Stephen King - The Dark Tower series

Published: Between 1970 and 2004

Like the earlier ones, which deserve it, the later books in Stephen King’s sprawling seven book epic, The Dark Tower, garner four or five star ratings on Amazon. It’s anyone’s guess why. Perhaps readers are too embarrassed, having struggled through the last few thousand pages, to admit having disliked it? Despite the positive user reviews, I cannot find any good reason to recommend this overblown saga to anyone, unless you’re a die-hard King fan or are doing a lengthy sentence in one of those prisons where government cuts have abolished the library.

                Yet it all started so well. The Dark Tower series (comprising seven books: The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower) started life as a magazine-serialised novella (latterly published as the first book in the series) back in about 1970 that introduced us to an intriguing figure, Roland the Gunslinger. The desert landscape and hitching-post townships in which we first meet Roland initially have an Old-West aura, but references to 20^th Century songs such as ‘Hey Jude’, mutant animals and atomic powered water pumps soon suggest something more malevolent and gone-wrong on this world (things have ‘moved on’ as we are endlessly reminded). I was swept along as much by the instinct to hunt for clues to the fate of this apparently once-advanced society as I was by King’s effortlessly deft writing.

                Early on we learn two things about Roland: that he is a ‘gunslinger’, a kind of peacekeeper / lawmaker; and that he is on a quest for the Dark Tower (of which more later). We subsequently learn that Roland’s world is only one of many, because the universe consists of different dimensions around its literal and metaphorical centre-point, the imperilled Dark Tower which Roland is driven to both reach and protect. It’s possible, by means of varying degrees of danger, to cross between the worlds, and in this way, in the second book, Roland draws his fellow, initially reluctant questers: New York junkie Eddie, multiple-personality-disorder Odetta, and more-perceptive-than-his-years Jake (all from ‘our’ world). Together they’re Roland’s ka-tet (yeah, King pretty much runs riot with the made-up words thing from this point onwards). The second and third books – the high point in my opinion – pluck us unsuspectingly from the relatively slow-paced desert trek of The Gunslinger and plunge us headlong into real-world New York of the 1980s and 1960s respectively, as Roland must get to grips with Eddie and Odetta’s world and coerce them, via whatever means, to join his quest. The next thing I knew (and, at the speed I read them, it really did feel that way) they’re fighting to escape the post-apocalyptic, one-time high tech metropolis of Lud together in The Waste Lands, one of King’s best-paced novels.

                The second and third books are exciting, imaginative and action packed, equal to any of King’s best-known novels. Number four, Wizard and Glass, is essentially a self-contained story of Roland’s lost love – diverting enough, but after the gathering pace of the previous three I felt like the series had gone off the boil a bit, and never really regains its momentum. Tellingly, this coincides – from this instalment onwards – with King’s attempts to flesh out his worldview and what the Dark Tower’s really all about. I’d argue that he never properly succeeds in this (probably because he was making up the story as he went along, initially) and the whole work, as a result, feels like less than the sum of its parts. Despite the subsequent novels getting interminably longer, I never felt like I got to know or develop any real affection for the characters in the way that I did in, say, It (still King’s finest work). Odetta (Susannah) in particular becomes a bit of a non-entity after her dual-personality problems are resolved.

                Although less compulsive than the earlier novels, Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla are at least coherent, engaging, and usually strike a reasonable balance between the main series plot arc, and their own individual stories. Yes, the self-indulgent references to King’s other work become more frequent as he tries to use the Dark Tower series to link up and underpin the rest of his work (basically, all of his non-Dark Tower stories take place within the Dark Tower macroverse, which explains all the supernatural stuff) and yes, this can seem clunky at times. But it doesn’t prepare you for the literary kick-in-the-nuts that King saves until (almost) last: he writes himself in. Yes, really. And not in the wry, ironic, (potentially) clever breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of way, either. It’s in the getting his own characters to save his life in the (actual) near-fatal road accident in around 2000 kind of way. Because on one level of the Dark Tower, all of it is a story in a Stephen King book, making him like a sort of god. Oh dear. It would be wrong to condemn the entire series for this remarkably hubristic indulgence. But it’s also true that this element could, and should, have all been cut without any harm at all being done to the rest of the story.

                Even leaving King’s own appearance aside, the last few books (the final one in particular) constantly feel like they ought to have been at least 20% shorter (hey, it’s actually more like 40%), via the removal of irrelevant scenes or chapters, and the paring-down on wafflingly unnecessary description of everything (minor characters, buildings, snow, rusty bathtub floors, everything). When not over-writing in this way, King is still capable of producing top-notch prose, but sadly the latter Dark Tower books miss out on this treatment. You can almost imagine him, past caring but doggedly forcing himself to bang out X thousand words per day, churning this stuff out. The in-references become tiresome rather than rewarding, leading to the suspicion that King is substituting inspiration for self-derivation. It’s no coincidence that King’s best books in recent years, minor gems like Joyland, owe nothing to either the Dark Tower macroverse or his earlier works. The ‘boss’ baddie, meanwhile, The Crimson King (the one to whom many of the villains we meet along the way to the Dark Tower are mere servants) is ultimately disappointing when he finally shows up. As for the real conclusion – reaching the Dark Tower itself – well, I’m not going to let anyone plough increasingly drudgingly through a seven-novel fantasy series only to have the end spoiled for them. At any rate, it’s probably best left down to the ‘make up your own mind’ school of thought.

