| The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands | ||||||||
| Stephen King | ||||||||
| Viking, 422 pages | ||||||||
|
A review by Matthew Peckham
In books one and two, we get the pitch for an epic hero quest to rival Edmund Spenser, E.R. Eddison, Kenneth Morris, and yes,
even Robert Jordan's porky über-oeuvre. It won't dethrone Jordan, who is, at this point, way past 6,000 pages into, it seems,
a bid to secure the fattest fantasy in history. (Note to self: call Guinness and report the lunatic.) But we're still
talking a Tolkien-and-Tolstoy-drop-kicking 4,500 page chipped, cooked, and pulped lumber freight train. What worked so well in
the first two books was but the appetizer, the pre-show lobby repartee, where motives and characters and plots are watered and
fed before the horses saddle-up and finally saunter off into the dusk.
Not that King has taken too long to get us here. The first book still stands as a nearly self-contained narrative (the revised
edition integrates much better with the rest of the books now), and the second book is an action-packed interlude that develops
characters simmered in Jungian archetypes and baked in Campbellian mysticism. A brief summary: Roland Deschain of Gilead (French
des meaning "of" and chain meaning "chain," ergo "Roland of chains"), the world's last gunslinger, is questing for the Dark
Tower, a reality linchpin that -- infected by sickness or wrongness -- is slowly shutting down the universe, described by Roland
as the world "moving on." The story was inspired in part by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" but
picks up literary and pop-culture allusions like a corybantic tumbleweed. By the end of the second book, Roland has "drawn"
two additional companions from New York in the late 20th century (think "inter-dimensional tarot") and recovered from
blood poisoning. The final pages leave the ka-tet (a word meaning "one from many") along the Western Sea, traveling into
unfamiliar hill and tree country.
The Waste Lands opens somewhere north of the beach in the Great West Woods. (Directions and distances change frequently,
deliberately, due to the breaking down of reality.) Roland has been training his two new companions to become gunslingers in
a relatively sheltered pine forest, giving King the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and reveal a few secrets. After teasing
readers for fourteen years, the first third of the book is suddenly brimming with explanations. It's as if King suddenly
realized the story was too mystically oblique and needed some time on straight rails. We spent the first book simply trying
to figure out what was going on, and much of the second marooned on a western beach to bring in more protagonists; the third
delivers us to Mid-World and sets us on track, literally -- as Roland refers to it, the "path of the beam."
Scribbling diagrams in the dirt, Roland explains to his companions that the fabric of time and space are held together by
six intersecting beams; at their center point is the Dark Tower, a kind of metaphysical bolt sustaining the order and anatomy
of the universe -- follow a beam to its intercross and you will come to the Tower itself.
"The Great Old Ones didn't make the world, but they did re-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they
are the seeds of the world's destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort . . . lines which
bind . . . and hold . . ."
While the story is still vitally indebted to the Robert Browning poem, the title of the third book is unsubtly intended to
invoke T.S. Eliot's 1922, "The Waste Land." The quote from the poem at the front of the book is the infamous stanza that
ends "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." And so King does, linking the bleakness of Browning's poem's middle sections
in which the landscape is both an object and a presence, with the grotesqueries of Eliot's gelded cyclicality. Like the Fisher
King of Eliot's poem, Roland's world has suffered a fundamental breach, a mythical cleaving of lord from land, the sickness of
the king and the blight upon his body -- the earth itself. We learn in Robin Furth's The Dark Tower: A Concordance that Roland
is the thirtieth in a side bloodline descended from Arthur Eld of the White. You guessed it -- Arthur Eld is King Arthur (or
someone much like him -- he is depicted in King's mythology as "riding a white stallion and brandishing his great sword
Excalibur"). Coupled with Eliot, the intimation is that part of how Roland will heal his world, as the present incarnation
of the Fisher King, is by somehow fundamentally healing himself.
More evidence that King is grafting the rules and regulations of science fiction onto the story appears with follow-up on a time
paradox created in the previous books.
"Not divided. Doubled."
The second half propels Roland's party along the beam through Mid-World toward a distant and massive city called Lud. Along
the way more questions are answered, and symbolic dreams had (King uses dream sequences frequently in the series to
foreshadow), and the journey is punctuated by bizarre encounters with surreal technology and relics from our world like a
crashed World War II Focke-Wulf, and some insanely powerful speakers that blast ZZ Top's "Velcro Fly" intermittently through
the streets of Lud. At one point, we discover that one of King's most notorious characters from his other novels has found
his way into the central story here. The final confrontation between a deranged sentient monorail called "Blaine the Mono"
culminates in, of all things, a riddling contest. The ending is the sort of cliffhanger one loves for its poignancy,
despises for its audacity (recall there was a six year lapse between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass), then accepts
because it's all such satisfying, thought-provoking entertainment.
The new Viking edition collects all of the original illustrations by artist Ned Dameron, who brings a kind of rugged realism
to the series that makes his depictions of the creatures in the waste lands itself doubly frightful. There are roughly twice
as many paintings here as in the previous two books, and we also get a lot of two-page spreads that open up the landscape to
the mind's eye, and one in particular that seems to translate Roland as a Clint Eastwood / Marlon Brando lovechild. The one
complaint I have about the Viking editions (available in both paperback and hardcover) is that the pictures appear spaced
so out of whack with the story that you're often given an image from an important scene dozens of pages before it
happens. No doubt this was done to accommodate a font change that drops the page count from the original's 509 to just 422.
With the release of the fifth book, Wolves of the Calla and the latter two coming in July 2004 and
November 2004 respectively, there's never been a better time to jump into this series. Drawing from some of his richest
books like Insomnia and The Stand, The Dark Tower series continues to prove itself out as an
epic worth the attention of readers and critics alike. There's no telling whether he'll pull it all off (King often has
problems with endings), but if he does, one hopes he'll receive the critical acclaim he deserves.
Matt Peckham, a Nebraska native who received his M.A. in Creative Writing from Creighton University in 2001, is a fiction writer, freelance journalist and contributing editor to the world's best-selling PC Games magazine, PC Gamer. Matt is currently working on his first book, a scholarly guide to Mike Carey's Eisner-nominated Lucifer series. For more about Matthew, check out mattpeckham.com |
|||||||
 
|
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2013 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide