The Dark Tower – Part IV
Volume VI, Song of Susannah, basically focuses on the struggle between Susannah and Mia who turns out to be a demon inhabiting Susannah in order to give birth to “the chap”, as she is fond of calling the baby. Mia has been given a body by the Crimson King and his minions; the baby she carries is both Roland’s and the Crimson King’s. Don’t ask me how this works. Actually, Song of Susannah is quite confusing – a great read, but confusing. The story is this: When Roland had to distract the demon in The Gunslinger so it wouldn’t kill Jake, he planted his semen inside the demon. The demon turned out to be both male and female, that is to say, it could switch gender. When Susannah distracted the demon while Roland and Eddie tried to save Jake, the demon switched to its male part, thus giving Roland’s seed to Susannah. Hooray! Now Roland’s going to be a daddy! Also, some part of the Crimson King has mingled with Roland’s seed so that the child will have to fathers. Great, eh? Just think of the possibilities – the little boy playing both fathers, getting from one what the other has denied. Of course, it’s not that simple.
As it turns out, the child Mia carries will be Roland’s Nemesis, and since the child will be named Mordred, people who are familiar with the legend of King Arthur will know what this might lead up to. After all, Roland is from the line of Arthur Eld – King Arthur, in other words -, and he’s the last one. As we know, the legend of King Arthur has father and son battling each other to death. Is this what Roland has to expect? We’ll see.
Song of Susannah focuses on various plots. First, there’s Mia and Susannah, sharing a body and ready to give birth in New York, helped by the agents of the Crimson King – gruesome creatures with human bodies and animal heads as well as the lower men, giant rats disguised as human beings. Second, there’s Jake and Callahan’s journey to New York to rescue Susannah. Third, there are Roland and Eddie who go to Maine via the Unfound Door to seek out Stephen King. And this is where the book starts to deteriorate. The chapter entitled “The Writer” is just plain awful because it introduces Stephen King as a character – a vital character, as it turns out. Upon seeing Roland, he tries to flee. Furthermore, we are told that Roland and Stephen King look like father and son (or brothers). This made me cringe. From the very first page of The Gunslinger, I had depicted Roland as a worn-out, tall, lean guy – a bit like Clint Eastwood in his 40s. But never – NEVER – did it cross my mind that Roland might look like Stephen King. Awful. Just awful.
It gets even worse. King – the character – tells Roland and Eddie that he has made them up, thus relativising the whole story. Argh. Even though it turns out that King only listens to the Song of the Turtle (the Turtle being one of the Guardians of the Beams) and is more or less the annalist, it was awful. It felt so… cheap. So narcissistic. Even more so since King ascribed to himself a very powerful role – that of saving the Tower, eventually. Roland and Eddie urge him to finish the tale, to listen to the Song because otherwise the Tower might fall. I absolutely hated that part. I know there are readers out there who thought it was a great twist, and I guess they can argue why they think that is. Good for them if they liked this. For me, it was a downfall. A big one. It was like plunging into some deep dark hole. And it got even worse.
The Dark Tower – Part III
At the end of Wizard & Glass, the ka-tet has somehow escaped Randall Flagg and is ready to move on. Next stop: Calla Bryn Sturgis, a small village on the outskirts of Mid-World – probably closer to End-World, in fact. Here we meet another familiar character. Say hello to Father Callahan, he who has faltered when facing the vampire Kurt Barlow in “Salem’s Lot”. Wolves of the Calla, being the fifth volume in the series, tells the story of the Calla and the Wolves that terrorize the land every 23, 24 years to take the children – well, not all of the children. Only one of each twins. For, you see, in the Calla, only twins are born. And every once in a while, the Wolves will take away one of each pair of twins and carry them off to Thunderclap to feed the Breakers. Of course, the ka-tet steps in to prevent this from happening again. This is the main story. Another storyline focuses on Callahan and tells what happened to him after he has fled from Salem’s Lot. More flashbacks. Yay. But this time, King did it right. He dedicates one chapter at at time to Callahan’s story, with the next chapter focussing on the main plot. In short, it’s not one awfully long flashback we have to endure but several small ones. Some readers found this dull and didn’t care much for Callahan’s story. I liked it, in fact, even though it wasn’t essential to the main plot.
