Christine

In true Stephen King fashion, Christine is much more interested in how its horror elements affect the character and impact their relationships than in how they scare the reader. However, if the novel is successful in this regard, it’s also unfortunately marred by an inconsistent handle of points of view.

The plot focuses on the friendship between two young adolescents: the football player Dennis Guilder and his childhood friend, the feeble Arnie Cunningham. One day, when Arnie decides to buy his first car, a dilapidated red 1958 Plymouth Fury, Dennis starts to notice something is wrong – a feeling that only grows stronger as Arnie becomes increasingly obsessed with his new acquisition, to which he gives a human name: Christine.

The affection Dennis feels for his friend is at the heart of the story. No wonder King positions the character as the novel’s main point of view, narrating the events in the first person, which lets Dennis recall several touching episodes between the two: they range from scenes in which Arnie is in need of physical protection – from bullies, for example – to those more delicate moments, such as the one when one of them literally offers a shoulder to the other to cry on.

Dennis establishes himself as Arnie’s protector, which is reflected in the way the acquisition of the fateful car is seen. The metaphors surrounding the purchase are all related to hunting, fishing, or slaughter, and Arnie’s position in the situation is always that of the prey that is about to be devoured. From Arnie’s rush to buy the car – which drives him to spend more than he should, making Dennis think he’s being hustled – to the boy’s subsequent submission to a garage owner – which causes him to have his workforce exploited in exchange for favors – the character’s actions are often viewed with pity by Dennis: the narrator sees his friend as an innocent sweet boy that is unprepared for life and that, without his constant help, is bound to be preyed upon. This gives the story a tragic tone: Dennis’s perspective gives the events an air of inevitability, as if each of Arnie’s actions represents another sure step toward his downfall.

Christine works almost like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings: a source of obsession that turns its owner into a possessive, paranoid figure that is aggressive with everyone who questions the nature of their relationship with their precious possession. The car twists Arnie’s personality so as to push away everyone he loves and even changes his way of speaking. However, the car also has positive effects on the boy, generating an ambivalence that is fundamental to the narrative – an ambivalence that, unfortunately, was lost in the 1983 film adaptation.

There is no doubt that, despite loving his friend, Dennis sees him as a loser. Christine, however, gives Arnie the willpower to fight back and stand on his own two feet. His passive posture gradually changes to an aggressive one that liberates him: he is finally able to confront his parents, who until then controlled his life with an iron fist; he manages to fight a bully all by himself, and even reveals that he could only have gathered the courage to ask his future girlfriend out due to the car’s influence on him. That is, while Christine makes Arnie a more violent, intolerant, and possessive person, it also makes him a more independent and self-assured one. The car’s ambivalent influence on Arnie is fundamental to the narrative precisely because it reinforces how tragic the boy’s story really is. Take the girlfriend, for example. It is Christine who allows Arnie to get closer to the girl he loves, but it is also the car who begins to destroy their relationship. Christine gives, but she also takes away. Arnie believes he wouldn’t have achieved anything without the car, but these achievements are also only temporary.

Arnie’s car, as it turns out, is haunted. King takes a long time building the supernatural aspect of the story: it starts with the characters feeling an unjustified aversion to the object, goes on to them having nightmares with Christine; the number of nightmares then increases; certain parts of the car show unusual signs of recovery; its dark past is gradually revealed, and then Christine finally starts to go around killing people. The focus of the narrative is not the car, but the relationship between the two main characters, so it makes sense that the horror is kept in the backseat for a while. However, even with that in mind, the narrative takes a long time to gain traction: the nightmares, for example, serve less to scare the reader than to remind them that something is really wrong with the car, and quickly become repetitive.

The horror scenes involving Christine are part of another major problem of the book. The narrator at the beginning of the novel is Dennis, who recounts the events with an air of fatality. The boy’s voice, with its informal, aggressive language, can be fascinating in how subtly it reveals his personality: Dennis’s girlfriends, for example, are rarely named, and when they are, it’s in the words of others characters, which reveals how unimportant they are to the boy. King, however, makes a big mistake in the second act of the novel: he changes the narrator from a first-person witness to an omniscient one.

That is, in the first part of the book, Dennis is talking directly to the reader, telling his story, and now he’s suddenly replaced by an impersonal voice that knows everything and enters everyone’s mind, having access to their thoughts. This leads to a grotesque narrative problem since draws attention to its own artificiality, placing the narrator under the spotlight and making the reader hear the same story from two absurdly different voices: Dennis’s and an unidentified deity. If King had changed only the person who was narrating – from Dennis to any other character – that would have not been a problem as the style would remain the same. However, the insertion of an omniscient voice raises problematic questions: if Dennis was the one telling the story so far, who is now? Whose voice is this? And who joined the two accounts to form the book? In other words, this change of narrators breaks immersion, making it clear to us that we are reading a novel.

Later, in the third act, when Dennis comes back to being a narrator, things get even worse as the boy mentions the events narrated in the second act, which only makes the narrative schizophrenic: how Dennis had access to what the omniscient voice said? After all, that voice not only narrated what happened but informed what the characters were thinking as it happened – something that Dennis couldn’t have had access to, especially regarding those who died before having a chance to tell him anything. If instead of an omniscient narrator King had put something that emulated newspaper articles, that would have made more sense, but sadly that was not the case.

To make matters worse, character development does not change between acts, as it should have happened with the change of perspective. If Dennis sees Arnie’s mother as a dominant, but irritating person, who nonetheless loves her son, and the boy’s father as a good-hearted but passive man, the omniscient narrator presents both characters under the same light, virtually confirming Dennis’ point of view as the objective truth.

It is easy to understand why King changed the narrator: the novel’s greatest horror scenes wouldn’t have been able to exist if Dennis kept narrating since he doesn’t witness them. The author’s solution, however, got him out of the frying pan right into the fire: keeping Dennis narrating would have excluded the action scenes, creating an anticlimax – as indeed happens in the third act, in which the closure of Arnie’s narrative arc is not shown since Dennis doesn’t witness it – but the solution found only makes the narrative illogical.

Finally, King has a habit of being somewhat wordy in his stories and it’s no different here, with several repeated or absolutely unnecessary passages. Chapter 15, for example, is expendable in its entirety as it deals with Dennis’s football matches and shows just one more of the boy’s many nightmares. A few chapters later, a garage owner also recaps all the events so far, even bothering to arrange everything in chronological order, making the narrative go into a “Previously on Christine…” mode.

Despite all that, Christine’s story still manages to work: the horror scenes may come too late and the change of narrators may be illogical, but the book’s heart – the relationship between the two main characters – is still able to fascinate us with its complex and tragic nature.

September 26, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on November 28, 2017.