I love the Dark Tower series. I really do. It's so popular and beloved and shit that i don't want to gush over it too much and seem like a sheep. But damnit, i'm gonna. There's just something about this tale that resonates with me. It's funny, i had people describe these books to me before, and they always sounded like cliched science fiction crap. And so many elements are derivative. But they don't seem that way when you're reading them. The details of this fading, rotten, winding-down, junked-out universe are so vivid and imaginative. The shit feels real somehow and there are so many rough edges and unanswered questions. Why is Maturin the Turtle some kind of benevolent godlike being, but Shardik the Bear is a manufactured cybernetic monstrosity? How do these things make sense together?
When i started reading the series, i wasn't that impressed until the part where Jack Mort appeared and the narrative doubled back on itself until the double-universe dilemma with Jake was solved. That's when i began loving it.
There are a few parts here and there that i dislike. I'm not a fan of the Emerald City sequence. I hated how Roland got his own copy of Insomnia and then gave it away without bothering to at least scan it for clues. I really wish that the Wolves didn't look like Dr. Doom or carry lightsabers. And i kind of wish that Harry Potter didn't have his own brand of sneetches. What was up with that? I have no idea how well King and Rowling know each other, but his Potter plugs seemed like the equivalent of an older guy sending a younger woman a drink and then catching her eye across the room and making the "call me!" motion with his hand. I dunno, man.
My least favorite part of all was when Jake and Oy switched minds to get past the imaginary dinosaurs because it's a far-fetched solution to a problem that didn't need to be introduced. I didn't like the repetition of "bodacious ta-tas" in that same part. Man, when Stephen King gets ahold of a slang term that he likes, he just doesn't let it go. But it's hard to stay peeved when a few chapters later, Jake's funeral caused a mighty lump in my throat. Damn you, King, i didn't think a fictional book could still DO that to me. Songs, maybe, but a book?
I really don't get the criticisms that some fans have. I generally assume that people are smarter than i am, and that they were imagining something far more dignified and artsy. But then i see their comments online and realize... no, wait, they wanted this series to be MORE predictable and trite, not less. They wanted the Crimson King to have armies, and for Mordred to kill his father and seize the throne, and for Maerlyn to appear from nowhere, and for Walter to be waiting in the valley by the Tower and say "Muah ha! Now comes our final battle, Roland! Prepare yourself for the emergence of a doom!" and then they engage in some huge psychic battle that Roland wins by remembering some lost piece of Gilead wisdom...
..and that would have been lame. Lame, lame, lame.
What don't these people understand? The brilliance of this story is how the plot is an epic reflection of a man's life. We don't need to know more about the geography of Gilead, or how many gunslingers there were, or what they did. The brief flashbacks to Gilead represent his fleeting memories of childhood, when mom and dad are giants and the world seems mostly perfect. Roland's time in the desert is his pissed-off twentysomething era, and it includs some freaky meaningless sex and a psychedelic trip where he talks about the nature of the universe with some dangerous drug dealer for hours on end. The whole of Wizard and Glass is his mid-life crisis, where he moons about his perfect first girlfriend and his old high school buddies who were so much cooler than his current coworkers. When he reaches the Callas, he's largely made peace with his past and calmly goes about completing his life's work. He has to keep track of the kiddies and make sure everything goes smoothly. By the last book, his life has resulted in this huge legacy -- the Tet Corporation -- that springs up in his wake, and he gets his golden watch before setting out on the last journey.
Readers complain that "the Roland i know" would have never been fooled and almost killed by Dandelo. But that's in his old age, where he starts to lose his grip a bit. He also pouts, and begs, and does other uncharacteristic things because he's almost at the end of his "life," and very few people are as rough and tough as senior citizens as they were in their youth. That's also why it makes so much sense for all three main villains to peter out and die in an "anticlimactic" fashion. It just feels real. He never gets his final battle with Walter because life is never that neat. The Crimson King, like any billionaire or dictator or politician, is just a power-mad control freak trying to fuck up his enemies from afar. And Mordred, the destined king of all darkness, ends up being a moody Columbine kid who dies of food poisoning? That's.... strangely awesome.
The ending. [Spoilers]
I fucking love the ending. It's brilliant for many reasons. From purely a plot perspective, it's like King takes one ray of light and sends it through a crystal until it separates into an infinite number of smaller rays. We can imagine what happened all the other times that Roland goes through the ka-hole and starts his journey again, since each time is apparently a bit different. What happened all those other times? Was there a go-round where they had to find a way to defeat Blaine that didn't involve Eddie's bad jokes? Did they ever just circle around Lud as someone suggested? Were there times when Roland didn't find Patrick Danville and had to figure out another way to beat the Crimson King? Think of all the close shaves, all the times that Roland came within inches of death. But no matter how close he comes to failing, he always makes it through somehow, over and over.
You can kind of imagine Roland's first time through the loop, where he's a total cold asshole who leaves Eddie to die on the beach, kills Detta Walker just to be safe, and grudgingly saves Jake and has him tag along as a reluctant squire, the two only beginning to like one another by the story's end. And you can imagine his final journey, where he finally wises up and keeps Jake from falling and ends his cycle forever...
...wait, can he even do that? If Roland ever saved Jake and let Walter go, then presumably he'd never save the Beams and the Tower would fall, ending all creation. So he has to keep making the "wrong" choice again and again, because if he ever gets it right, that's it for the universe. Roland has to keep going for as long as the universe lasts because it can't last without him. Whoa, man.
It just all makes sense somehow. If Buddha-like wisdom comes from finding eternity in a moment and always being content with where you are, then Roland is the opposite of all that. He's the perfect, trapped, driven Western man. Always advancing, always on a quest, never happy where he is. He's always remembering his lost past or thinking ahead to his goal which will justify everything. I think it's hard to live in modern times and not relate to this story since nearly everything we do is just to get to somewhere else. We all have our own personal dark towers... mine, of course, is "being an artist." Why? For money? Money to buy food and shelter? To get to some final goal or place? Nope... it's just something that's going to define my life whether i like it or not. No matter how much i draw, it's never enough. Shit never ends.
Another way to look at the ending is to disregard the metaphor and look at it as speculative sci-fi... dude, what if those old Hindu notions of karma and reincarnation weren't just intoxicated mysticism but rather glimpses of the multiverse hypothesis that science is just starting to explore? What if reality really looked this way, and we're all living countless, exhausting parallel lives?
That would be amazing and fucking horrible at the same time. And whatever the true nature of reality is, i have no doubt that it IS amazing and horrible.
Anyway, my favorite book was probably either The Waste Lands or The Dark Tower. Least favorite? Song of Susannah, obviously. I understand that King just published an eighth Dark Tower book called The Wind in the Keyhole, and i'll get around to it eventually. It sounds kind of... not essential, since it's just another long flashback.
Meanwhile, my King bender has continued through Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, The Tommyknockers, Eyes of the Dragon, and soon on to The Talisman and Black House.
I'm not going to read all of his books. That would just be crazy.
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