The Writing of the Seven (The Gunslinger, revised)

Considering that I was excited to go back to the Dark Tower world and visit it again, it came as a surprise to me that I did not enjoy The Gunslinger as much as I thought I might.  Sure, there were the same memorable scenes: crazy zombie guy reveals secret of death, gunslinger shoots up town, a raven named Zoltan.  But I found myself distracted by the numerous mentions of events from previous novels, particularly Wizard and Glass, which is the fourth book in the series.  To understand why, you have to put yourself in SK's shoes and think about the creation of the series as a whole.  It also helped me, when I thought it through, to consider similar 7-book fantasy epics, because I think that I may have identified some kind of 'fourth-book crisis,' which is worth thinking about.

First, you need to know that Wizard and Glass may rank among one of SK's all-time best books.  Not just in the Dark Tower series, although I would argue that it is the strongest of them.  But in all of his books.  It is set in a place called Mejis, which is a bit like California, and tells the story of Roland Deschain falling in love with a woman named Susan Delgado, then bad things happen.  While the world depicted in Wizard and Glass is not quite modern, it is also a functioning society.  By the time we get to The Gunslinger, this world seems to have completely disappeared.  In other words, we enter the series in the middle.

As I mentioned before, there is plenty of time travel in the Dark Tower series as a whole, so maybe this shouldn't be surprising.  But it leads to plenty of problems in terms of the information that you want to put in your early books because you are not really moving chronologically.  In fact, even The Gunslinger doesn't move chronologically since we have flashbacks to Roland's early years and earning his guns.  This problem of conflicting chronologies led SK to revise The Gunslinger and re-release it in 2003, ostensibly because he wanted to fix continuity problems and change the prose.  This was around the same time that he finished the Dark Tower series after a 6-year hiatus.

Why did he suddenly finish?  Because in the interim, he was involved in a serious car accident when he was hit by a minivan.  This event gets written into the Dark Tower series and was obviously extremely traumatic for him.  But that doesn't explain why there was an hiatus in the first place.

I think that there was this hiatus because Wizard and Glass was good.  Really, really good.  And I think that he wasn't quite sure what to do next.  That whole novel is effectively a flashback, then the series moves forward with volume five (The Wolves of the Calla), although with a great deal of jumping through time and space--and a pretty big change in style.  I think that SK's inertia while writing an epic is not unique, but I think that his chronology problems may be, particularly if you compare his seven-volume epic to others.

If you think about seven-volume epics, quite a few might leap to mind.  There is the Narnia series, which was not written chronologically (it starts with book 2), but proceeds chronologically.  C. S. Lewis did allow for some flexibility in terms of chronology because time spent in Narnia moves more slowly that time spent in our world.  Thus Narnia ages considerably more quickly so that the whole duration of this world is the equivalent of one adult life here.  However, the adventures themselves move in chronological order.  You can't have Prince Caspian, for instance, before The Silver Chair, and while events from previous novels may be referenced, they are most frequently in a broad way that doesn't cause noticeable conflicts.  Harry Potter is similar in that each year is clearly delineated in the series and everything moves forward, apart from a few necessary flashbacks.

However, the seven-book epic is not always so straight ahead.  Take Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for instance.  That is not technically a seven-book epic, but that is because Tolkien got stuck trying to fill in the past--in other words, he experienced a fourth-book crisis.  There are books that give the history of this world, such as the Silmarillion and other writings, but Tolkien did not complete them.  I think he ran into a similar issue to SK.  If the world of the Hobbit has already been created, it can be difficult to go back and fill in the background while remaining consistent to the whole, short of making adaptations to the original (which is precisely what Peter Jackson in doing in his film adaptation, taking material from the Simarillion and other unfinished works).

SK came up with a different solution, which was to revise volume 1.  And he did so in a way that it incorporated an awful lot of Wizard and Glass, I think because he was so enraptured in this world.  So enraptured that he wasn't sure what to do next.  So enraptured that the series stalled because there could not be a return to Mejis.  But you could have Roland remember, and to do that you could have him thinking about his time there as he went on to the desert, Tull, and waste.  There are a lot of references to Mejis, Susan, and a lost horn, all of which are clear references to later books in the series.

And this was exactly what I didn't like about it the third time around (so I didn't like it two out of three readings, weird).  I did pick up on a few more details this time, like the mummified corpses in the former subway that disintegrated.   But for the most part, I found myself wondering just how much SK revised this volume compared to the original, particularly because there was so much of Wizard and Glass at the periphery.

So I found a way to answer my own question: I got a copy of the original Gunslinger and shall read that next.  I know, when I read The Stand I said something to the effect that I don't have time to check out old versus new versions.  In the case of The Stand, I stick to my original argument.  But this situation is different.  I'm curious to know where The Gunslinger started and whether those hints were initially there.  Fortunately, I was able to obtain a copy from an academic library--these are tricky to find now.  Thus the official report on The Gunslinger will wait until I have read the original.