                There’s an almost inevitable disappointment to finishing a major series of books; they almost never satisfy in the way they built themselves up to. But at their best, they should leave you feeling bereft and wondering what could take their place in your life. Not The Dark Tower, though. I was just grateful to be done with the damn thing. The lasting impression is that the series was at its best in its earlier days, when King had little idea where it was heading. Even so, I don’t doubt that, with a bit of judicial fat-trimming in some places and fleshing out in others, this wouldn’t be a more satisfying and coherent read. But is it King’s magnus-opus, his crowning achievement? I don’t think so. The Dark Tower (and its sodding Beams) ought to stand as a testimony to the practical truth that all authors, no matter how successful, famous or prolific, must still have their work subjected to the attentions of a dispassionate, hard-nosed editor.

Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary

Published: 1998

So, no book reviews for a while, then. This may have had something to do with the twin addictions of the TV series Breaking Bad, which ought to come with a government warning, and Stephen King’s sprawling, seven book magnus opus, The Dark Tower (review forthcoming when I’ve finished it). But then my birthday, for an age I’d not care to mention, rolled around again, and suddenly I was inundated with books from family members and friends who know what really gets me going. One of these was The Rum Diary.

                Despite the well-worn maxim about not judging a book by its cover, I was practically infatuated with this one before I even opened it. In the black-and-white picture, a young, toned, shorts-wearing man sips a glass of something (rum, the title suggests) whilst making notes on a journalist’s pad on his lap. He’s got his feet up on a table containing empty beer bottles, and in the background is a concrete hotel block, peppered with balconies and fringed with palm trees. From the perspective of another grim Cumbrian winter, I couldn’t wait to start it. The knowledge that it was written back in the early 1960s, but not published until relatively recently, added to the appeal. I wasn’t disappointed. It turned out to be one of those novels so good you don’t want to begin another one afterwards. But the life portrayed in the novel turned out to be far more nuanced and ambiguous than the cover photo suggested.

                Paul Kemp, a vagrant journalist in his early thirties, has pitched up in San Juan, Peurto Rico’s capital, in the late ‘fifties, for a job on an English-language newspaper. He doesn’t speak any Spanish, or for that matter have any significant journalistic talent that we can discern. But he knows the right places to get a decent, inexpensive shot of rum and a hamburger, and that seems to be more important. Wall to wall heavy boozing features strongly, along with a pleasing 1950s disregard to driving drunk, turning up to work drunk, or doing practically anything without a few beers in an exotic land where “men sweat twenty-four hours a day.” Most of the itinerant hacks who write the paper don’t wander in to the newsroom until noon, and do most of their work in the bar. I have to admit that Thompson’s seductive imagery and sparse prose initially made me yearn for Kemp’s carefree life in the sun.

                But despite Hunter S. Thompson’s well known ‘Gonzo’ trappings, the novel is surprisingly ambivalent about the lifestyle. Kemp arrives in San Juan the worse for wear from drinking on the journey, echoing unpleasant memories I have of arriving in foreign lands both jet lagged and hung over. On more than one occasion, in rare sober moments, he wonders if all the booze might be getting the better of him. Aside from a couple of drinking buddies – Kemp has no real friends in the story – considerable contempt is shown for the other sozzled hacks at the News. Fired journalist Yeamon is ridiculed as messed-up and incompetent, and abusive of his beautiful girlfriend to boot. Masochistic over-drinker and whoremonger Moberg is condemned as ‘disgusting’ and ‘degenerate’. If anything, the author – for surely this is at least a semi-autobiographical work – is saying that hard drinking is only cool if you can handle it and keep your head, as Kemp mostly does, but few others manage.

                From a sociological point of view, the novel depicts a pre-globalisation third-world country on the cusp of being converted into one big resort for American tourists, of whom Kemp is suitably scornful. But at the same time, with this process incomplete, it is currently a playground for Kemp’s type of Westerner. Meanwhile, there are no significant Peurto Rican characters in the story; where they do appear, they are portrayed as violent, impulsive and, in one scene, sexually predatory. In a sense, these elements mark it out as a product of a previous era.

                The plot itself follows the fortunes of Kemp, and by association that of his acquaintances and the newspaper. One major plotline involves Kemp’s stewing lust for the alluring but naive Chenalt, Yeamon’s girlfriend. But in the same vein as the not dissimilar 1950s counterculture classic, On The Road, the plotline of The Rum Diary is less important than the overall atmosphere, the sense of place, that makes it so alluring.

                If you’re anything like me, it’s worth remembering that Kemp’s life – if it ever was indeed possible – certainly isn’t now in our interconnected world, where you need more than the false claim of a connection to The New York Times to make it as a journalist in the tropics. At any rate, in the latter part of the novel the footloose Kemp, who has spent his twenties tramping around the world from job to job, admits to yearning for symbols of stable adulthood, such as his own apartment and a car.

                The Rum Diary is one of those books that, whilst reading it, you find yourself wanting to live it. But, like so many novels, from fantasy to travelogue, it’s always worth simultaneously being realistic about the flaws in the world it portrays. There may be plenty of rum in this novel, but there’s barely a hangover in sight.