Who's the best actor in 'The shining'? both versions of it?

Continuing my aforementioned Shining kick, I picked up and read Stephen King’s novel.

The first thing I’ve got to say is that it’s lightyears better than the miniseries. King did himself an injustice with that script.

It’s the first King novel I’ve read, though I’ve read a bunch of the short stories before. I’m reinventing the wheel here, but his writing is excellent—smooth, fast-paced, colloquial and descriptive. It’s not surprising that his On Writing has been recommended even by critics who consider his works “sub-literary” (whatever that means). The Shining is 659 pages in my edition and feels like half of that, it’s so exciting and fast-moving. (I read it very rapidly.) That’s a remarkable talent, one that isn’t celebrated as much or as often as it should be.

It is, as everyone says, very different from the Kubrick movie, though that’s less in plot than in style: it feels different. The movie has this sense of isolation that the book does not have: for the first half, for one thing, the Torrances are frequently going back and forth between the Overlook and the town of Sidewinder. The movie is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and its depths seem unplumbable—the book is a fairly straightforward, if novelistic (Dickensian in size and many supporting characters), ghost story, in the mold of Shirley Jackson’s much more concise The Haunting of Hill House.

It’s particularly intriguing to see what Kubrick saw in the novel: there are distinct moments where you know Kubrick must have bookmarked them and then expanded on and/or altered them in his script. Several scenes actually have cross-references in the movie (the doctor checking Danny, for example) but are altered or placed at a different point in the story. King describes the elevators as appearing like an enormous mouth, something that comes back with the movie elevators that pour blood—the Grady girls are taken from the book, just visualized in the movie—and so on. I’m sure I read somewhere that Lloyd the bartender wasn’t in the book, but indeed he is, and Jack’s speech to him (“Portland, Maine… Portland, Oregon, for that matter”) is taken nearly verbatim, as is the conversation with Grady (“you’re the caretaker, sir…you’ve always been the caretaker”—just as enigmatic as in the movie, for all that the book explains more).

I remain unconvinced by King’s criticism that the movie strips Jack of personal tragedy because of Nicholson’s casting. If Nicholson is too unsympathetic from the get-go, King’s Jack Torrance is too sympathetic: he’s so sweet and kindly that it’s difficult to see him as being driven mad by the hotel. (Hold on to that thought.) Jack is even innocent of the major plot point of having broken Danny’s arm in drunken fury; this Jack was holding on to Danny’s arm when Danny turned the wrong way. Also, this Jack is (despite what the synopses say) not driven crazy by the hotel; he’s possessed by it, so that he’s just a vessel for the spirits (or, as Grady says, “the manager”). He’s thus exonerated, certainly in his creator’s mind, for trying to kill Danny, Wendy, and Hallorann—which is no tragedy at all, for all of King’s complaining. In the book, he couldn’t have chosen otherwise, taking his agency out of it. He’s just a puppet in the hotel’s scheme to consume Danny’s shining ability.

These aren’t criticisms of the book as much as they are criticisms of King’s criticisms of the movie. There are flaws with the book—Danny sounds more like an adult than a five-year-old, Jack’s characterization seems more like psychobabble than actual character, and (bizarrely) the Overlook itself is never described in much detail, so that I could never get a good grasp on how it was supposed to look, or any kind of atmosphere—but it’s such a good read that they seem like nitpicks. King even manages to make one of the most risible aspects of the miniseries, the deadly fire hose (!), spooky, which I strongly doubted he could pull off. (Danny’s fear of it is like a child’s fear of something random, as exemplified by something like this—coincidentally directed by the same documentarian who did Room 237.) On the other hand, the moving hedge-animals still come off as kind of goofy.

I highly recommend the book, though with those caveats. It’s a great read.