One thing I really liked about Volume V was Roland’s progress. He becomes even more human, attached to the other people in his ka-tet. And, as it turns out, the guy can also sing, dance, and stagedive. That was a bit strange, probably, but it also showed a different side of Roland that hadn’t been there before. Ever since Volume II, Roland has started to care more and more for the people who accompany him. Even more so: He has come to love them. This is a different Roland. He’s no longer the lonely wolf focused solely on his goal though he never lets go of the Tower. But he also realises that there are people who depend on him, who need his help and friendship. Very nicely executed, and I cannot understand how readers cannot like this book – but hey, I didn’t like Wizard & Glass and other readers did. De gustibus non est disputandum, right?
Wolves of the Calla features a battle – not epic, but a battle. We encounter Black Thirteen, the most powerful of the glass balls in the Wizard’s Rainbow, able to send people todash – which means, they enter a dream-like state of being, seeing things and getting an idea of what to do next – very simply put, I’ll give you that. We also encounter a new character – Mia, who seems to be yet another part of Susannah’s divided personality and who’s pregnant with “the chap”. Now there’s a surprise. Ever since Jake had been drawn to Mid-World, King had made allusions as to Susannah being pregnant. As it turns out, she is. And she develops strange cravings – or rather, Mia does. Roland is the first to notice which is yet another sign of him taking care of the people surrounding him (and of his sharp senses, of course). Wolves of the Calla, thus, is a good book – not the best in the series, mind you. After I have read all of it, The Waste Lands still is my favourite. Wolves of the Calla could have been equally great but King decided to ruin it. First, he introduced a peculiar language the Calla folken speak – and after a while, this became really, really annoying. “Say thankya” is ok, and I definitely can live with “Thankee-sai”. But “We say thankya big-big” was too much. Way too much. I appreciate King’s effort to develop a language of his own. I really do. But as I’ve said above, after a while this peculiar dialect became annoying.
Even more annoying was the twist King decided to put in at the end. After defeating the wolves (who turned out to be robots equipped with light-sabers – yes, those from Star Wars! – and sneetches King “borrowed” from Harry Potter), Susannah disappears through the Unfound Door – not of her own free will but because Mia takes over. Mia feels that her time is drawing near and that the baby will soon be delivered so she kidnaps Susannah and takes her off to – yes, that’s right: New York. In the cave that houses the Unfound Door, our heroes find some books (that have been pushed through the door by one Calvin Tower who owns a deserted piece of land in New York, the land housing a rose that is connected to the Tower and needs to be saved by our heroes). Tower was saved by Eddie from certain death in the other world but had insisted that Eddie saved his most precious books – which end up in the cave. And guess what Roland, Eddie, Jake, and Callahan find among these books? A copy of “Salem’s Lot” by one Stephen King. As I’ve said before, it’s quite amusing to have allusions to other books in the series. But this one set the path for a development that I still cannot stomach. Callahan goes all “Oh no, I’m a fictional character” while the others figure that Stephen King must somehow be crucial when it comes to saving the Tower. Because, you see, it has turned out that the Beams holding up the Tower are crumbling (this is where the Breakers come in). Only two Beams remain, and if one of them collapses, so will the Tower. In order to prevent that, the ka-tet figures that they must seek out Stephen King because he seems to be the counterpart of the rose. Yeah, right. When I read the final pages of Wolves of the Calla, I feared for the worst. And it turned out I was right.
The Dark Tower – Part II
As I’ve stated in my previous entry, Roland isn’t a very likeable and also a very enigmatic character when we meet him in The Gunslinger. After his long palaver with the Man in Black (who calls himself Walter) and a long sleep, he awakens at the Western Sea, and this is where Volume II, The Drawing of the Three, picks up. Roland is confronted with lobster-like monsters, the lobstrosities, who seem to consider him rather tasty since they decide to munch on the fingers of his right hand and also on his foot. This happens pretty early in the book – again, I was shocked. How could King do that to his hero? How could he rob him of his right hand – well, part of it – that he needed for drawing his gun, for shooting? How could he leave him on that beach slowly dying of the poison the lobstrosities’ bite had injected into his wounds? It is here that Roland finds the first of three doors that lead him to another world in which he draws his first companion, Eddie Dean, a junkie on his way to deliver some drugs. The beginning of this chapter, entitled “The Prisoner”, made for some tiresome reading and I had to put the book away for months – I had finished The Gunslinger in April or May 2010, had started right away with The Drawing of the Three and found that, after about 120 pages, I could go no further. So the book rested on the shelf until October. Then I decided to give it another shot – and I was hooked. Completely hooked and instantly addicted to the Tower. I won’t go into much detail here; it becomes clear pretty soon that Eddie, when not on drugs, has the abilities of a gunslinger. So does Odetta Holmes, a black woman bound to a wheelchair after she has lost her legs in a gruesome accident. Odetta is a divided personality – within her, there also lurks Detta Walker, a foul-mouthed bitch and a troublemaker. By stepping through the third door and encountering Jack Mort, the man who likes to kill people by pushing them on, say, railways and by defeating him, Roland frees Odetta of her split personality and she becomes Susannah.
