The Gunslinger, by Stephen King
Jun. 18th, 2019 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeThe man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
This is partly a reread -- a year or so ago I read a new copy of the book, which has King's revised text, but this week I read the original printing, pleasingly found in a newly-opened second hand bookshop betweentimes. I hadn't read any of the later books, and my memories had dimmed, so that while I was reading I was only aware of a single major difference. Both versions stand up solidly, as independent reading experiences; this second reading has me going right on into book two, but I don't know if that's the text or the moment.
In both versions, the book tells the episodic pursuit described in its first sentence, the man in black a wry sorcerer who laughs at the bitter taste of the world (and may or may not himself be one of its poisoners), and the gunslinger, stolidly monomaniacal survivor of a destroyed order which might have been noble and might only have thought itself so. (And which I just realised is a version of Camelot. Huh). As the pursuit goes through its episodes (written by King as a series of novellas over the course of eleven odd years), it becomes increasingly unclear whether the traps left by the man in black are intended to stop the gunslinger, or to change him, or to damn him by his own intransigence. King is good at logistics, good at the physical details of events, but fairly often he abandons them: it does not seem as though much in this book could have gone differently. Fate weighs in. Before I started this book I read the beginning of Rachel Pollack's The Child Eater, and, while trying to work out why I didn't especially want to read on (I have loved books by Rachel Pollack), thought, "It's the sense of destinedness. None of the people have time to be people, they're too busy having fates." I didn't find that a problem with The Gunslinger, because the fates and the people don't seem separable. The gunslinger has yet to be given a choice which presents two options he could take either of).
I feel like I should be quibbling with this book more than I actually want to. It's clunky. It rests a lot of its power on asserted significance -- the landscape is full of superlatives, and the gunslinger is described using the word 'unimaginative' more often than he's actually shown displaying a lack of imagination, and if there are only the vaguest of hints yet as to what the gunslinger's quest actually entails, it's at least partly because King himself didn't know either. It surprises me, the extent to which I don't want to quibble, the extent to which I care. I don't know how much of that caring comes from my knowledge of how big the series is, and with what slow pains it was written. There aren't many long-delayed epic fantasy series I know about where the first book took eleven years to write. But the book itself has serious narrative undertow, too. While a lot is asserted, the minor characters have an opaque liveliness: people only glimpsed. And the desert, apotheosis of all deserts, where only devil-grass grows -- people holding on tight to the ragged edge of life -- the cyclopean mountains --infrastructure from some great society, possibly ours, long-abandoned and falling to pieces... along with the sense that after one book, the possibilities of what's to follow are almost entirely unconstrained, and that Stephen King himself was excited to find out. I'm sold.
(Also, I took this off the shelf after reading various bits of Dreamwidth enthusing about the gunslinger, Roland, so I came in primed to like him, and I do, even though after his actions in this book, I wouldn't use the words 'likeable' or 'good').
I am not sold, yet, on what being a gunslinger means, violence toward children being a right and proper spur for them to go out and be nobly violent themselves; and I am not sold on the aura of -- guilt? certainly danger -- which characterises most lust and sex, as regards the three female minor characters (there are currently no female major characters, though I'm already up to the bit of book two where that changes). I'm not unwilling to be sold them, I'm just watching those spaces in the series with interest to see what they do.
I can imagine why a later King might want to go back and integrate this book with what follows: having glanced through a comparison of what the differences between the editions actually are, the bulk of them seem to involve little bits of worldbuilding, putting in more hints that the gunslinger has specific cultural knowledge of a place not ours. I think I'd rather have the rough edges, because I like the sense that King is finding the story as he goes. (Also, the man in black is less nasty in this edition to the tune of one unpleasant mind game -- that's the one change I actually noticed, reading -- and I like him more that way, subtler, less cut-and-dried, but still just as inclined to think of pain and life as two equally good jokes). The landscape of the first edition doesn't feel worldbuilt, it doesn't even seem clear that it's set in a world, not one that could be mapped, anyway, or have its relationship to our world precisely defined. The world has, as is often remarked, moved on, but whether that's a description of societies collapsing, or people looking back toward youth, or a metaphysical event, isn't spelled out -- I suspect the answer may be 'all of the above.'
(And now I'm partway through book two, and confused as to why he didn't choose to revise it instead of the first one. It keeps going back and forth between bits I find interesting and compelling and bits where I look up from the page and go, "Really, Steven King?" More to follow).
