| The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (2003) | ||||||||
| Stephen King | ||||||||
| Viking, 231 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Matthew Peckham
With the exception of a growing writer's fondness for the occasional adverb, the writing in the original version of The Gunslinger was
strong, the voice clear and poignant, the tale gripping and mature. So why revise? Simple. Because, to quote Mark Twain, "The difference
between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Though the protagonist's quest
stands uncompleted at the end of the first book, the tale nevertheless had the distant almost detached mythic feel of a standalone fable in a
way that none of the subsequent books do. The emphasis in this first version of The Gunslinger is on the journey -- not the
quest's end, and Roland the gunslinger's journey is nearer in the first version to an inexplicable Sisyphean labor that embraces itself
for its own romantic sake, than something which demands an archetypal fireworks finale. King may have sketched out much of the road in book
one, but he didn't find its pace until book two. Thus, in King's retrospective words, "the beginning was out of sync with the ending."
The tale concerns a world perhaps parallel to our own (we are never told outright), in which Roland Deschain of Gilead, perhaps the last
gunslinger, is hunting the "man in black" through a fantastically bleak geographic nightmare of dying towns, sweltering deserts, and arid
mountainscapes. A gunslinger is a sort of flintlock samurai, a mystical knight with superhuman gunfighting skills and Epictetian mental
discipline. We are told enough of Roland's adolescence to suppose that, vamping off the Round Table motif of Arthurian legend (King makes
reference to King Arthur at one point), a gunslinger's purpose is to "uphold love and light." Roland's world has soured, starting as far as
we know when he was very young. The world, we're told and reminded of throughout, "has moved on," which means that the laws of physics
have begun to deteriorate. Time has been deformed or warped, the poles appear to be shifting due to unstable magnetic forces, and everything
is in an advanced state of decay. Along the way, Roland encounters a resurrected drug addict, a thunderous bible-thumping woman pregnant
with a demon, a boy who has somehow been transported to Roland's world from our own earth in the late 20th century and who becomes
Roland's companion, a sexually libidinous demon oracle, and an army of subterranean mutants.
Roland is pursuing the man in black because he believes that at the center of time and space exists a tower, a black pylon that is somehow the
linchpin of reality. Something has corrupted the tower, and Roland intends to fix it, though how or the nature of what such a confrontation
entails (literal, figurative) is not revealed. All we're sure of is that Roland's path to the tower is through the man in black.
The revised edition is a radically different experience, though the framework of the tale is the same. King has added a prefatory quote
from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel that is appropriate in its recollection of alienation with the line "o lost, and by the wind
grieved, ghost, come back again." It also may act as a bookend to something new that the man in black tells Roland near the end.
"What do you mean, resume? I never left off."
The most sweeping changes occur at the level of basic sentence construction. King takes a phrase like "standing to the sky for what might
have been parsecs in all directions" and improves it to "standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions." Nearly every
adverb has been hunted down with merciless zeal and purged. There were several spots in the original where King would flip adverbs with
subject and verb, e.g. "onward, he plodded." These have all been changed so they read straight, e.g. "he plodded onward." The literal use
of semi-colons has also been toned down, so that "white; blinding; waterless;" becomes "it was white and blinding and waterless." The narrative
voice has been smoothed over so that sentences seem longer, the inner monologue jumps less skittish, and a great deal of exposition has
been added identifying specific places, like In-World, Mid-World, and Out-World (none of which were in the original text). Names of
people and events that occur in the latter books now appear here as well.
Plot seeds that were planted in the original have been modified, bits that King refers to in the foreword as "a great many errors and
false starts, particularly in light of the volumes that followed." For example, in the original, Farson was the name of a town -- in the
later books, it becomes the name of a man who engineers the fall of Gilead, Roland's childhood home (this has been corrected by renaming
the town). Roland's relationships to his father, mother, and his father's court adviser are clarified, as is the relationship of the man in
black to Roland. There are even a few additional scenes which tie directly to plot ideas King introduced in the latter books, and which
now make sense for Roland to be thinking about or referencing here. Not counting the grammatical changes, the added material amounts to
roughly thirty-five pages, or about nine-thousand words, resulting in a slightly longer and more balanced story. While it no longer sits
as comfortably on its own, it now fits snugly with the successive books, which was King's intention all along.
If you've never read The Gunslinger, this is the edition you should get. Is it better than the original? Without question, though
as noted above, primarily because the story integrates better with the latter volumes. If on the other hand you've already read the
original, you will still find the revised edition indispensable for its new revelations which affect the continuity of the latter
books. Purists who elect to read both will find it fascinating to note how an author like King went about revising something he wrote
some three decades earlier, not so much the new details as the sentences he changes, the scenes he lengthens or shortens, and so on.
Whatever category you fit into, give this book a look -- it will be the series he's remembered for, and the final three volumes are just around the corner.
Matthew Peckham is the pen name of Matthew Peckham. He holds a Master's Degree in English Creative Writing and is currently employed by a railroad. For more about Matthew, check out mattpeckham.com |
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