The Dark Tower Reread Pt. 4: Wizard and Glass

The first time I read this I really loved it. As is becoming something of a pattern * though, this time around I was conflicted. There's around a 70/30 split on loved-it-to-indifferent on Goodreads. The ones who love it really love it. I counted myself among those until this reread. ** I didn't read anything in the negative-to-indifferent reviews that really resonated with me, though, so away we go. ***

*  I refer here to my last post, but I write these words after having finished Wolves of the Calla and spoiler alert, same deal there. Hopefully by the time I get to that post, I'll come up with new opening remarks.

** Ray Benson was among the indifferent, with a 2-star rating. Not to call him out for it or anything, just I'd love to hear his take on it, wish he'd left a review.

*** Well, I was going to away-we-go either way, wasn't I? Even had I found one that I agreed with 100%, can't just link to a review and say "ditto." Not on a King's Highway Todash Tunnel Big Dig Reread.

EVERYTHING PRE-MEJIS

The novel picks up where it left off, with the ka-tet screaming along in Blaine the Mono on a suicide run to Kansas, winner of the riddling take all. And... Eddie Star Treks it? Blaine would really be vulnerable to this? I get that his circuits have deteriorated and all but sheesh. He mentions some 60s TV, even - there's not one running file in all his dipolar-gazillion-load of circuits that grokked the not especially complex lessons of "I, Mudd"? (You can't tell me whomever programmed him wasn't a TOS fan. And Blaine's exceeded his original programming, to boot; you telling me a psychotic eternal train isn't going to watch TOS start to finish to wile away its time? No way, little pard.) 

I wish King had developed the getting-some-details-wrong path, such as when Blaine scrambles some details about his 60s shows and gets miffed at Jake innocently correcting him. But hell, even that's "The Changeling." I'd have preferred it had he opted for "Return of the Archons," if TOS was really the only option.

"HATE... FORRRRRR...."

Beyond that, though, it just didn't land with me. Eddie tells some lame jokes, and Blaine goes "AAAAAAAA!!" And before that he was just laughing and laughing (ahem, "Wolf in the Fold") which grew irritating. It was a real let-down from the Blaine we see at the end of The Waste Lands.

I'm leaving out the resonance of Charlie the Choo Choo in the above, it's true. The twinning/ka/vague-multidimensional-clues thing is very much part of the Dark Tower experience. On that score, I'd have preferred it had Blaine and Jake discussed Beryl Evans instead of Bewitched or whatever it was. I'm reading these sentences over and wishing I'd taken better notes because (a) do Jake and Blaine discuss Beryl Evans? Am I totally blanking on that? and (b) what the hell was it that Blaine gets wrong, was it the Mike Hammer/ Bewitched connection? If my copy of this wasn't way the hell over there, I'd check.

Before Blaine's improbable breakdown, Jake wonders why the monorail felt "such despair, such bitterness, such anger? Because he's a pain, that's why. Blaine is a really BIG pain." FFS Jake. This little mantra keeps getting offered as if it's some kind of profound thing to say. I fixed it.

"Because he's a pain, that's why." Silence filled the car, except for the very light hum of Blaine's air circulations. "Blaine is a really BIG -"
Roland's gun flashed from its holster so fast that even Blaine's internal sensors had trouble tracking it. The sound of the hand cannon was deafening in the Barony couch. Jake's chest exploded against the translucent windows, and a disinfectant/ brain-and-bone-matter-splatter program automatically kicked in. The rest of his body fell to the floor, and his leg kicked out the god-drums of "Velcro Fly." Roland holstered his weapon.
"WELL-PLAYED, GUNSLINGER OF GILEAD," came Blaine's booming voice. "YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS CAN LIVE." 

 "I mean, really, he just should have stopped saying it," said Eddie. He shook his head. Susannah reached over to squeeze his hand.
"You said it, sug," said Susanna.
"Tim-may!" said Oy. 

