The Shining – Stephen King

The first tick off the Booket List.

Jack Torrance is down on his luck, at least he thinks so, having lost his teaching job in New England due to an unfortunate incident with a student. Of course, if he could just finish writing his play, all would be fine, but now he has writer’s block too. It’s not all bad, he has a wife, Wendy, who is attractive but recently distant, and a son, Danny, whom he loves ferociously but with whom he sometimes gets frustrated.

Truth is, Jack’s drinking (now paused) and anger issues are the problems, as Wendy and Danny (oddly perceptive for a five-year-old) know all too well.

But there is a solution. Jack’s ex drinking buddy has pulled a few strings to get him a job on the other side of the country – off-season caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. The hotel is high up in the Colorado Rockies, snowed in and inaccessible in winter, so it closes down from October to April, but needs someone to maintain the heating and keep an eye on things. The bar is cleared of stock (and therefore temptation) and there will be plenty of free time to finish that damned play, so it is perfect. Wendy and Danny are not so sure, but accept that what is best for Jack, is best for them too.

As soon as Danny arrives his heightened perception goes into overdrive. Dark deeds have occurred in the Overlook’s seventy year history. Stains remain, invisible to most but indelible to Danny, who has the ‘shining’. Among the departing staff is Dick Hallorann, the chef, who recognises Danny’s psychic awareness and shares it to a lesser degree. He warns Danny off certain rooms and areas of the grounds, telling him to ‘shout’ if he needs help. He will be in Florida but will hear anyway.

Alone at the Overlook Jack, Wendy, and Danny settle, along with the snow that cuts them off completely. Jack finds the basement full of archives and delves into the hotel’s history; he finds himself drawn to and even into its past. Things go bump in the night, and worse. Danny sees more horrors, Jack fears for his sanity, and Wendy fears for their lives. Will Danny’s ‘shout’ for help be heard in Florida? If it is, could Hallorann get to him in time?

It is a classic for a reason. King is the consummate story-teller who creates real and complex characters and puts them through hell for our entertainment. In his hands the tension ratchets up degree by degree, the unbelievable becomes all too credible, and pages turn fast and furious.

The Booket List

Not a review but the name of a new reading journey.

The next birthday being of biblical significance concentrates the mind on unfinished business, in this case unfinished reading. Hence the new reading journey, the Booket List, to be started at once to give it a chance to finish. That means an overlap with the dawdling Bookpacking journey, which is not a problem as both are virtual and can co-exist.

Unlike the other reading journeys, which encouraged new reading experiences, the Booket List will tread some familiar paths, pushing some to their natural conclusion. Trilogies, longer series, and some full works will be completed. Books whose fame demands that they should have been read by now will get their opportunity. An initial fifteen, in no particular order are:

The Mirror and the Light – Hilary Mantel; completing the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Testament of Friendship – Vera Brittain; companion to Testaments of Youth and Experience.

The Labyrinth of the Spirits – Carlos Ruiz Zafon; completing the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

Exit Music – Ian Rankin; the seventeenth and final novel, seeing DI John Rebus into retirement.

The Duke’s Children – Anthony Trollope; the sixth and final volume of the Palliser novels.

Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens; the only unread long work of the master storyteller.

Last Things – C P Snow; outstanding from the Strangers and Brothers series, avidly read in the 1970s.

The Shining – Stephen King; one I never got round to, and a film avoided for that reason.

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier; have seen this film, but the book is on the shelf.

Emma – Jane Austen; the last of the big four unread (but would still leave Persuasion and Northanger Abbey).

Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson; been holding out for a hardback copy but will go paperback if necessary.

Dubliners – James Joyce; been reading it for ten years but still not halfway through!

Emotionally Weird – Kate Atkinson; an early work to catch up on, having read the rest.

Adrian Mole, the Prostrate Years – Sue Townsend; never got round to this last diary.

MaddAddam – Margaret Atwood; concluding part of the trilogy of the same name.

Becoming Inspector Chen – Qiu Xialong

The bookpacking journey visits China, where Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police is in retrospective mood. He has been told his state medical insurance no longer covers the nursing home fees for his mother. She needs care but instead of moving in with her son, she insists on returning to her own tiny apartment. That puts Chen in the cramped attic bedroom of his childhood, prompting a night interrupted by dreams that both echo his life and reflect his current insecurities. He worries that the cancelled insurance is a first sign of political disfavour.

As he wakes from successive dreams, he recalls key incidents in his education and career that led to his appointment in the police service and his rapid promotion to inspector. This was despite his ‘black’ family background due to his father, a Confucian scholar, being labelled and persecuted as a bourgeois intellectual and class enemy during the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

The incidents illustrate that Chen’s talent for investigation started early but had to be combined with carefully treading the minefield of political correctness, that correctness forever changing over the decades as the Party continually reformed and reset the rules.

The criminal detection element takes second place to the historical context in this, the eleventh book of the Inspector Chen series, though one early case provides a meaty chunk in the middle. The Shanghai setting, particularly the Red Dust Lane community, is atmospheric and the impact of unfolding politics on such individuals is interesting enough to sustain attention over the two hundred pages.

A reader more familiar with the series may get more from this delve into the character’s development than I did. Am I tempted to pick up an earlier volume, more representative of the series? Maybe, but not any time soon.