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While waiting for The Dark Tower VI: The Song of
Susannah, I decided to do some Dark-Tower related reading. There
are not so many King's books left for me to discover, and I thought,
why not start with The Talisman... I think my previous
reluctance with The Talisman and its sequel Black House
came for the fact that these are not strictly Stephen King's
books... Well, I don't want to put the
blame on Straub since I have not read any of his books but one thing
is sure: The Talisman bored me... I wanted to like this novel
and I even liked it for a while. Its subject intrigued me: Jack
Sawyer, a twelve-year-old boy, has escaped with his sick mother, an
ex B-movies actress, to the Alhambra hotel, in a seaside resort in
New Hampshire. They are trying to escape "Uncle" Morgan Sloat,
former business partner of Jack's dead father. It is the off-season
and the place is deserted. Jack befriends Speedy Parker, a handyman
who makes repairs in a closed amusement park nearby. Soon Speedy,
who is not a mere handyman,
confirms Jack's suspicions that his mother is dying of cancer, and tells him that the only way to save her is to retrieve a
Talisman located in a hotel similar to the Alhambra, on the West
Coast. He will have to travel through America and also through a parallel
world, the Territories, in order to complete his quest. Jack recalls what he used to call
his
Daydreams but which are in fact the Territories: another world in
which he used to escape as a child, a brighter and purer world,
unspoiled and uncorrupted, a good world, but which is endangered by
an evil spreading quickly, and by the prospect of the death of its
sick queen; Laura DeLoessian...
As I said, the idea is interesting and so is the story itself, until about the middle of the novel. I
found out by reading reviews on amazon.com that people, that is, the
few who were not totally enthusiastic about the novel, found the
ending more entertaining than the beginning, they thought the pace
picked up... Well, I personally thought things were fine
before that: I liked the description of the Territories (I thought
more of the story should have happened in the Territories, I
would have liked to learn more about them and about the queen), I liked the idea of the
"Twinners" (look-alikes in our world and the Territories,
linked in several ways) but it ended up to be ultimately confusing
and poorly exploited. I also liked the idea of a young boy on
the roads with a quest to complete and many dangers awaiting him. I found the character
of Sunlight Gardener, the creepy preacher, and his home for the
wayward boys particularly entertaining...
Afterwards everything goes awry: I had to
struggle through the episode of the Thayer school, the trip west and
the end of the quest, that is, to struggle against sleepiness and
boredom. Whereas the first half is part fantasy and part adventure,
the second half is cheap horror: biting worms, horrible
mutants, gore galore... And whereas the book as a whole
reminded me at times of The Lord of the Rings and at other
times of The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende (published
the same year, strange coincidence...), the second part seemed like
a bad first draft of the Dark Tower, one which its author
should have been ashamed to let print: the Blasted lands
resembled the Waste lands, Morgan's banal train seems to have
inspired formidable Blaine the Mono, and worse of all, the Talisman
is described as "the nexus of all worlds", the exact words used to
define the dark tower in the DT books: I hope you have a good
explanation for this Mr. King, and in fact, I don't doubt you have an
excellent one, because I think I know where you are going with the
Dark Tower, and I just love the idea: still, it does not
excuse the many weaknesses of The Talisman...
What I usually relish in King's books is that
there is almost always a different reading that can be done: The
Dark-Half and Misery are really about the writer and his
responsibilities, The Dreamcatcher is about pain and sickness
as well as it is about aliens or friendship (remember it was written
after King's accident). I missed these finesses in The Talisman:
either I was unable to see subtler meanings, either they weren't
there. Of course it was a coming-of-age story, of a young boy who
loses his innocence but also discovers courage, loyalty, trust and friendship. I
think it was also
meant as a tribute to nineteenth-century writers such as Charles
Dickens and Mark Twain who wrote about teenage boys (there is a
single intrusion of the narrator at the end of a chapter, which
meaning, beside the fact that it is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century
novel, I did not grasp: it puzzled me for a
while I must say...). But all in all, this story lacks subtlety and
even worse, it lacks King's particularly discernible sense of humor,
which I learned to appreciate... There are some touches of it at
the beginning but they soon vanish to leave a dull storytelling and
finally, and even duller story...
Well, I did not like The Talisman, but
this won't prevent me from reading Black House. There are very few
King's books which I did not like, so I will give a chance to The
Talisman's sequel. Also, seventeen years have passed between
both books and styles evolve, and maybe in the meantime the two
authors have developed more skill at working together. Finally, when
King (and Straub) wrote Black House, The Dark Tower
series was well on his way to completion and I have hope some loose
ends will tie...
Rating:  
© Discussing Books, 03/26/2004
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