landingtree | Entries tagged with author: king steven

I’m staying in my grandmother’s house at Ruapuke - the one that burnt down. Well, I mean, the one built to replace it, but somewhat of the other thing too: it’s on the same site and has as nearly as the available kitsets would allow the same layout. When I got here I kept being surprised that the hallway didn’t have another room coming off it, and now I’m used to that, I keep being surprised that I can’t walk through the linen closet to get to the living room instead. It makes me think of those Diana Wynne Jones books where someone has to stretch a house out into a different shape using magic - I can imagine a team of builder-witches collecting the pieces of the house’s spirit from where they caught in the surrounding tea-tree, regretfully concluding that there just isn’t enough left of it to make the corridor any longer or the walls wooden, but shoving and stitching all the pieces back together with gusto anyway.

The actual story took much longer and required more permits and vexed septic tank issues, but the result is very good, my grandmother seems happy. There may be a remnant ring of char on the trees all round the house, but Ruapuke feels like Ruapuke. And the amount of good furniture and small nice things, and the number of wonderful hand-made quilts, speak to a large family network enthusiastically activated. It already feels comfortable. I’m here for a week doing bits and pieces - the current bits and pieces involve clearing the weedy bank by the front door, and I should go to bed soon, because tomorrow will be hot and so far there are no curtains.

I mean to start posting about all the books I read again. Be advised, I will fail. But: today I finally finished the last of Steven King’s Dark Tower books, about which I can say, oddly, that I didn’t care enough to not read the end. (There is a point at which Steven King writes the equivalent of ‘A person in sympathy with what I value about these books will stop reading now,’ and though I at least somewhat was in sympathy, I didn’t. I’m happy to assemble my own canon in my head after the fact). This book is like the whole series: a propulsive, characterful hodgepodge, with bits that really really work for me and also other bits. If he’d planned it all from the start the series would be a very different shape, and I’d be sad, because one of the things I like about it is the strangeness with which it slowly emerges from the mists.

(Not of interest to people who don’t know the books: I’d sometimes been irritated by the bluntness of fateful background graffiti in them, but I was pleased when reading an appropriate scene in this book to glance at the top of the fridge in my new flat and find a bottle of whisky marked, in large letters, ‘BEAM family’, and illustrated with a circle of six BEAM family men around a seventh in the centre. Alas, none of the numbers on the bottle made nineteen).

Book 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 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.

Book two of the Dark Tower series. Spoilers, mostly veiled.

I like this overall less than the first book, while finding it in some ways more interesting. The first book had a sense of running on rails, even though those rails bring Roland very close to death several times. In this book, almost the first thing he encounters is an unexpected setback whose consequences will be permanent. It makes a real change to the texture of the plot.

That's part of why I liked the start of this book so much and found it so hard to stop reading. Also: I said about the last book that King often abandons logistical detail, and here he really doesn't. This is a hyper-detailed book, which is very effective when I'm in the flow of caring about what's going on. Especially in the first sequence, where Roland makes his way to a door in the world, following information he's been given about his own future, and steps through it into a) an extremely tense situation in which he has to juggle an increasing number of factors his life absolutely depends on, and b) an airplane about to land in New York. Jadis in London, Thor in a pet shop: I really enjoy the blend of tension and comedy this sort of thing generates. Grand and deadly events pause a moment for the discovery of soft drinks...

When I'm not in the flow of what's going on, I find the same level of detail which can build tension doing the opposite. A bunch of things in a bunch of places made that switch for me. First and least: in this book, unlike the last one, King uses a lot of stylistic intensifiers which work on me backwards. An especially dramatic line is given its own whole section, like a bible verse, and I look up from the book and go, "Really, Stephen King?"

Second, there are many small segments presented from inside the heads of a wide range of minor characters. Sometimes I liked these. Mostly I wanted them to get out of the way and stop slowing things down. Roland is a highly intense and competent person, and the major characters he's interacting with in this book are characters who share or have the seeds of sharing those qualities. In the first book Roland was alone, but now he's finds potential equals and friends (and people he may someday have to lose all over again), all of them snarled in a mad quest for the nexus of everything. (This is the main thing I find more interesting about this book than the first book, and it's why I'm still as excited as I am to read the third). In theory I should like the fact that the intensity of their story is chopped up between many background characters having ordinary lives. In practice I like it maybe three times, and it happens a lot more often than that. (Specifically, a crime lord and his goons get a lot of buildup, and they left me not just cold but confused: that was where my initial inability to stop reading ended, and about where I was up to when I wrote 'Why didn't he revise this book if he was revising a book? This would be so much more interesting if there was less of it.') I really liked the sense in the first book that the minor characters were real people seen from outside, partially understood. Seeing this book's equivalent characters from inside makes them feel less real to me, not more.

Third and most majorly, the book has three segments centered around three characters, and I find the third one dull, and not as resonant in his resolution of certain difficulties as the plot would have him be. (Hmm, this may be the worst of both worlds in terms of spoiler-avoidance. And the number of people reading this who have not read the series, yet intend to, may be zero. Ho hum).

Of the other two central characters, I am interested in and like the first one, Eddie, a heroin addict with a lot of underlying steeliness and very little apparent chance of using it to get out of his predicament -- absent the unexpected arrival of a doorway to another world. The second character is very interesting, and I found her uncomfortable to read about. The first major female character, she's black, active in the civil rights movement, and part of her personality is a monstrous racist stereotype, in the sense that on some level she's seen the racism she faces and gone, "That's what you think I am? Alright, have that then, with a cherry on top." I found the large section of the plot in which two white men have to wrangle her monstrous aspect while she insults them in exaggerated dialect wince-inducing, but not simply so. (Various things around the edges of that: she doesn't get nearly as much of an introduction to Roland as Eddie does before she's irrevocably entangled with his world. That actually bothered me in a 'wish he'd changed it' kind of way, the fact that she gets less apparent choice when her life situation might have tended to offer her more; the things around racism bother me in a 'how interestingly bothersome, I will turn it over in my mind a while' kind of way). And if I wasn't reading the next book for any other reason I'd read it to see what she does next. (Although I would be reading it anyway: the oddness of this series makes me fairly certain that whatever I dislike about the third book will be different from what I disliked about this book, which is quite refreshing).

Oh, also, in this book Roland makes choices that involve actively avoiding unnecessary deaths, which was seriously not a feature of his actions in the first book. It's nice to see that I have some grounds for actually approving of him as well as finding him compelling.

There, it's only the sixth of July and I'm already only two books behind.

(I've never actually tracked my reading rate before. Total books read in June, let's see: eight, one nonfiction, three rereads, in a month with quite a lot of available reading time. Would probably have read two or three shortish novels in the time the nonfiction took me. Also I've been nibbling my way up to the end of the book about American suburbs I meant to have finished a month ago).

The 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).