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.
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