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Attention: Contains spoilers if you haven't read
The Gunslinger,
The Drawing of the Three,
The Waste Lands, and
Wizard and Glass.
I made up my mind to enter Roland's world and his
quest for the Dark Tower last June, already knowing that the series
was complete (I think I wouldn't have bothered without this
knowledge, there's nothing worse than getting caught in a good story
and not knowing if the author will eventually complete it). I was
hoping to wait a few months in between books, and not to find myself
in a state of withdrawal and without the next book close at hand.
Well, I didn't succeed, here we are, January of 2004, and I have
just completed Wolves of the Calla, and have to wait until August to
know how the story will go on...
I won't go into a summary of the first volumes
of the Dark Tower, since you can read them in the previous reviews,
but as I did before, I will sum up the previous volume.
Wizard
and Glass brings us not much closer to the Tower in time or
space, since after
stumping Blaine the Mono with a riddle and forcing him to stop at
the terminus, the ka-tet finds itself in Topeka, Kansas, in a world
devastated by the super flu (that Constant Reader will have
recognized as the world of The Stand). Here Roland finally
tells the story of the first love of his life, fair Susan of Meijis,
who eventually died at the stake after Roland, and his friends Alain
and Cuthbert, managed to kill a good number of the Farson's men.
(Farson, the "Good Man", is a harrier who brings blood and
destruction on his path) These men were breeding horses and
collecting oil for the Good Man's war effort. Roland brings back to
Gilead his sorrow and one of thirteen magical balls known as the bends o' the
rainbow. After the telling of the story, the ka-tet arrives in a
castle resembling the Wizard of Oz's, in which they are almost
killed by the tick-tock man (bad man who was saved by Marten at the end of
The Waste Lands), and after killing
him, they meet
Marten himself (aka the ageless stranger, aka Randall Flagg), who
forces Roland to confront his past and to let his friends witness
it: the ball makes Susannah, Jake and Eddie travel through time and
space and witness the death of Gabrielle Deschain, Roland's mother.
By a trick of that same ball, in the past, Roland thought he was
seeing Rhea of the Coös behind his mother's bedroom door, a terrible
witch and main responsible for Susan's death. Roland shot and
realized too late that he killed his own mother. After confronting
this event, Roland and his ka-tet are allowed to find the path of
the beam again, and to follow it in Roland's world once again...
Wolves of the Calla begins more or less
where Wizard and Glass leaves off. The ka-tet approaches
Calla-Bryn-Sturgis, a farming village inhabited by mostly charming
people who would live peacefully, if it wasn't for "wolves"
coming from neighboring Thunderclap every generation or so. Each
time, the wolves kidnap children, one of every set of twins (Calla
people have mostly twins, for some reason), and a terrible fate
awaits the poor unfortunates. Tian Jaffords, one of the villagers,
wants too stand up against the wolves, whose arrival is predicted by
helpful robot, Andy, a still-functioning machine from the time of
the Old Ones. Father Callahan, an old man arrived some years before
in the Calla, convinces some villagers to ask Roland and his ka-tet
for help (their approach has been reported by the same Andy).
Meanwhile, the ka-tet wonders about a
mysterious number nineteen that seems to cross their path pretty
often, they develop new worries about the famous rose waiting in the
vacant lot in Manhattan and learn about a "traveling" method named
todash. All of them seem to harbor secrets of their own in Wolves
of the Calla, mostly Roland who suspects something about
Susannah and the child she bears.
Will their ka-tet be destroyed by this
secrecy? Will they succeed helping the Calla people with their
wolves problem and at what cost? And if so, will it bring them
closer to the Tower? These are some of the questions that are
answered in Wolves of the Calla, and some more will be
raised. Wolves of the Calla interweaves different
stories, all connected to the tower and also connected to one
another. Among other things, fans of Stephen King will find a sequel
to Salem's Lot, and learn the story of Pere Callahan (I
particularly loved this story, that some seem to have found boring.
I will never hear Someone Saved My Life Tonight again without
thinking of it!). Once
again, I can only praise this series and this particular volume,
since it kept a steady pace, and constantly kept me on edge. Perhaps
the most satisfying books in the series so far. In
On Writing,
King complains that in interviews, he is never asked about the
language. Since King's books are considered popular literature, no
critic actually bothers looking closely at the language itself, and
focuses on the story instead. Well, in The Dark Tower, it
becomes evident that King is a words lover. The various speeches
used in In-World, Mid-World and End-World, the colloquialisms,
Roland's misunderstandings and misspellings (the tack-sees, fottergrafs and other
Magda-seen) are proof enough that King is a master of language as
well as a good story-teller...
Attention! What follows contains spoilers and
is only for people who have read Wolves of the Calla (also
contains hints about how I imagine the ending of the series).
Mostly, I read other reviews after having
written my own. Sometimes, rarely, either when I am at a loss about
what to say (which is rare indeed or otherwise I would have quit
writing reviews), I will read some reviews to give me somewhere to
start. I also do that when what I am going to write is so clear in
my head that I know I won't be influenced in any way by other
reviews. The latter applies to Wolves of the Calla. I would
like to react, however, to what I read on some amazon.com reviews.
People were shocked both by references to pop culture (Star Wars,
Wizard of Oz and mostly recent references like the reference
to Harry Potter), and by the intrusion of the author himself
and by his habit to refer to his own previous works. These people
put this on account of King's gigantic ego. These same people claim
to be constant reader of Mr. King... Come on, folks, you must be
kidding me? Read all by Mr. King and haven't understood where he is
going with it yet? When one has read such books as Misery or
The Dark-Half (which are NOT Dark Tower-related by the way,
at least not story-related), one probably has the slightest idea
where all this is going? One knows what King likes to talk about
behind the facade, what became his obsession: writing... King dropped many hints
along the way about what we can expect, in his
fictions, non-fictions and in interviews he gave about the DT books.
Not that it will please everybody, of course, some will be furious,
but personally, I think what awaits us is an elegant (albeit
spectacular and action-packed...) conclusion for a writer whose
stories tend to address more profound issues than mere gory tales...
Rating:
© Discussing Books, 01/05/04
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