Before the Dark Tower

If I had to blame this crazy project of reading all SK works in chronological order on something (apart from the anthology of his first three novels that got it going), I think that I would choose to blame The Dark Tower.  Probably I am not the first or only person to fall prey to this folly since so many of his works are mirrored in this series; there is a dangerous temptation to find everything that SK ever wrote somehow coming full circle in his magnum opus (which is so totally wrong, as I will explain).  However, the journey that I took to get there is a bit unusual, so I wanted to share that before I start posting on these books.  In fact, to best understand this journey, you need to know more about my relationship with SK over the years and how it has changed.

When I was a kid, some SK novels interested me and some didn't.  I have no idea what the distinction was.  So I can't tell you why I wanted to read Pet Semetary but had zero interest in Cujo.  Undoubtedly, this was fueled in part by what was available at my local library (in the grown-ups section) and what was not.  At the same time, I can explicitly remember being uninterested in some of them, such as Christine, which was available on the shelf but one that I never read.  I can't remember the first novel that I ever read by him or what possessed to start reading these novels in the first place.  Probably they seemed like Something Important that could be found also in movies and other cultural references, so I wanted to know what they were about.

If I had to guess, I would date my SK years from 1990-1995.  The last 'new' book that I read by him was Needful Things (1991), which I owned in hard copy.  I know that I read 'The Mist' in the summer of 1994--in fact, I can date a number of his books very precisely because I remember where and when I read them, or more exactly, where and when I became afraid from reading them.  Perhaps it is for this reason that they stay more firmly fixed in my memory than most of the books that I have read in my life.  I would say the same of John Bellairs, whose Gothic horror stories were like SK for kids, and whose novels also terrified me.

In other words, I was not an avid, constant reader (sorry SK), but one who disappeared for quite a while.  I remember rediscovering some when I lived in Vienna (2003-2004) because the choice of English-language books was slim--that time, Pet Semetary didn't scare me as badly, and I realized that I just might be able to reread these stories that scared me so memorably when I was younger.  Some I remembered fondly, like Misery (which I realized was actually about the writing process) and The Eyes of the Dragon (I ran out and bought a copy in the summer of 2005 just because I wanted to read it again).  But these incidents were few and far between, and I can't say that I ever really planned to rekindle my relationship with SK.

You have to fast-forward to 2007 and a very long bus trip for my first encounter with The Dark Tower series.  I was underemployed and looking for things to do, which may have been why I bought The Gunslinger to help pass the time for my travels.  It would have been an ideal time to crank through seven books (after getting off the bus, of course, and back to my underemployed life at the end of the line).  My reaction was that I did not care for it.  Not at all.  In fact, I found it boring and had absolutely no desire to continue reading the series.  But I owned my personal copy of the book and did move it with me when I started my new job in the fall of 2007.  It sat on the shelf, along with my copies of Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon as the only SK novels that I owned.

I'm not sure what possessed me to pick the book up again in the winter of 2011.  I had just rearranged all of the books that I owned in preparation to put them in real bookshelves, so maybe it just caught my eye.  But I decided to take it with me for some light reading while dog-sitting for friends.  This time it did take, for some reason, although I couldn't say what changed from my first reading of it.  I wanted to continue reading the series this time around and see what happened to Roland next.

The timing could not have been more ideal, because the next day I realized that I was coming down with the flu.  As my final act before succumbing to illness, I rushed to my local library and picked up the next three books in The Dark Tower series.  This was probably one of the best moves that I have ever made, literature-wise.  The books helped get me through the illness without being too bored, while I had an ideal opportunity to read.  And read I did.  In fact, after finishing those four, I wanted to know how it ended (although I was recovered from flu).  So that was my January 2010: reading all of The Dark Tower in the course of one month.

(You've probably realized that I read fast).

And then, I wanted to rediscover SK.  Because I could hear echoes in The Dark Tower of his previous works, echoes that sometimes I barely remembered.  But it was amazing to me how vivid those recollections could be.  I remembered the prayer to the Turtle in IT.  I was sure that the haunted house was a theme that had appeared in previous SK books.  I wanted to find these common threads and tie them together...even though I rationally know that there is no such 'master-thread' in his works.