The chapter about Mort is probably the best in the entire book, and I knew I had to read the next volume as soon as possible. As it turned out, The Waste Lands was even better. It shows us how Roland, Eddie and Susannah slowly become ka-tet – you might also call it a fellowship -, how Eddie and Susannah improve their gunslinger qualities and how their love blooms. This volume also features Jake, the boy who has died before. By pushing Mort in front of a train, Roland has prevented him from killing Jake (who has been pushed in front of a car by Mort), thus creating a paradox which King has solved in a brilliant way. I loved that part, I couldn’t put down the book – not for the love of God would I have wanted to miss this. Drawing Jake to Mid-World turns out to be quite difficult – Susannah has to distract a demon by having sex with it (is there any King book out there without at least one sex scene?). And then we’re headed for Lud. The description of the ruined city and its inhabitants is stunning and I think it’s among the finest works King has ever written. The book ends with a massive cliffhanger – after having escaped the lunatic Tick-Tock-Man and after having found Blaine the Mono (who’s even more of a lunatic, as it turns out), the ka-tet, now complete and accompanied by a billy-bumbler named Oy, can finally resume the journey towards the Dark Tower.
However, they have to beat Blaine first. The crazy train (Ozzy Osbourne, anyone?) is very fond of riddles and requires a contest – if the ka-tet can confront him with a riddle he cannot solve, he won’t crash at the end of the journey, killing them all. And off we go to Volume IV, Wizard & Glass – the most tiresome book in the whole series, as far as I am concerned. The first 100 pages are excellent even though the riddling contest grows a bit tiresome after a while. There are allusions to “The Stand”, our heroes find themselves in yet another devasted, ruined land. It is here that Roland tells his companions the tale of Susan, the only woman he ever loved. And this is where the book becomes really, really tiresome. I don’t mind flashbacks – not at all. But 600 pages? Dear Mr. King – that’s way too much. Especially since the flashback only covers a couple of month, telling us the story of how Roland and his best friends Cuthbert and Alain reach the small town of Mejis where they uncover great evil and where Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado.
I was prepared to hate Susan, simply because a dear friend who has read the books a couple of times and on whose opinion I can rely had told me that Susan was some kind of Miss Perfect. I didn’t think so. She’s a teenager, ready to sell herself to the town’s mayor in order to retrieve her father’s lands that have been stolen from her. I think Susan Delgado is one of the most tragic characters in the whole series. She’s doomed from the beginning. As soon as she encounters the witch Rhea, her fate is sealed. Having read The Gunslinger, I knew that Susan would die and this didn’t improve the book much. It seemed pointless to read 600 pages of flashback already knowing the outcome. The main grudge I hold against Wizard & Glass is that Roland and his friends, although still kids, don’t behave like teenagers. King stresses over and over again that they are very young and inexperienced, yet they manage to not only discern the schemes woven by the bad guys. They also manage to kill all of them – and there are plenty – in a short, brutal fight. Not very convincing, if you ask me, even for trained gunslingers, but what the heck.
The flashback is necessary – no question about that. We learn more about Roland, we learn how he has become what he is, and we learn why he sets out to search for the Dark Tower. We also learn about the tragedies overshadowing his beginning quest – Susan’s gruesome death (gosh, that was heartbreaking!), his mother’s death at his own hand because magic had deceived him into believing that the witch Rhea, responsible for Susan’s death, was facing him. No wonder the guy is traumatized, eh?
Wizard & Glass ends with the ka-tet reaching the green glass palace where they encounter an old acquaintance – here comes Randall Flagg, villain of “The Stand”. At that point I began to doubt King’s intentions. Granted, it’s quite amusing to have references to his other books here and there, but introducing Flagg was a bit over the top especially since the ka-tet escaped him by way of deus ex machina. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the book; it dragged along, was quite repetetive and, to some degree, pointless insofar as the flashback could have been told in a much, much shorter fashion.
