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I am a huge Stephen King's fan. However, I had
never gotten around to reading his epic in 7 volumes (4 published), The Dark Tower. When I
read the short story The "Little Sister of Eluria" in
Everything's Eventual, I
knew I wanted to know more about Roland and the Dark Tower. When it
was confirmed that Stephen King would retire from writing and that
the books he would write before retiring would be the remaining Dark Tower
books, I was sure I would eventually read the series... And so sure was I that I would enjoy the series that
I bought the 4 paperbacks published so far... Was I right to do
so? The story begins with these words:
"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger
followed". The gunslinger, whom we
will come to know later by the name of Roland, is after a man known
to us as the man in black. The man in black knows something
about the object of Roland's quest: the Dark Tower. Who Roland and
the man in black are is what we will progressively discover. They
live in a world that is not ours, a world that has moved on, in a
universe that is explained at the end (as well as why the world moves
on). Surprisingly, their world shares a lot of similarities with
ours, like the Bible, the legend of Arthur and the song Hey Jude,
amongst others things...
Many flashbacks tell us more about Roland, his
childhood, the world as it was before it moved on,
Roland's training and coming-of-age. We also learn about the
dreadful events that took place in the town of Tull, where the man
in black left a deadly trap for Roland...
Soon Roland meets a young boy, a boy who died
on earth and was brought to this world by the man in black. Together
Roland and Jake will face many dangers such as an oracle and slow
mutants, before the final encounter with the man in black...
The Gunslinger is very hard to get into
and confusing to follow, it has a dreamlike quality that is
sometimes exhausting. King begins his novel in the middle of the
action without any descriptions of the world or of the characters.
The background information is sparse, most of it in the final
chapter. Of course, few is explained even then, as this book is the
first of a series. It takes a lot of faith in the quality of the
series to go further in the book. However, the ending is excellent and
makes up for the rest. In an afterword, King claims to have written
this novel over 12 years, beginning when he was in college, and this
probably explains the inequality of its chapters. Obviously, King
has improved his storytelling a lot over the years, and knew
eventually how to write a powerful ending.
Although King's Dark Tower has been inspired
by a Robert Browning's poem (Childe Roland), The Gunslinger
reminded me a little bit of Frodo's journey in
The Lord of the Rings.
And even if King claims to have forgotten other poems he studied in
college, The Gunslinger has some resonances of W. B. Yeats's
The Second Coming... Even when I struggled to read on, some
parts were intriguing enough (like the part with the oracle who
describes the three) to make me want to read
The Drawing of the Three. Also, I have often noticed that
Stephen King is better at writing big books (500+ pages), when he can expand the
characterization as well as create an atmosphere. His weakest novels
in my opinion have been his shortest, the size of the other books of the
series published so far is therefore encouraging...
It won't probably be too long before I read
and review The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three,
because despite the critics I just made, I am already hooked...
Rating: 
Just after writing this review I stumbled on a
Stephen King's interview on Amazon.com. King says that he
rewrote The Gunslinger (it will be published this summer), because
he realized that he wrote it too young, "it was trying too hard to
be something really, really important" he says, and he decided
recently to "simplify it". I guess King would agree with my review
then! Too bad I didn't wait a bit, I would have read the new
version...
© Discussing Books, 06/06/2003 |
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