Under the Dome

The Book

One of Stephen King's heftier novels, the paperback is just under 900 pages long. The story doesn't feel as though it is plumped out or full of unnecessary text, however, and each chapter keeps you engrossed in the microcosm of small town American life as it is put under pressure and gradually disintegrates.
An unexplained invisible barrier cuts of the village of Chester's Mill from the outside world and allows for an initial rash of grotesque and horrific events to take place, as people discover its inflexibility the hard way.
This is just the set up for allowing King to delve into a large collection of characters familiar to his stories - the religiously fervent, the megalomaniac bureaucrat, the increasingly unhinged sadist, the right man in the wrong place - and crank up the set pieces of confrontation and mutilation.

The author seems to have an unhealthy fascination with the mouth as a wound - so may of the citizens end up with bloody maws with broken teeth - which left me unsettled and not in the right way!

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Book

This is a short 200 page novel written in the first person, with the narrator talking to an American stranger he happens to meet in Lahore. He proceeds to tell him his life story - how he was educated in Princetown via a grant, graduated with honours and went to work for a high profile US company. Combined with this is the love story between the narrator and Elisa, a girl who cannot move on from the love of her life who died of leukaemia.
I found the narrator method quite clunky when his is the only voice you get to hear - the stranger does not get to speak at all and the book becomes a one-sided conversation. Perhaps this is allegorical linked to Eastern and Western cultures. It has been said that the narrator's love for Elisa and then her gradual decline and madness are symbolic to that of his love for America. You gradually get to learn how he becomes disenchanted with the US and its political and economical approaches to the Middle East following 9/11.

 I was expecting more than a dissenting voice based on the title of the book, but this is misleading as the company he works for in the USA deals in fundamentals (rationalising businesses and making them more profitable).