The Dark Tower – Part I
It’s done. After about four months of more or less constant reading, I have finished the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I still have rather mixed feelings about it, and I will explain why. Before, let me warn you: First of all, this is going to be a very long entry so I’ll split it up in at least two parts. Secondly, there are huge spoilers ahead – spoilers that include the ending, for instance, or crucial moments in some of the books. So if you haven’t read the books yet and plan to do so or if you haven’t finished the series, you should stop reading now. If you don’t, prepare for massive spoilers. Should you decide to read the books or are in the middle of reading them – well, don’t blame me if you rob yourselves of some surprises. I warned you.
The Dark Tower surely is a great achievement by a very talented writer who has written some of the finest horror literature ever. It’s more or less Kings “Lord of the Rings”, though not as perfect and much longer. While it took Tolkien “only” about 1200 pages to tell his tale, King needs – brace yourselves – 4032 pages to tell the tale of Roland and his quest for the Dark Tower. Just looking at this number is stunning, especially since most of the time, you just don’t realise how thick these books are because you’re simply hooked. Most of the time, anyway. There are also chapters that drag along, some are downright boring, and some – from Volume VI onward – are plain annoying.
We first meet Roland Deschain of Gilead in Volume I, The Gunslinger, originally published in 1982, re-published in 2003 (revised and extended edition). Writing commenced even earlier – in 1970, to be exact. The last Volume, The Dark Tower, was published in 2003. It took Stephen King 33 years to finish his epic – and it shows. The Gunslinger clearly is the work of a very young author, full of interesting and fresh ideas, set in a post-apocalyptic, western-type world that has moved on. The main story of Volume I consists of Roland’s pursuit of the Man in Black who he thinks holds valuable information as how to reach the Dark Tower. Also, there are flashbacks to Roland’s youth and his training as a gunslinger, and while chasing the Man in Black, he meets a number of people. The story seems a little jumbled and more than once I wondered where this might go – and, more so, if Stephen King himself had an idea where the story might actually lead. It’s not an easy book to read, not very accessible but nevertheless a masterpiece and definitely one of the best books in the whole series.
Now, if you pick up the revised edition (as I did) and read it very carefully, you will, when reaching the end of Volume VII, notice that the ending has been foreshadowed in The Gunslinger. I admit I had to go back to the ending of The Gunslinger because it had been a while since I had read it and simply couldn’t remember all that had been said during the palaver between Roland and the Man in Black. I’m referring to p. 225. Here the Man in Black tells Roland this: “What hurt you once will hurt you twice. This is not the beginning but the beginning’s end. You’d do well to remember that… but you never do.” Now, I haven’t read the original book so I cannot say for sure whether this dialogue has been inserted later or was part of the book from the beginning. However, it foreshadows the ending; those of you who have read all seven books will know what I mean, and I’ll get back to that later. For now, let’s just say that if the Man in Black had been more direct, he would have spoiled the ending.
One crucial encounter in The Gunslinger involves Jake, a boy killed in New York and transported to Mid-World. Roland meets the boy at the Way Station; he becomes his surrogate father and takes the boy with him. And then he makes a crucial mistake – one that could be among the reasons why the finale of the series is what it is. Desperate to catch up with the Man in Black, Roland lets Jake die a second time. He’s faced with the choice of saving the boy who is struggling not to plummet down into the darkness after old rusted crossties have given in and broken beneath his feet. Roland could save the boy or he could leave the mines to palaver with the Man in Black. He decides to sacrifice Jake – for a hero, this is a very cruel thing to do, isn’t it? I was shocked. This guy actually put the Tower above a human life, and even though he seems a bit shocked himself, catching up with the Man in Black is still the most important thing. It was daring of King to let his hero do this – very daring because up to this point, we don’t know much about Roland. We know he’s a gunslinger (some kind of knight only that instead of a sword, he has guns), we know he’s lost all people he ever cared about including his closest friends and his beloved Susan, and we know he searches for the Dark Tower. We know he can kill 30 people single-handed if he must, we know he has great knowledge. But we don’t know why he searches for the Tower, we don’t know what kind of person he really is. In Volume I, he’s presented as a very enigmatic yet at the same time very lonesome guy who is strictly focused on his goal. Nothing will come between him and his goal, not even a 10-year-old boy who has died before. This isn’t necessarily the stuff likeable characters are made of, is it? But over the course of the series, Roland progresses. I actually liked him a lot even though at times he made decisions that weren’t very humane, to say the least.
