The attack (novel)

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The attack , English original title 11/22/63 , is a 2011 novel by the American writer Stephen King . It is about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

The book is Kings 51st novel, and the 40th he published under his own name. The reviews in the leading American and German media were mostly positive.

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The protagonist and narrator of the plot is Jacob "Jake" Epping, a young, recently divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls. One evening he corrects essays in his GED class, the task: "The day that changed my life". An essay captivates him and remains unforgettable: Harry Dunning, the handicapped caretaker at the school, who is now catching up with his school leaving certificate, describes that Halloween night in 1958 when his drunk father Frank Dunning killed his mother and siblings with a hammer and him crippled himself.

Two years later, in 2011, to his amazement, Jake received an invitation from Al Templeton, the host of his local diner , who ran his place . When he arrives, he is shocked to find that Al has apparently become terminally ill overnight. The claim that there is a “time portal” in his pantry that leads to September 9, 1958, 11:58 am, to the second, seems all the more incredible. Jake dares to try, spends about an hour in 1958 and then returns to the present via the portal. In the present, exactly two minutes pass during the journey into the past.

After Al has convinced him of the portal's existence, he explains his plans to him. After many visits and attempts in 1958, Al made sure that the course of history can be changed and that one can return to the now correspondingly changed present at any time. However, every new visit undoes all changes in the past, thus leading to a "new start" on the same September 9, 1958. There only a drunk, disheveled man with a conspicuous yellow card in his hat band seems to suspect that the time traveler does not "fits" into the past. Al believes that John F. Kennedy would have prevented the Vietnam War from escalating , and has forged a plan to prevent Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

At first he had hoped to be able to prevent the assassination attempt himself and spent almost five years in the past, i.e. lived there almost until the time of the assassination in November 1963 - also to observe Lee Harvey Oswald and thus ensure that he was actually the killer Kennedy's is what countless conspiracy theories deny to this day. However, Al finds that time seems to be resisting changes, with the resistance being proportionally dependent on the effects of the change: The change to allow Kennedy to continue living would therefore trigger considerable "resistance" in time and make the mission very difficult . In addition, Al developed lung cancer during this time and can no longer carry out his plan himself. So he returns to the present to send Jake into the past instead.

Jake initially hesitates to grant As's wish and insists on testing the changeability of the story on a smaller scale first: He decides to save the Harry Dunnings family from murder. With false papers in the name of George Amberson and a certain amount of contemporary cash, he travels back to the year 1958. Everything is as before, only the card of the “yellow card man” has now turned orange. Despite this warning sign, Jake takes action, goes to the city of Derry and follows Frank Dunning there. On the decisive night he finally ambushes him and prevents Harry's mother and sister (but not his brother) from being killed and keeps Harry himself from being crippled. Back in 2011, Jake tests whether his intervention in history was successful. Nobody really knows the disabled Harry Dunning in this presence. But Jake finds out the phone number of his sister. When he calls her, she tells him to his horror that Harry was killed during the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Al commits suicide by overdosing on the pain reliever oxycodone , and since the time portal will soon no longer be accessible when Als lease expires, Jake finally takes on his mission.

With notes about Oswald and sports results from the years 1958 to 1963 (in order to be able to earn a living by betting) he travels back to 1958 and thus triggers a new start. There he first discovers that the "man with the yellow card" killed himself. Instead of a yellow card, his corpse now holds a black card. First Jake has to prevent the murder of Harry Dunning's family again, and so he goes to Derry again and shoots Frank Dunning, this time some time before the actual act. He then went to Florida, earned a diploma in English at a title mill and spent the remainder of 1958 as an assistant teacher at a school.

He knows from notes that Oswald will not return to the United States from the Soviet Union for a year and settle in Texas . Jake spends the waiting time in the small town of Jodie, Texas, where he takes up a one-year temporary job as a high school teacher. There he falls in love with the school librarian Sadie Dunhill, who in turn fled to Texas from her psychotic husband. Over time, however, Sadie becomes suspicious (Jake reveals himself through out-of-date slang and especially when he once sings the song Honky Tonk Woman , which was very obscene for the 1950s ), but when she asks him who he actually is and where he comes from, he refuses the answer.

Thereupon she breaks off the relationship with Jake and travels to Nevada during the summer vacation in order to arrange the separation from her mentally ill husband there because of the more liberal divorce law. Meanwhile, Jake decides not to extend his probationary year and leave Jodie to monitor Oswald, who has since rented a shabby apartment in Fort Worth . In this way, he can not only follow Oswald's contacts with George de Mohrenschildt, but also later verify that Oswald (as suspected to this day, but not definitively proven) was the shooter in the assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker in April 1963.

After a while, Jake resumes his relationship with Sadie, revealing to her that he is a time traveler from the future; as proof he can correctly predict the course of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, and later that of a boxing match. The closer the time of the assassination approaches, the harder the time fights against being changed: In April 1963, Sadie is attacked by her ex-husband and her face is disfigured. But before he can kill her, he is stopped by Jake, whereupon he commits suicide. Jake pays Sadie's hospital bills and then has to bet on his money again. However, after a successful bet he is beaten up by the bookmaker. Jake has to recover from the injuries and the resulting memory loss for the next eleven weeks, which makes him forget the details of the assassination and Oswald's name.

It was only a few hours before the attack that he found the notebook with Oswald's name in it and remembers his mission. With Sadie he makes his way to Dallas , but time struggles again: The bus in which the two are driving has an accident and other "random" accidents happen. Only at the last minute do the two reach the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository , where Oswald has already set up his rifle. Jake shoots his pistol at Oswald, who can still fire, but misses Kennedy and is hit by Secret Service shots shortly afterwards . Before he dies, Oswald can turn around and fire a shot in the direction of Jake. Jake is able to evade in time, but Sadie standing behind him is fatally wounded.

Jake and Sadie are declared national heroes shortly afterwards, and President Kennedy and his wife thank Jake personally. Sadie is slated to be buried in an honorable ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery . After an interrogation, the FBI suggests that he go underground for a while until the situation has calmed down. He agrees and makes his way back to Maine to the time portal. While driving, he learns of a severe earthquake in Los Angeles, killing thousands, and suspects that it is a direct result of his actions: time resists changes. When he stands in front of the portal, he sees that there is now a young man named Zack Lang who is watching who is wearing a green card. He reveals himself to be a “warner” for time travelers: The people who went through time portals should be warned of their changes. He explains to him that the portals are temporary "bubbles" of time and that there is no restart, but just a new "timeline" is triggered every time. If there are too many timelines, they will get tangled and the portal will be destroyed. Changes also influenced the stability of reality: the greater the changes, the more unstable the world becomes - which explains the new earthquakes. Zack Lang asks him to undo his changes in order to keep the earth stable. Jake doesn't listen to him at first and returns through the portal to the year 2011.

Only two minutes have passed since his departure - and yet the world is the scene of a dystopia . He meets Harry Dunning, who was saved from his father, but was wounded in Vietnam and has been in a wheelchair ever since. He has been explaining the world to him since 1963: Lyndon B. Johnson never became US President and as a result there was no civil rights movement . During the race riot, Martin Luther King was killed by a corrupt FBI agent and, despite all hopes, the Vietnam War broke out. Since 1969, more than 30 atomic bombs have been detonated in the Vietnam War by President George Wallace , in a war between Pakistan and India and in terrorist attacks .

Maine joined Canada in 2005 . The Japanese island of Hokkaidō has largely sunk into the sea. There are inexplicable earthquakes that will wear out the world by 2080 at the latest. On June 19, 1999, there was a devastating reactor accident with far-reaching consequences on American soil. Jake doesn't last long and makes his way back to the time portal to undo his changes. Back in 1958, he meets Zack Lang again - whose card is now ocher. He begs him not to change anything and to come back and Jake agrees after a while. He goes back to the year 2011 without any changes and finds the world in its usual form again.