This is partly a reread -- a year or so ago I read a new copy of the book, which has King's revised text, but this week I read the original printing, pleasingly found in a newly-opened second hand bookshop betweentimes. I hadn't read any of the later books, and my memories had dimmed, so that while I was reading I was only aware of a single major difference. Both versions stand up solidly, as independent reading experiences; this second reading has me going right on into book two, but I don't know if that's the text or the moment.
In both versions, the book tells the episodic pursuit described in its first sentence, the man in black a wry sorcerer who laughs at the bitter taste of the world (and may or may not himself be one of its poisoners), and the gunslinger, stolidly monomaniacal survivor of a destroyed order which might have been noble and might only have thought itself so. (And which I just realised is a version of Camelot. Huh). As the pursuit goes through its episodes (written by King as a series of novellas over the course of eleven odd years), it becomes increasingly unclear whether the traps left by the man in black are intended to stop the gunslinger, or to change him, or to damn him by his own intransigence. King is good at logistics, good at the physical details of events, but fairly often he abandons them: it does not seem as though much in this book could have gone differently. Fate weighs in. Before I started this book I read the beginning of Rachel Pollack's The Child Eater, and, while trying to work out why I didn't especially want to read on (I have loved books by Rachel Pollack), thought, "It's the sense of destinedness. None of the people have time to be people, they're too busy having fates." I didn't find that a problem with The Gunslinger, because the fates and the people don't seem separable. The gunslinger has yet to be given a choice which presents two options he could take either of).
I feel like I should be quibbling with this book more than I actually want to. It's clunky. It rests a lot of its power on asserted significance -- the landscape is full of superlatives, and the gunslinger is described using the word 'unimaginative' more often than he's actually shown displaying a lack of imagination, and if there are only the vaguest of hints yet as to what the gunslinger's quest actually entails, it's at least partly because King himself didn't know either. It surprises me, the extent to which I don't want to quibble, the extent to which I care. I don't know how much of that caring comes from my knowledge of how big the series is, and with what slow pains it was written. There aren't many long-delayed epic fantasy series I know about where the first book took eleven years to write. But the book itself has serious narrative undertow, too. While a lot is asserted, the minor characters have an opaque liveliness: people only glimpsed. And the desert, apotheosis of all deserts, where only devil-grass grows -- people holding on tight to the ragged edge of life -- the cyclopean mountains --infrastructure from some great society, possibly ours, long-abandoned and falling to pieces... along with the sense that after one book, the possibilities of what's to follow are almost entirely unconstrained, and that Stephen King himself was excited to find out. I'm sold.
(Also, I took this off the shelf after reading various bits of Dreamwidth enthusing about the gunslinger, Roland, so I came in primed to like him, and I do, even though after his actions in this book, I wouldn't use the words 'likeable' or 'good').
I am not sold, yet, on what being a gunslinger means, violence toward children being a right and proper spur for them to go out and be nobly violent themselves; and I am not sold on the aura of -- guilt? certainly danger -- which characterises most lust and sex, as regards the three female minor characters (there are currently no female major characters, though I'm already up to the bit of book two where that changes). I'm not unwilling to be sold them, I'm just watching those spaces in the series with interest to see what they do.
I can imagine why a later King might want to go back and integrate this book with what follows: having glanced through a comparison of what the differences between the editions actually are, the bulk of them seem to involve little bits of worldbuilding, putting in more hints that the gunslinger has specific cultural knowledge of a place not ours. I think I'd rather have the rough edges, because I like the sense that King is finding the story as he goes. (Also, the man in black is less nasty in this edition to the tune of one unpleasant mind game -- that's the one change I actually noticed, reading -- and I like him more that way, subtler, less cut-and-dried, but still just as inclined to think of pain and life as two equally good jokes). The landscape of the first edition doesn't feel worldbuilt, it doesn't even seem clear that it's set in a world, not one that could be mapped, anyway, or have its relationship to our world precisely defined. The world has, as is often remarked, moved on, but whether that's a description of societies collapsing, or people looking back toward youth, or a metaphysical event, isn't spelled out -- I suspect the answer may be 'all of the above.'
(And now I'm partway through book two, and confused as to why he didn't choose to revise it instead of the first one. It keeps going back and forth between bits I find interesting and compelling and bits where I look up from the page and go, "Really, Steven King?" More to follow).
