My ink on the classic: All The King's Men

Accidentally picking this up at the library in their audio book section, I gave the first CD a listen and was hooked throughout all 18 CD's in this large, vast and powerful read.

All The King's Men was originally pulped in 1946 by Robert Penn Warren, and it is a tale about the corruption of a powerful man. I have to get really geeky here and talk about some pop TV for a second. The character Benjamin Linus on ABC's Lost is played by Michael Emerson is one of my favorite TV characters of all time.

I was pleased to find out that All The King's Men, the audio book version is read by none other than the Michael Emerson. And since the story is told in first person, Emerson becomes the central charaacter of the story, Jack Burden. There was a movie made recently based on this book, and Burden was played by Jude Law, I believe, and the movie tanked.

I'll tell you why it tanked, because Emerson didn't play Jack Burden. His voice and inflection are perfect and it would be hard to imagine no other as the character because Emerson embodies Burden so well, simply by audio. Imagine what he could do on the big screen.

That being said, let me tell you how awesome this book was. Coming at it from a point where I knew nothing of the story, it was a great trip into mind of Burden. Burden is a news reporter who, as a young man, gets hooked up with Willie Stark, a politician on the rise who begins his career as a straight shooter, someone even Lincoln would be proud of. But as the story goes on, flashing back and forth from the past to the present, making the book feel timeless and move quickly despite its length, we find Stark turning into the thing we feared he would become most, a politician. Stark's rise and downfall is chronicled by Burden, who tells how his past and present life mix in and blend together with Starks, touching at all points.

Burden's thoughts and comments about life and the goings on in the story of often pessimistic and hopeless, and that's perhaps what this book does so well, in that eventually it saves Jack Burden, and not a page too late.

Warren can write southern dialect with the best of them: McCarthy, Faulkner, and the conversations in the book feel real and genuine. Nothing reads so good as some southern fried dialog.

This book is deep and touches on many aspects of life: parenthood, death, pride, love, loss of love, philosophy, history, and politics. The characters are singular, and I don't think we'll see another Jack Burden in literature for a long time--someone so callused on the outside but vulnerable as well, with quick wit, a lack of regard for any authority, and one who eventually admits he was wrong about everything.

I loved this book, and will read it again in the future. If you are a fan of audio books, you must hear this one in your ears. I never experienced a better experience with a narrator than I did with Emerson's Burden. Pick it up, and enjoy.

Until next read--

JT.