Wizard and Glass, by Steven King
Oct. 7th, 2019 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeBook four of the Dark Tower series.
This feels like a book by the writer I'd always vaguely assumed King was, based on leaflemming's descriptions of books I still haven't read. The Gunslinger is assured and atypical, pared down to essentials. In the second and third books, though there's plenty which works for me, King will keep on reaching visibly for an effect, and I experience not the effect but the reaching. He has the bones but not the flesh. In this book he seems to come back around to the assuredness of the first book on a larger scale: when he reaches for something, he finds it. He tells his central story quite slowly, lighting and shading it with quantities of half-defined threats and promises. This means that his ability to describe people and places, his ability to put poetry into the small scenes on which things hinge, is crucial, and he's gotten better at it.
If his craft has grown to support his ambitions, I also think his ambitions in this book are smaller. Commenting on my post about the second bookskygiants described King's choice to write Detta/Odetta as an example of a writer "...really valiantly squaring up to their own blind spots and weaknesses as an author and .... kind of getting pummeled by them?" which I agree with. Wizard and Glass is a love story and a story of small-town corruption and evil; on both those fronts it feels to me like King turning squarely away from his blind spots and weaknesses in favor of his default settings.
(About those default settings: wow, this book has the most Evil Witchy Witch I've seen in a very long time. I'm so used to subversions of the Evil Witchy Witch that it's almost startling to read one played for maximum cackle. She is petty, everyone distrusts her with good reason but relies on her with worse reason, she envies youth, she's old and distorted and sexually creepy*, her familiar is a mutant cat... The fact that the chapter which begins by introducing her ended up being the chapter which made me think, 'Okay, I was drifting away from bothering about these books but it's one in the morning now and I don't want to stop reading' fits well with my overall feelings about the series. I go back and forth between 'the cake is burnt to carbon but the icing is nice' and 'this is one of the best cakes I have ever tasted but you have to cut the top off because someone used baking soda instead of icing sugar.')
The book is tied to the cycle of the seasons, as they unfold in a farming community -- I love the way this world doesn't just have one man in the moon, but a different one for each month, twelve figures coming and going in the same pattern of craters. Also, most of the book is a story Roland is telling, in circumstances where he should have neither the time nor the knowledge he needs to tell it. When you tell a story in this universe, you change the rules. Which is both an example of King doing whatever the hell he likes without bothering too much about deep coherence, and a bit of structure and worldbuilding evocative enough to make the back of my neck tingle.
The protagonists and antagonists spend a lot of time saying they are playing a complex game with each other, but it's a game with about six total moves taken over some hundreds of pages. I feel like this the way I sometimes feel about Gandalf -- for all the thinking and worrying he does during The Lord of the Rings, for example, when trying to solve the problem of Denethor, he never shows his working, and I don't always feel as though actual thought is occurring as opposed to plot-mandated pause. I am fairly sure the characters in this one could have just bloody well done something a hundred pages before they do. But the heart of the book is Roland and Susan falling in love and negotiating their social positions, obligations, ideas of sexual morality, ideas of honor and fate.
And the ultimate withheld promise of the series fills in slowly. Only a little more is known about the Dark Tower itself than was known at the start of the series, but its possible meanings are filling in more and more behind it -- because the series is built of repeating patterns, and I suspect the whole thing is going to end up shaped like one of its pieces. Insofar as it isn't going to end up shaped like a bag full of string.
*I was really pleased when two of the book's other villains got into a mutually fun and fulfilling love affair while remaining terrible people. It felt like a necessary counterweight.
This feels like a book by the writer I'd always vaguely assumed King was, based on leaflemming's descriptions of books I still haven't read. The Gunslinger is assured and atypical, pared down to essentials. In the second and third books, though there's plenty which works for me, King will keep on reaching visibly for an effect, and I experience not the effect but the reaching. He has the bones but not the flesh. In this book he seems to come back around to the assuredness of the first book on a larger scale: when he reaches for something, he finds it. He tells his central story quite slowly, lighting and shading it with quantities of half-defined threats and promises. This means that his ability to describe people and places, his ability to put poetry into the small scenes on which things hinge, is crucial, and he's gotten better at it.
If his craft has grown to support his ambitions, I also think his ambitions in this book are smaller. Commenting on my post about the second book
skygiants described King's choice to write Detta/Odetta as an example of a writer "...really valiantly squaring up to their own blind spots and weaknesses as an author and .... kind of getting pummeled by them?" which I agree with. Wizard and Glass is a love story and a story of small-town corruption and evil; on both those fronts it feels to me like King turning squarely away from his blind spots and weaknesses in favor of his default settings. (About those default settings: wow, this book has the most Evil Witchy Witch I've seen in a very long time. I'm so used to subversions of the Evil Witchy Witch that it's almost startling to read one played for maximum cackle. She is petty, everyone distrusts her with good reason but relies on her with worse reason, she envies youth, she's old and distorted and sexually creepy*, her familiar is a mutant cat... The fact that the chapter which begins by introducing her ended up being the chapter which made me think, 'Okay, I was drifting away from bothering about these books but it's one in the morning now and I don't want to stop reading' fits well with my overall feelings about the series. I go back and forth between 'the cake is burnt to carbon but the icing is nice' and 'this is one of the best cakes I have ever tasted but you have to cut the top off because someone used baking soda instead of icing sugar.')
The book is tied to the cycle of the seasons, as they unfold in a farming community -- I love the way this world doesn't just have one man in the moon, but a different one for each month, twelve figures coming and going in the same pattern of craters. Also, most of the book is a story Roland is telling, in circumstances where he should have neither the time nor the knowledge he needs to tell it. When you tell a story in this universe, you change the rules. Which is both an example of King doing whatever the hell he likes without bothering too much about deep coherence, and a bit of structure and worldbuilding evocative enough to make the back of my neck tingle.
The protagonists and antagonists spend a lot of time saying they are playing a complex game with each other, but it's a game with about six total moves taken over some hundreds of pages. I feel like this the way I sometimes feel about Gandalf -- for all the thinking and worrying he does during The Lord of the Rings, for example, when trying to solve the problem of Denethor, he never shows his working, and I don't always feel as though actual thought is occurring as opposed to plot-mandated pause. I am fairly sure the characters in this one could have just bloody well done something a hundred pages before they do. But the heart of the book is Roland and Susan falling in love and negotiating their social positions, obligations, ideas of sexual morality, ideas of honor and fate.
And the ultimate withheld promise of the series fills in slowly. Only a little more is known about the Dark Tower itself than was known at the start of the series, but its possible meanings are filling in more and more behind it -- because the series is built of repeating patterns, and I suspect the whole thing is going to end up shaped like one of its pieces. Insofar as it isn't going to end up shaped like a bag full of string.
*I was really pleased when two of the book's other villains got into a mutually fun and fulfilling love affair while remaining terrible people. It felt like a necessary counterweight.
