bad guy stereotype King labels them with. King used to able to layer characterisation masterfully, and there are creations of his – Arnie Cunningham from Christine, Jack Torrence from The Shining, most of the entire main cast of The Stand – who still live on in my mind as old friends. The almost cartoon-like people of Chester’s Mill are already fading from my memory.

The most infuriating example of this lazy writing is the Town Councilman Jim Rennie, who brings a reign of terror to the town. We know he’s the bad guy because he’s a Bible-thumping evangelical Christian - King does this a lot, and it’s getting a little dull. Rennie is not only a politician and a Christian, but a used car dealer and drug manufacturer. Let’s not leave any obvious prejudice out, eh?

Now, we are supposed to hate Jim Rennie for all these faults, and we do. But that’s it. He just goes from bad to worse, murdering those who oppose his rule (despite this making no sense at all, as no indication is ever given that the Dome will last the weekend, much less forever - Rennie acts without thought of consequence throughout, even at one point ignoring a direct order from the President Of The United States). And Rennie soon surrounds himself with armed lackeys made up – implausibly – of High School jocks and bullies and other mental and social delinquents… and not one law-abiding, sensible citizen says a word. Not one. The good guys (themselves made up of such stalwart King goodies as teachers, journalists, doctors and an ex-soldier) instead seem to mope about the place, doing good deeds, but nothing the stem the dictatorship which they know is happening.

At this point, it should be obvious that King is writing allegory here. ‘Big’ Jim Rennie is George W. by any other name, and the cast of Good Guys and Bad Guys are amorphous and generic enough to be any American who stood by for the last eight years and watched their world go to Hell in a hand basket, and it seems likely that King is hoping than many readers will put the book down at some point in shock and whisper to themselves, “My God, that was me…”

On the other hand, maybe as many, if not more, did what I did and put the book down after almost every chapter and thought, How much better would this book be if Jim Rennie were a flawed man who destroyed the town he loved with bad decisions made for the right reasons? That would be a novel worth reading, and a novel worthy of King’s abilities, which Duma Key showed he still has.

Under The Dome takes its time getting started. The first few chapters detail the appearance of the dome from multiple viewpoints. Some of these feature deaths, as people drive into the force field or are caught crossing it as it appears, but little of these impact on the later main narrative to any degree. Later, the story seems content to show us how clever and resourceful our heroes are, while also constantly having them outmanoeuvred by the witless cast of villains – it’s an easy trick this, manipulating the reader’s emotion by setting up hopeful expectation and then pulling the rug out cruelly, and King uses it far too often (I’m reminded of his dictum to, when all else fails, “go for the gross-out” - but it becomes cheapened by overuse).

King’s publishers these days seem to be using the length of his novels as a selling point, but Under The Dome is an over-inflated and flabby thing, with very little to say.

And then, once the town has been destroyed to King’s design (although the physics of it is never satisfactorily explained), as if to insult the effort paid into continuing with the book, there is a science-fictional Deus Ex Machina ending that seems - and quite possibly is - ripped off from some old ’60s episode of Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. It’s a long, dark slog from nowhere to nowhere, this book, and for all King’s liberal good intentions, it’s an overly simplistic tale unworthy of his talent.

On the plus side, Under The Dome has pace (although, obviously, at the expense of characterisation and realism) and, though the events play out exactly as you’d imagine, the writing is compelling and solid. But it’s just such an empty exercise, like reading stage directions for an uncast play. You don’t care about any of the characters, as they almost don’t exist beyond their own cliche. It’s as involving as watching black chess pieces wipe the white pieces from the board, one by one, with a dreary inevitability.

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