I Love Time Travel - Part 7 - 11/22/63

You will learn more than you wanted to know about Oswald.

A few spoilers within.  Suck it up.

Stephen King released 11/22/63 in 2011 and I was immediately intrigued.  I had not read a King novel in years, and now he threw a time travelling behemoth of a book at me.  I had to check it out.

In the world of time travel, I’m betting Stephen King played around with a lot of time travel devices to get this story off the ground.  There have been so many time machines used in the past; cars, booths, portals, black holes, just waking up in another body…  It must have been an interesting writing session where he came up with using a walk-in freezer at a burger restaurant as a doorway to September 9, 1958.  Here we have the use of fantastical time travel.  I love to see this.  Sometimes the story has nothing to do with experiments or missions, but just one normal guy’s experiences.  This is a very close approximation of what it would really be like to live life, not just a few days, but years in another time.

Jake Epping is a teacher in Maine.  (Yes, Maine.)  He has a favorite local restaurant that serves the best burgers around.  Through his friendship with the owner, he discovers this doorway to the Eisenhower era, and that the chef has been using it to buy cheap burger meat.  That’s right, at the beginning of the story it is a Frozen Beef Portal to the Past.

 The doorway operates like this: Every time you walk through it you are in the same spot in Maine on September 9, 1958 at 11:58 in the morning.  You can return through the portal back to 2011, but only two minutes of your own time has passed.  The catch is, any changes in the world you have made during a visit, including killing anyone, robbing a liquor store, or buying ground chuck at less than 70 cents a pound are reset the next time you go through the portal.  Jake learns that the chef has not only been buying cheap meat; he’s been buying the same meat over and over again to serve to 2011 customers.  The chef is dying, he has to close the restaurant and he lets Jake take a crack at the doorway. 

King’s vivid descriptions of the world of the late 1950’s pull you into Jake’s journey.  Obviously taken from his youth; the taste of food, slang, mannerisms, clothes, the racism, the music are all center stage. Jake has a few personal missions to accomplish, but remember, he has to decide to never return to 1958 again if he wants the changes to stick.  The title suggests correctly that he decides to hang out in this time period for five years to try and stop the Kennedy assassination.  This trope is as trodden as there is in the genre, but King makes it more of a commitment to the protagonist.  Are you willing to invest five years of your life to save Kennedy?  How would you live and work and take care of yourself?  Do you avoid people or not?  Would you want to stay and never come back at all?

There was talk of turning this into a movie soon, but that has changed to a possible JJ Abrams series project on TV.  A two-hour movie would lose the book’s central conceit.  Time travel and life in another time, day after day, can wear on you.  You can completely reinvent yourself as a mysterious stranger anywhere you want, but you will be lying daily to everyone you know.  To speak honestly about a magical meat locker from 53 years in the future would probably raise a few eyebrows.

Without revealing too much, the consequences for Jake are disastrous.  (It’s a Stephen King book, remember?) There is also a new wrinkle.  Time travelling is unnatural. It takes a toll on the natural world and the events with which Jake is interfering.  It’s not just Jake playing a hand at affecting the course of history, but the travelling itself causes disasters outside of Jake’s control. Reality itself does not like the interference of time travel.  It is rejected like white blood cells attack a virus.  This is not explained clearly, in that, why would there be a doorway to this time at all if it would only create a catastrophe for space/time/Earth?  But the questions remain in Jake’s hands.  What do you do and what would you sacrifice for the changes you’ve made?

Although this is one of King’s longest books, and there is a bit of sag in the middle, it is one of his more unique and satisfying efforts.  It is worth a read for the window into the 50’s and 60’s alone.  11/22/63 is a meticulously detailed Twilight Zone episode, complete with a love story, historical footnotes, and time-travelly goodness.