"FOR DOING THIS FAVOR, I AM SWITCHING TRACKS IN TOPEKA. WHAT WAS ONCE MY TERMINUS POINT HAS BEEN MODIFIED TO BRING YOU ALL THE WAY TO THE DARK TOWER ITSELF."
"TIM-MAY!" said them all.

As for the Captain Trips sideways-level of The Stand part of things, and the introduction of the thinny, I liked all of that. I chuckled when I saw the Kansas City Monarchs part. I'm developing a theory about this whole Dark Tower series and King's metafiction in general. It's still in the oven, but it's coming along and I'll share it in good time, say true. But these little author's-surname/allusions he makes throughout his career (most notably, I guess, in Castle Rock, but also here in this series with the big screaming red baddie waiting for Roland at the Tower) are fun. Here, of course, there actually was a Kansas City Monarchs team, and it's a perfectly legit and non-metafictional way of distinguishing this level of the Tower from the one we saw in The Stand. But: all things serve the Beam. 

AIN'T NO REAPING LIKE A MEJIS REAPING

'CAUSE A MEJIS REAPING DON'T STOP
(UNTIL SOMEONE IS BURNED AT THE STAKE)

The bulk of the book is Roland's telling his ka-tet of when he was a young gunslinger and sent to Hambry, the Barony seat of Mejis, and of the intrigue he found there: the town's leaders in cahoots with John Farson, the Good Man, that insurgent promising justice and an end to Gilead's oppression, etc. but who is really stacking heads on pikes and rolling up oil tankers from the still-active pumps at "Citgo," just outside town) and his tragic love affair with Susan Delgado, a comely young lass set to be the Mayor's side-wife come Reaping, the big barn dance of the Mejis social calendar.

I still found this part of the novel to be quite strong. It's more than Roland's story - it's also Susan's, and she's a good and well-sketched out character in King's catalog. And not just her but her aunt and - especially - Rhea, the old crone witch who plays a pivotal role in Roland's mother's sorrowful end. Wizard and Glass was written in the midst of King's feminist phase (so-called, i.e. compact-for-women's-flesh, ownership-vs-appropriation-of-vaginas, snake-dildoes, you name it), and he clearly took pains to sketch out the inner worlds of all the female characters of the tale. He succeeds well - you even sympathize with Rhea and Susan's aunt, for thy father's sake, and they're awful people who do awful things. Well done.

Does the series need a Peyton Place smack dab in the middle of it? Maybe not. Or maybe not as much of one as what we get. The story - not just Wizard and Glass but the Dark Tower series - might have been better served by excising just some of it (100 pages of cuts, maybe, though don't ask me which.) This is a very mild objection; I still quite like all the Mejis stuff. (Is there a bit too much about lady bits? Especially Rhea's? OMG yes. Animal abuse added to her crimes! )

These images are all by Dave McKean. Pretty weird stuff.

King gives himself the storytelling 'out' of Roland's time in the glass, which I'll get to momentarily, but that allows King-the-writer to ditch the Roland's POV restraint and spend several hundred pages on things Roland never saw or in the minds of characters Roland could not ordinarily peek.

While this invention (Roland's time in the Pink Glass as they escape Mejis) is both perfectly Dark-Tower-y and also pretty cool, it does metaphorically serve as a drug binge. Which is an ever so slightly off note for me, for Roland. King sometimes has trouble resisting inserting himself into his stories. This is ironic considering what's coming in the series; King's story is inextricably linked with Roland's, and not just metaphorically. The writer's experiences are reciprocal to Roland's and vice versa.

"Those in the grip of a strong drug - heroin, devil grass, true love - often find themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy as they walk the tightrope of their lives. Keeping one's balance on a tightrope is difficult under the soberest of circumstances; doing so while in a state of delirium is all but impossible. Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland's descent into addiction first with disbelief, envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent horror."

Jonas, DePape, Reynolds, aka "The Big Coffins Hunters," are all fine. You've seen all of these villains before in King's work, as well as Rimer (another 'impossibly tall' man in King's Rogue's Gallery) but they're all effective. Jonas, the failed gunslinger, is that shadowy reflection of the protagonist that every good adventure story needs. (Roland makes pretty quick work of him, all told.)

