Between Christmas and New Year, I finished a 740 page book that, at times, I could barely stand putting down. Not that it didn't have its sagging moments, its occasional tedium of detail -- which book that long can avoid those things? But I don't recall a book which kept me wondering so long about so many threads, about how the author would resolve each of them.

Stephen King's 11.22.63 - billed as an alternate uni¬verse reimagining of the John F. Kennedy assassina¬tion - with an epigraph from Norman Mailer's Os-wald's Tale. "It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng and his security," Mailer writes. "If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most power¬ful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd."

There it is, the ultimate underpinning of ever y Kennedy conspiracy ever invented, the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a worthy foil. I've gone back and forth on this myself for many years: Did Oswald act alone or was he a patsy, as he protested on the night of the assassination in the cus¬tody of the Dallas police? Was he part of a conspiracy or a twisted figure intent on blasting his way into the his¬tory books?

For a long time, I thought it was the former but now I'm not so sure. If at the heart of all conspiracy theo¬ries is the notion that the universe makes sense (a ver¬sion, in its way, of the belief in God), then I've come to think more often that the universe is a manifestation of chaos, in which things happen for no reason or for no reason we can see.

What seems more prob¬able - that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy or that he was taken out by a loser with a mail-order rifle and a grudge against the world?

Such issues motivate 11/22/63, which deals with a man named Jake Epping, who goes back in time to derail Kennedy's date with death. To make the story work, after all, King has to come down firmly on one side or the other; it's impos-sible to stop a crime if you don't know who your target is. "There was no way of knowing anything for sure," Jake acknowledges, although the twist of the book is that he knows almost ever ything, coming from the future as he does.

For him, then (and, by extension, for us), much of the narrative takes the form of an elaborate waiting game, as Jake stalks Oswald, trying to make sure there are no conspira¬tors, while also desper¬ate not to be seen. I've always been interested in fantasy and horror and I've read many a Stephen King. Some I liked; some I adore, others .. well, let's say they were put-down and left for another day or month. I also know that he has writ¬ten more than just hor¬ror; a novella he wrote, for example, was turned into what I consider the most magnificent film I've ever seen, The Shawshank Redemption.

I started on 11.22.63 perhaps only because it is about the assas¬sination of JFK.

Even if you don't buy the myriad conspiracy the¬ories, it is fascinating to speculate about all the mystery and questions around the event. Who was Lee Harvey Os¬wald? What was he like? Who was Jack Ruby? What made him shoot Oswald? What if he hadn't? What if Os¬wald had missed? This book takes you into that thicket of questions. Quite literally so, via that time-tested fic¬tion device: time travel.

What happens if you can change the past? What happens if it is a relatively small event you're changing, one with few wider implica¬tions? What happens if it is, well, the murder of an American President? Is one of these more difficult to achieve than the other? What hap¬pens when you return to the present? What happens when you re¬turn to the past after re¬turning to the present?

It's not that nobody has tackled such themes before; and more than that, it's not that none of us have ever thought about them. But King explores them in dif-ferent ways. With the e xc e l l e n t r e s e a r ch that he is famous for, King manages to take the reader through the many psychologi¬cal twists and bends that surround the JFK assassination. And, coming back to the re¬search: If the book tells you something about Oswald, his wife Ma¬rina, their stay in Rus¬sia or even their places of residence in Dallas, Texas, you can rest as¬sured he has it down to a T - that is, the very smallest detail.

When one puts down the book at some stage to ponder the events, one eventually makes one very interesting dis¬covery: It is a love story. Not a story only of the assassination itself, not the travel through time itself, but a love story. How else can a relation¬ship across the barrier of time play out except as heartbreak? And yet King manages to find believable hope for his story. You can't change the past, but if you want, it can make you whole. What ifs are fine as far as they go. The what nows are infinitely more interesting.

The book is avail¬able at the Book Den in Windhoek, as well as CNA and at the many excellent bookshops around Namibia. You can order if from your favourite bookstore if not immediately avail¬able.