The Green Mile - Six Volume Box Set
by Stephen King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen KingEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Box set
Published: 1996-09-01
ISBN: 0451933028
Number of pages: 592
Publisher: Signet
Book Reviews of The Green Mile - Six Volume Box Set
Book Review: A Robin In The Rain
Summary: 4 Stars
What looked at first like a publishing stunt managed, in the end, to bring the dark artistry of Stephen King to a new generation of readers while winning back some others who had drifted after his classic 1974-84 period. 1996's "The Green Mile" is not a great novel, but it has moments of greatness. King's power of sucking in readers is hardly dimmed by a monthly installment plan.
Paul Edgecombe is an old man living with some hard memories in a nightmarish nursing home. His memories revolve around his days as overseer of a penitentiary execution block, a.k.a. "The Green Mile", when a large yet docile convict named John Coffey came to pay for a heinous double murder. About the only thing Coffey can answer for is his name ("not spelled like the drink"), yet there's something in his manner, not to mention his actions as the story unspools, that suggests he is not the man he was judged to be.
I love Stephen King, but in a qualified way. He's one of America's best-ever storytellers, but he can get carried away with that highly charged imagination of his. Here, revisiting the prison milieu that spawned his classic "Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption", he keeps things in check with a largely quiet tale of human suffering and failings, of regret and longing, that draws you in by slow degrees to one of the best, and saddest, resolutions in the King canon. Not everything leading up to the end is great, but it's well worth reading, and in my case, re-reading, as I missed a lot of King's subtleties the first time round.
That John Coffey shares the same initials with another condemned man some two millenia ago is no accident, and in the dismal setting of a North Carolina prison King creates a deeply-detailed Calvary for modern readers. The guards, good sorts mostly like Edgecombe who we get to know well, find grim amusement in the practice sessions they run before each execution, suggesting a kind of bleak, practical existentialism. When strange things begin to happen, we are surprised, even if this is a King novel, because of his way of locking you into the everyday reality of the place.
Take for example a little mouse that wanders onto the Green Mile and befriends a sadsack convict. Before King is done, any reader worth his or her salt has lived and died several times over the fate of the little guy. The convict he befriends dies one of the most gruesome deaths in any King story, yet it is so powerful because it is so real-feeling, not because it's delivered by a possessed car or a rabid hound.
Coffey may be not entirely of this world, but he can feel its pain, more than most anyone else. "I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain" is how he puts it to Edgecombe. Is Coffey a gift from a loving Deity, or one of God's cruelest little jokes? Much of the power here comes from the way King doesn't say, right up to the end.
Each of the six books leaves you wanting more with an unresolved story arc. There's even a cleverly weaved framing story of old Edgecombe at the nursing home, where he tries to write his tale and finds himself confronted by an orderly with a strong resemblance to the least human guard at the long-ago Green Mile.
It does take a while, though, and the ending, while again quite wonderful and bracingly sad, does go on for a few pages more than it should. Perhaps I am just looking at it as a middle-aged guy who doesn't quite like its hard message of life's inevitable end. When I first read it, right when it came out, it left me entirely cold. Now I understand better what King was trying to say, about aging and how the road can feel so terribly long.
It's a long road getting through "Green Mile", but it stands up well, only gaining power and momentum as it drives on, fiercely and inexorably, to a grim yet satisfying end. I can't agree with those who place it at the top rank of King novels, but it is quite good, and very much worth your time, whether read in chunks or all at once.
Summary of The Green Mile - Six Volume Box Set
Read this history-making serial novel -- from cliffhanger to cliffhanger -- in its entirety.When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list -- simultaneously -- and delighted millions of fans the world over.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs...and yours.
When Stephen King originally wrote The Green Mile as a series of six novellas, he didn't even know how the story would turn out. And it turned out to be of his finest yarns, tapping into what he does best: character-driven storytelling. The setting is the small "death house" of a Southern prison in 1932. The Green Mile is the hall with a floor "the color of tired old limes" that leads to "Old Sparky" (the electric chair). The charming narrator is an old man, a prison guard, looking back on the events decades later.
Maybe it's a little too cute (there's a smart prison mouse named Mr. Jingles), maybe the pathos is laid on a little thick, but it's hard to resist the colorful personalities and simple wonders of this supernatural tale. And it's not a bad choice for giving to someone who doesn't understand the appeal of Stephen King, because the one scene that is out-and-out gruesome (it involves "Old Sparky") can be easily skipped by the squeamish.
The Green Mile won a 1997 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel; and Tom Hanks stars in a film of the novel by Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption (from King's collection Different Seasons). --Fiona Webster
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