I know that developments in the next book kind of negate this a little, but is it a little too much to have both Sauron's Eye (the CK's sigil) AND the "my precioussssss'ness" of the glass? It's just interesting to me that he set out to deliberately distance himself from Tolkien but so specifically evoke these two things here.

As with the Guardians it would be cool if there were other tales of the Glass. "Some colors of the Wizard's Rainbow are reputed to look into the future. Others look into the other worlds - those where the demons live, those where the Old People are supposed to have gone when they left our world. These may also show the location of the secret doors which pass between the worlds. Other colors, they say, can look far in our own world, and see things people would as soon keep secret. They never see the good: only the ill." 

EVERYTHING POST-MEJIS

I'm afraid I was pretty negative on all the post-Mejis stuff. Not the stuff in Gilead, with the tragic end of Roland's mother. I didn't quite care for Roland's flying "in the gale" stuff inside the glass, but the Gilead stuff was the twist that deepened Roland's story and justified its place here in the series.

The same cannot be said of the Wizard of Oz stuff, though. It works for a minute, when they point out the similarities or Roland's tale/ their surroundings to Oz. And then, starting with the shoes and getting worse once Oy has to don them - and sinking ever tediously further once the Tick Tock Man is playing the part of the wizard, apparently indulging that inner theater nerd he never got to indulge underneath Lud - it doesn't work at all. For me anyway. The novel takes such a committed and in my eyes improbable turn into this Wizard of Oz stuff and then comments on itself doing it, for far too many pages.

The MIB mentions - after the Tick Tock Man's acting the part of the Wizard and after the ka-tet shoots him - that he probably made a mistake to rescue him for Lud. Truth. It made no sense at the end of The Waste Lands and goes nowhere here. Nor does it make sense - what the hell is Wizard of Oz to the Tick Tock Man? Or to the MIB for that matter? If he's creating tangible emerald castles that straddle both worlds (for the people of the Calla see it too, in the next book), he can't create something more formidable to stop Roland's quest? 

And why drop them back down on the Path of the Beam on their way to Thunderclap, with a picnic basket no less? FFS he could've just left them in Stand-variant Kansas, likely to die of Captain's Trips. Was he worried they'd make their way to Mother Abigail's? I could use the hey-that’s-what-they-tried-this-time excuse i.e. maybe Walter and the CK have tried to strand them all a thousand times and they thought hey, this time, how about a nice gift basket and a polite note? But like challenge flags or timeouts (or a reader's patience) there's only so many times one can draw from that well. 

All told, the MIB is conveniently stupid (or helpful) when he needs to be.

And what the hell happens to the glass? Why didn't they just destroy it and that's how they get back to Mid-World (somehow)? King keeps its fate ambiguous, but it never shows up again. And neither does Rhea. Seems like there's some tale, there, King was keeping for a rainy day but as of this writing, we haven't gotten it.

IN CLOSING 

A solid sci-fi western fantasy coming of age story, with many characters masterfully blended, bookended by stuff I didn't much care for. 

Let's take some quick stock of things. Reading-wise, I've finished Wolves of the Calla, "The Little Sisters of Eluria," "Everything's Eventual," "Low Men in Yellow Coats," "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," and I'm about halfway through The Wind Through the Keyhole. I'm procrastinating starting the last two books, as they're long-ass books, my memory of them was negative, and I'm just dragging my feet. I'm also circling Insomnia. That one's long, too, though. But very rewarding if memory serves.

Anyway it'll all materialize sooner or later. Of the books we've looked at so far, my first attempt at ranking the Dark Tower books had Wizard and Glass at number one, The Waste Lands at five, Drawing of the Three at six, and The Gunslinger at three. This time around it looks like this: (4) The Waste Lands, (3) Wizard and Glass, (2) The Drawing of the Three, and (1) The Gunslinger. 

Who knows what re-rankings await on when I read these books for a third time? Tune in come 2025 to find out!