Book Review: The Stand

My latest read was an older Stephen King novel, The Stand. Coming in at over 1400 pages, The Stand is basically three novels in one.

The Stand is a Stephen King's foray into post-apocalyptic fiction. The novel is written from the perspective of the scattered survivors of a virus that has infected and killed close to 99% of humanity. The book is about how the survivors attempt to reestablish civilization.

It's not a Stephen King novel without some supernatural force. In The Stand, We see that force in the form of physical manifestations of "good" and "evil": There is Mother Abagail, a wise and god-fearing 103-year-old woman who reaches people in their dreams and attracts them to rebuild society in Boulder, Colorado. There is also the evil and ambitious Randall Flagg, Satan's disciple, who uses dreams to attract the morally-bankrupt to build the "evil" colony in Las Vegas.

The survivors of the plague trickle in from all parts of the country to join either the dictatorial Randall Flagg or the democratic Mother Abagail.

The Stand was a good read when it came to the individual story-arcs. Stephen King is thorough when it comes to introducing his main characters. He may take 50 pages to describe where Stu Redman (a leading member of the "good" camp) hails from, but after those 50 pages you could describe Stu Redman as though he were a close friend. King also excels at tension-building narrative that makes you want to skip ahead to see what happens to a favored (or hated) character.

The Stand was not a great read, however, because King does not do a good job describing the war between Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg (good vs. evil, basically). I think The Stand should have been a book about the personal struggles of post-apolyptic survivors in a world where mankind no longer controls nature. By introducing the supernatural and the battle of good vs. evil, King tried to make this story a treatise on theology. The end result is a very muddied moral message.

For example, he spends close to 1200 pages building up the terror of Randall Flagg and highlighting the internal squabbles that threaten Mother Abagail's democracy. I expected the last 200 pages to describe a confrontation between the two camps that vindicates Mother Abagail's compassionate-though-inefficient society. Instead, the "evil" camp is destroyed in a freak accident when an atomic bomb detonates in Las Vegas. What this seemed to imply is that the "good" guys were saved by pure, dumb luck; it's not that "good" destroys evil, but that evil destroys itself. This seemed to me like King had enough of writing The Stand and looked for an easy way to end the story.

I haven't seen the TV miniseries based on The Stand, though that's next on my to-watch list. Hopefully, the screen adaptation learned from King's mistakes and toned down the preachy message of the book. Stephen King is strong when it comes to narrative and character development, but moral philosophy is another issue.

Captain Gullible

Movie review time! Or at least, here's my review of the latest comic book flick, Captain America. To put it bluntly, thumbs down for Captain America because the main character is an idiot.

He's an idiot because to impress people, he agrees to be a guinea-pig for extremely dangerous medical testing that he knows nothing about.

The movie is about a scrawny asthmatic kid Steve Rogers who wants to enlist in the army but is repeatedly rejected because of his health issues. Desperate to help with the war effort, Rogers decides to volunteer for a dangerous experimental medical treatment that turns him into the "super soldier" Captain America.

Which brings me to the first reason Captain America is an idiot: He gives himself up for medical testing without knowing (a) the consequences; (b) the purpose or (c) the value of his contribution. The lesson this teaches is that if you're a "good guy", maybe even a "good American", you'll listen to your superior. If your boss tells you doing X is good for America, you should do X because you're a nice guy and nice guys like helping America. Never mind the irony that the movie suggests the best way to fight a racist regime that believes in Aryan Supremacy is to create Aryan super-soldiers like Captain America himself. Is the lesson really that you fight fire with fire?

Captain America is an idiot for volunteering for the experiment because he has no idea what it could do to him. The movie portrays his eagerness as being due to his desire to impress a pretty lady who was nice to him and the creepy scientist who let him enlist. I would have liked to see him question his superiors a bit more before agreeing to be their guineapig. I guess I just don't buy that a "hero" is a guy willing to sacrifice his life for a cause, any cause, that some big-shot in the army says is important. I think a "hero" is a person who doesn't shy from asking hard questions and sticking to his moral principles.

Captain America is also an idiot because after he develops superhero powers, he decides to save his buddies instead of killing Hitler or saving concentration camp prisoners.

After he transforms into Captain America, his first order of business is to save his captured buddies from the Nazis. This is WWII, and I have trouble believing that captured POWs were worse off than starving inmates in concentration camps. Heck, I even doubt if captured POWs were worse off than harassed civilians subject to bombing raids and other atrocities. Yet rather than consider what purposes his skills should be put to, Captain America decides to just save his buddies.

Maybe it seems I'm being picky here: Can you really blame a small-fry guy wanting to save his friends before he thought of the greater good of humanity?
I guess this boils down to a personal preference. To quote another superhero movie, "with great power comes great responsibility". In a nutshell, saving your buddies is acceptable if Captain America is just an average Joe; but when you have superpowers up the wazoo, you should do more. While you could argue that the whole point of the film is that it shows an everyday nice guy can be a "hero", I think being a "hero" depends on what you do AND what you are capable of doing. Our understanding of hero is an ordinary person who perseveres and does extraordinary things beyond their skillset. The quintessential example may be David taking on Goliath. For that reason, I don't see Captain America being a "hero"

The story is redeemed somewhat when after saving his buddies, Captain America decides to go after the evil Red Skull to foil plans to launch weapons of mass destruction. Too little, too late , given that this happens only after spending ages saving his buddies.

All in all, what I expected from Captain America is a story of a young man who questions authority and has strong moral values that even a military machine and war mongering cannot taint. Instead, I saw a story of an obedient little kid who accepts what people tell him at face value and is incapable of thinking big.