Part of what fascinated me about The Dark Tower was its unapologetic post-modernity.  SK invents a world that seems to fit into conventional tropes; I think that we spend much of the first book thinking that we know what is happening ('It's a post-apocalyptic disaster zone!  I'll bet nuclear weapons are to blame!'), and then things get weird.  Very weird.  Not explainable by conventional narratives weird.  And I think that this post-modern approach to the epic is part of what makes these twists so fascinating.  Characters walk through the worlds of other novels and meet their characters; time ceases to move in a linear fashion; and even death loses its permanence.  This is the world that I wanted to explore more, and I think that there are hints of this post-modernity throughout King's oeuvre.  Maybe not all the time.  Maybe Cujo really was just a rabid dog.  But his way of mitigating this post-modern universe by using a popular style (and writing an epic on the scale of C. S. Lewis or Tolkien) is a uniquely King creation.  And this was what I found when I explored The Dark Tower again.  It was fascinating and intoxicating, in a literary way, and perhaps that is why I felt I needed to complete the series in a month.

(That is kind of crazy when I think about it since I am no longer underemployed.  It was almost 4000 pages.  Yeesh.)

I think that The Dark Tower led to my reappraisal of King and wanting to reread his works.  While I would still consider the anthology of his works sitting on a friend's shelf as the impetus, part of me is convinced that this is far more to do with finding fragmented shards of The Dark Tower in King's other works and trying to piece them together.  Yet I know that this is impossible because you can't uncover a master narrative in a post-modern work, at least not in the conventional way.  Maybe I am being a literary Roland here, seeking to fulfill my quest which is ultimately unfulfillable.  At any rate, I am looking forward to revisiting the world of The Dark Tower to see if I can make any more sense of this complex, compelling universe.

The Running Man

I am going to start right away by saying that I did not really like The Running Man that much.  However, I'm glad that I read it, because I think that you can see a number of different themes that SK was confronting around this time and some that would become important in his later works.

Things that I didn't like:

1) The countdown.  Especially because if you think about it, nothing actually counts down in this story, not even the explosion at the end. 

2) The protagonist.  Maybe this just felt hackneyed because I had just read Cujo, where the characters are fleshed out (okay, maybe too much so).  But this guy just seemed kind of like a jerk for no reason.  Now, I realize that he was living in a society that gave him reasons to be angry, but he seemed less angry at those causes and more just generally angry.  That didn't appeal to me.  There was something about the 'as a man, I need to go earn my family money' idea that was too simplistic for me.

3) The future.  I felt like the future in this story was somewhat vague and not all that sketched out.  Basically, everything, everywhere is a disaster, unless you are rich (which most people are not).  Everyone else is dying of awful diseases or appearing on fatal game shows.

Now, some people might say that SK was prescient in predicting the obsession that we have now with reality shows, and I will give you that.  But he already did that in The Long Walk (which is kind of like The Running Man with a slightly different cast and set of rules).  And he's often prescient, which is probably part of why he is considered to be a masterful writer and observer of society.  

Perhaps part of why this novel didn't work so well for me is that stories set in the near future rarely age well. The Running Man supposedly takes place in 2025, so not all that far away, but everything has turned into chaos.  We hear about this in little bits, like France is under martial law, but we don't know why.  Also, would it really be likely that everywhere would fall apart?  I don't know.  Most importantly, people are restricted in their use of information and access to it.  That part seemed kind of strange now, considering how much information is currently at our fingertips and how that has changed our society--I realize that this is an unfair way of evaluating a book, but I just couldn't get my head around the fact that there seemed to be very few technological developments (FreeVee was basically cable, but with only one channel and mandated in everyone's homes, and I think the cars could kind of float or something) but pretty much everything else was the same.  It didn't feel like a coherent world vision of the future, like you might find in Margaret Atwood, for instance.  The Long Walk was better in my view, perhaps because it didn't need to describe the whole society in detail, so it provided fewer chances for the reader to question the coherence of the future being presented.

Some things that will come back later:

1) Sewers are icky.  There is a scene where the protagonist escapes through the sewers and I was suddenly reminded of scenes from IT.

2) They've after you!  Of course, we have already seen this in Firestarter, among others, but what struck me about this iteration was the fact that the protagonist constantly thought that the Hunters were following him and needed to plan his mistake.  This reminded me very much of Father Callahan's experience as recounted in The Wolves of Calla, which is the fifth Dark Tower book, so we have a ways to go.  The way in which SK described the gradual realization that the people outside were not simply bystanders but actual threats is very similar to how Father Callahan figured out that the 'low men' were after him and went on the run.  There is a pretty big gap in terms of time for this idea and I wonder if it will appear in other books as well.  None leaps to mind in this case.

Speaking of chronology, there is also a question of which order SK was writing these things.  I don't know that it was in publication order; in fact, that seems unlikely.  There were some common themes between this one and Cujo, the most notable of which was the fact that the father was ultimately helpless to aid his child, despite his best intentions (and in this case, the mother of his child).  The reason that this seems particularly pertinent is that the next book is The Gunslinger, which was one that SK worked on for a very long time, dating back to 1970 in fact.  Yet it also has some common themes with this and other contemporaneous works (running, for instance).  Look for a new post soon, I suspect that The Gunslinger will go quickly.