On the Internet, Jake learns from Jodie's newspaper archives that Sadie survived the confrontation with her ex-husband without his interference. He travels to Texas, where Sadie is now an old woman who has devoted her life to social work. The two dance together at the end.

reception

The reviews of the American leading media were overwhelmingly positive, sometimes exuberant - this reflects the growing acceptance of King by the literary establishment as a "serious" writer. Thus , the stop already the 32th Roman Kings, the first place in the bestseller list of the New York Times Book Review reached, but in his career and the first elected by the literary critics of the newspaper in the prestigious list of the 10 best books of the year became - a decision that made headlines itself.

filming

Director Jonathan Demme ( Philadelphia , The Silence of the Lambs ) announced in 2011 that he was interested in a film adaptation of the novel; However, he gave up this project after differences in content with King in 2012. In April 2013, it was finally announced that Warner Bros. Television and Bad Robot Productions , a JJ Abrams production company , were planning to acquire the rights to a television series or miniseries. Since September 2014 it has been certain that a miniseries will be produced for Hulu and that it will comprise eight episodes. The main role of Jake Epping was played by James Franco . The series 11.22.63 - The attack finally celebrated its premiere on February 15, 2016.

Trivia

  • King tried his hand at the idea for the novel back in 1972, at that time under the working title Split Track (here, for example: "Parallel World"). In retrospect, he was glad he had waited longer, since after only ten years the shock of Kennedy's murder was still too deep. Back then, King only got 14 pages.
  • King outlined the plot of The Attack in an open letter back in 2007, at that time as an idea for a comic.
  • In June 2011, a longer excerpt from the novel was pre-published, it was about chapters 8-10.
  • The e-book Raststätte Mile 81 also contains an excerpt.
  • Another e-book version contains a 13-minute short film about the Kennedy era, written and set to music by King himself.
  • Since the beginning of November 2011 there is an official, interactive homepage for the novel.
  • Stephen King's car accident occurred on June 19, 1999, the day of the reactor accident in the novel .

Links to other works

  • Through the theme of time travel, the novel is linked to numerous stories of King, including the novella UR and the novels Es and The Tower .
  • The protagonist in The Attack travels back to the fictional small town of Derry , in which the novels Es , Schlaflos and parts of Das Monstrum and Sara are set. Epping lands in the first part of It a few weeks after the events . He meets some characters from the novel, such as B. Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier. ES itself tries to lure him into an overturned chimney without success.
  • During the school ball, Sadie mentions Don Hagarty, who in Es has to watch the murder of his partner.
  • The fictional city of Castle Rock from Dead Zone - The Assassination , Cujo , Stark - The Dark Half , In a Small Town and a number of other King novels also appears in The Attack .
  • In King's novel Dead Zone - The Assassination , Johnny Smith wonders how world history would have changed if someone had murdered Adolf Hitler in time. With these mind games, which are taken up in The attack by Al, Johnny Smith wants to justify his planning an assassination attempt on Greg Stillson.
  • When Jake plans the murder of Frank Dunning, he thinks of the possibility of ending up in the fictional Shawshank State Prison, which appears in King's novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and the novel The Arena , among others .
  • While Jake teaches at DCHS, the school football team beats the team from fictional Arnette, Texas. Arnette is the hometown of Stu Redman in The Stand .
  • Jake Epping puts his hand on a red and white Plymouth Fury as soon as it landed in 1958. The ex-husband of his girlfriend Sadie also drives a white and red 58 Plymouth Fury. This car is the "leading lady" in the novel Christine .
  • When the protagonist returned to a setting world at the end, the connection with The Dark Tower saga is represented again by a thunderstormless thunder, which stands for the breaking of a beam. Epping also finds a car named Takuro Spirit (the plot of the book is also mentioned in the Dark Tower).

literature

expenditure

Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Forrest Wickman: For the First Time, Stephen King Makes NYT's 10 Best Books . In: Slate , November 30, 2011.
  2. "11/22/63": Jonathan Demme breaks off Stephen King's adaptation "The attack". Film releases, accessed December 23, 2015 .
  3. JJ Abrams 'Bad Robot To Option Stephen King Novel '11 / 22/63' For TV Series. Deadline, accessed December 23, 2015 .
  4. Stephen King's JFK assassination thriller gets Hulu series order. Entertainment Weekly, accessed December 23, 2015 .
  5. 11.22.63. IMDb, accessed December 23, 2015 .