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Rose |
...I'm a great big deal...
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Rose |
Rose Madder opens in the aftermath of brutality: Rose Daniels has been severely beaten by her husband, and now she is having a miscarriage. The pain, she is used to. The shame, she is used to. She is the wife of a deranged policeman, and she lives in his hell for thirteen years.
What rouses her out of what she thinks of as "sleep" is a single drop of blood found on the bedsheet one morning. The blood symbolizes her misery; all the fear, all the anger, all the horror of living with Norman Daniels. Calling on reserves she didn't know she had, Rosie takes Norman's credit card ... and runs.
Here, the novel splits into two personalities. We watch Rosie travel to a large, unnamed city, scary and looming. Here, she meets a man named Peter Slowick who directs her to a shelter named Daughters & Sisters, who help her through her pain and suffering and show her that she can have a good, independent life. But we also watch Norman, whose actions march across the page in disconcerting italic, on the chase for the quarry that got away. We see into Norman's already diseased mind, and in horror, we see as it becomes worse.
Halfway through, Rosie goes into a pawn shop to hawk her engagement ring. After finding out it isn't worth half as much as she'd thought, she trades the ring for a painting she's fallen in love with. The painting is named "Rose Madder," and it depicts a noble Grecian woman looking down at a ruined temple. This is a highly symbolic move (Rosie trading her old life for her new life), and within the pawn shop she also finds a new job and a new love who might -- might -- be The One.
At this point in Rose Madder the tone shifts slightly. The taught intensity of the chase-novel elements are spiked with the supernatural, finally culminating in an exciting symbolic/mythologic climax. Unfortunately, (and this is rare for a King novel), the supernatural elements detract from the main tale, diluting the real-world horrors with symbols and myths. This is not to say the supernatural elemnts make it a bad book, but one wonders what Rose Madder would be like if King had stuck to reality.
Still, Rose Madder is a gripping, fast-paced novel that serves as a summation of the female-consciousness novels King experimented with in the early 90's, but also retains some of the violent horros King fans are familiar with. A unique and generally satisfying novel, Rose Madder must be viewed as a success.