In the Georgia Pines' nursing home, Paul Edgecombe spends his days trying to exorcise his demons. He's been writing about his experiences of the time when he was employed as the chief guard of the Death Row staff at the Cold Mountain prison in the far-gone year of 1932.
To Paul and the other guards of that part of the prison that was to be the final destination for hundreds of human lives, the year of 1932 was a year of cruelty, of botched execution, of miracles and darkest sin, and no-one who lived through it was left untouched by the events that took place there.
To Paul, regardless of everything else that happened, he would always remember it as the year of John Coffey, the black man convicted for the rape and murder of two 9-year-old white girls, the depraved killer with his eyes full of tears, the man whom Paul began to believe was innocent.
But it turns out, that there are reasons enough to include it.
The novel obviously has a large measure of its time devoted to ruminations on death and death-dealing, and these are interesting, though less than adequately explored through our narrator Paul Edgecombe, who is a little Blasé (internally at least) about the executions he has performed, but it ios also implied at one point, hinted, that there just might be something more involved, something evilly supernatural.
Of course, having seen the movie, I knew that Coffey himself has an extraordinary power at his command, and it's also more than clear that he has it in the book itself. However, what wasn't clear in the movie (I think) is that, at one point, Coffey appears to exorcise a woman of an evil spirit. It's hidden, occluded, behind known science; the vileness is cloaked behind the symptoms of dementia and Tourette's, but King gives enough hints here that whoever is so inclined to will be able to see it. It's especially clear since the novel evokes the name of God more than a bit, and in horror, where there's the light there must be darkness as well, and not just human darkness.
The human darkness is presented mostly by Percy Wetmore, the sadist guard who's only at the Green Mile to be able to execute a man himself, and William 'Wild Bill' Wharton, both of whom are different shades of irredeemable all on their own.
I should make mention of Eduard Delacroix who never ever fits the role of rapist-arsonist-murderer, and who only ever comes across as pitiful, likable and silly by turns. This is remarked on several times in the story, of course, but this does not excuse or validate King's portrayal of this particular prisoner, who's ever only here to evoke sympathy in the reader, and isn't well explored because of it.
Mr Jingles is perfect of course. And if I hadn't seen the movie I probably would've been bloody shocked and angered. As it is, I remembered where the story went and took it in stride, only to then be surprised, in not so nice a manner, at the end of the novel, which does do things a bit different, epilogue-wise. Brutal, Harry Terwilliger and Dean Stanton are all very likable characters, and it was a little bit disconcerting to have their eventual fates revealed as well.
There's a lot of Melancholy in this book, and though it's reasonably light on details concerning the time period it takes place in, it does manage to evoke a lingering sense of the time. It's a slow, ruminative novel, filled with a gripping sentimentality, and it should be, the conceit being that this is Paul writing his story 60 years after the facts, but it's remarkable how well this reads.
I'm not a fan of King, at all, but the man does consistently write the proverbial page-turner.
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