Steve-Calvert.co.uk
Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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Stephen King's The Green Mile is a wonderful read. Set in 1932, it is told in the form of a memoir written 60 years later by Paul Edgecombe, the former Superintendent of Cold Mountain Penitentiary's E block. E block was the last stop for prisoners that were destined to sit in the lap of Old Sparky and have a little juice. The floor in the corridor that ran between their cells and the hot-seat was covered in green Linoleum, and so what was known as the Last Mile at other prisons was known as the Green Mile at Cold Mountain. As Paul Edgecombe writes his memoirs he is in another prison, of sorts - an old people's home. The story does go back and forth between Cold Mountain and Mr Edgecombe's present abode, but for the main part it concentrates on 1932. A lot happened that year. Paul had a urinary infection, Percy Wetmore came to work on the block, bringing a bad attitude with him; and a very unusual mouse named Mr Jingles appeared on the block and befriended Eduard Delacroix; for a little while anyway, before Delacroix died so terribly in the chair. Then there was Wild Bill Wharton - trouble with a capital T and don't forget to underline it. Most of all, though, 1932 was the year of John Coffey and this is the real story that Paul is trying to get out of his system and down onto paper. When John Coffey first came on the block the first thing that everyone noticed was his size. He was a big man, and if Wild Bill gets a capital T for trouble then John Coffey gets a capital B for big: six feet, eight inches tall, and around three hundred and fifty pounds. Coffey is a big man, but he is a quiet man, a gentle man, and he cries a lot. Not at all, in many ways, the kind of man you might expect to walk the mile for the murder of two little girls. But as Paul and the rest of the E Block guards get better acquainted with John they discover that there is an awful lot more to the big, bald headed black man than any of them could ever imagine. The Green Mile is an enjoyable tale that is populated by some very real seeming characters. King's prose brings them to life and allows the reader get to know them almost as friends, and if they should die at the turn of a page, then it is hard not to grieve for them. My favourite characters would have to be Paul Edgecombe and John Coffey, with Mr Jingles running a close third and pushing his coloured cotton reel before him. But every good book needs someone for the reader to hate, and the two characters that got my blood boiling were Wild Bill and the hickory stick wielding Percy Wetmore. The Green Mile is around 450 pages long, which is not an unusually lengthy work for Mr King. What is unusual though is that the novel was originally serialized as a kind of experiment. According to the book's Forward, Ralph Vicinanza, a long time friend and business associate of Stephen King, got involved in a conversation about Charles Dickens. Many of Dicken's novels were written in instalments that were either featured in magazines or else were printed as chapbooks. During the course of the conversation someone wondered what might happen if a modern-day writer were to bring out a novel in the serialized form, someone, say, like Stephen King? The rest is history and The Green Mile was originally issued in the form of six chapbooks; and after the reader had read one, they had to wait for the next one to be written. This meant that King had to write each one to a strict deadline, and the poor old reader had no chance of flicking ahead if he got a little bit curious about what was coming next. That was then and this is now and anyone can buy The Green Mile as a complete volume and flick ahead to their heart's content (though I never do). As a reader, I only noticed one difference that the serialization had made: when I started reading the next instalment, there was usually a paragraph or two that repeated what had happened in the previous instalment. Apart from that, if there were any other differences, I missed them, but it's not surprising; I was too interested in finding out what happened next. |
