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.