Carrie, by Stephen King | Free Audiobook
The first King novel, fifty years on and still the cruellest
Carrie White is the girl nobody at school wants to sit next to, and the reason is not only the other pupils. At home she is managed by a mother whose faith has hardened into something punitive and strange, and the two worlds she moves between have agreed, without ever discussing it, that she is there to be punished for existing.
What she has that they do not know about is the ability to move objects with her mind, an inheritance she has been taught to treat as a sin rather than a talent. The novel builds, in newspaper extracts, testimony and an unsparing amount of interior narration, towards the one evening when the town decides to be kind to her and some of her classmates decide not to be: the school dance, and the joke they play on her there, and the very short period of time in which a small town discovers what it has been raising.
This is the remastered fiftieth-anniversary presentation, with Margaret Atwood's new introduction, and it is read by Sissy Spacek, who played Carrie in the film, with Atwood reading her own introduction. Seven hours and forty-six minutes.
The casting is the reason to own this in audio rather than in any other format. Sissy Spacek played Carrie on screen in 1976, and there is a particular quality to hearing her read a novel whose ending she has already lived: the fury is intact, the sympathy never wavers, and the quieter passages of ordinary humiliation land harder than the famous ones because she reads them as an adult looking back rather than as a narrator in a hurry to reach the destruction. Margaret Atwood's new introduction is a genuine addition rather than a marketing note, and she makes the case for the book as a piece of social observation rather than a shock machine, which is the right case to make.
What holds up fifty years on is the technique, which nobody expects from a first novel. The story is told through a collage of reportage, secondhand testimony, book excerpts and straight narration, so the listener knows the scale of the disaster long before the people in it do, and the dread accumulates out of the book's own structure rather than out of any single scene. King wrote this while teaching school and living in a trailer, which is worth remembering when the passages about the economics of teenage life arrive; the cruelty in the book is rarely fantastical. It is a novel about what a town does to a girl who cannot fight back yet, and the horror is not the telekinesis, it is the unanimous consent of everyone around her. The reviews make the point repeatedly, in the most thoughtful ones, that King is not only a writer of horror and that Carrie is a book about how we treat each other.
The famous ending does what it is supposed to do, and it is worth saying that the audio version does not tip it: Spacek paces the climax so that a listener who has seen the film still feels the shift from sympathy to terror rather than from familiarity to boredom. The scene at the prom is the whole novel in miniature, a group of people enjoying something at somebody else's expense, and the book's judgement of them is exact and permanent.
The complaints are the usual ones for a novel of this age, plus one about shape. A listener who loved it still docked a star because the pacing is a little slow before the end, and because the book is divided into two long parts rather than chapters, which makes an otherwise short novel feel like a climb. Another, generous about the period, notes that a few moments have dated, in the way a book written in 1974 about American teenagers and about a mother's religion will have dated, and that some of its treatment of adolescent sexuality reads very differently in an era with different instincts; that listener declines to judge it by the standards of today and enjoyed it anyway. I would add only that the dated parts are not incidental, they are part of the evidence about what the novel is looking at, and a listener who can take the 1970s including its discomforts gets the better book for it.
Content notes: there is sustained bullying, an act of extreme violence against a school full of people, and a mother whose religious practice includes physical cruelty. Nothing is gratuitous in the sense of being decorative, but the book is genuinely distressing, and one of its cruelties is aimed squarely at someone who has never been able to defend herself. Seven and a half hours, and the site's The Talisman and Other Worlds Than These are the two King collaborations already on the shelf here.
Carrie is Stephen King's first novel and the one that made his name, and this is the remastered fiftieth-anniversary edition, with a new introduction written and read by Margaret Atwood. The novel itself is performed by Sissy Spacek, who played Carrie White in the 1976 film, which is the sort of casting an audiobook rarely gets. Running time 7 hrs and 46 mins, unabridged.
Carrie White is tormented at school and disciplined at home by a mother whose religion has turned on her, and she is discovering that she can move objects with her mind. The novel is told through clippings, testimony and narration, and it heads, from the opening, towards a school dance and a prank that nobody involved survives unchanged.
Seven and three-quarter hours is short for a novel with this reputation, which makes it a sensible first month on any of the trial offers above: one free month, one title that remains yours, whether or not you keep the subscription.
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