The Dark Tower Reread, pt. 8: "Ur"

"He had stumbled on 10.4 million alternate realities, 

and he was an unpublished loser in all of them."

Just a quick one tonight, one I hadn't planned to reread but the idea got in my head and stayed there. I love this story, so it wasn't a hard sell.

The Plot: Wesley Smith is an English teacher at Moore College, a pretty good school that no one has heard of outside a 30-mile radius. One of the school's success stories is its ladies basketball team, coached by Wesley's ex-girlfriend, Ellen. Wesley's feeling lousy about the harsh words exchanged at their break-up, as well as his lack of progress as a writer of fiction; having always wanted to write books, he's written exactly zero. Ellen had mocked him for his Old School ways, and when a student (the Henderson kid) discusses the virtues of an Amazon Kindle in class, he imagines getting one of these newfangled Kindles and being seen reading it on the quad and the effect it might have on her. 

"Spite was kind of a methadone for lovers, 

and better than going cold turkey."

He purchases one, but what arrives is a device from another world. It is pink (like a certain grapefruit) where all others are of the white. (Why is there no North Central Positronics stamped on the back? I'd like to think because the story was commissioned by Amazon and someone at Amazon was savvy enough to not want to associate its product - even with those few would care about such things - with the work of the Crimson King in this world. So, not quite crimson, but pink.) 

"A crazy certainty had arisen in his mind: a hand - or perhaps a claw - was going to swim up from the grayness of the Kindle screen, grab him by the throat, and yank him in. He would exist forever in computerized grayness, floating around the microchips and between the many worlds of Ur."

#GoneTodash

Wes soon discovers that not only can he download books from authors in this dimension, he can download books from hundreds of millions of dimensions. He downloads works by Edgar Allen Poe and Hemingway and reads until dawn, fascinated and terrified and unable to turn away. (Again, like a certain grapefruit.) 

He asks both the Henderson kid and his friend Don to verify the reality of these newfound discoveries, and they go even further into its mysteries, finding first Ur-New-Archive (news and events from an infinite channel of alternate realities) and then Ur-Local (news from a 6-month-window unto the future for any localized user). Upon discovering his ex (with whom he's been slowly reconciling) and almost all of the Lady Meerkats are to be killed by a drunk driver as they return from a tournament, and with the further plot complication of Ellen having told Wes that - no exceptions - they'd talk when she got back from their away game and not before, Wes and Robbie (the Henderson kid) race to intercept the drunk driver.

After they do Wes is visited by some familiar low men who drive flashy cars and wear garish coats that are probably alive and make sounds like liquid chuckling. They chalk the whole thing up to a shipping error, reclaim the Ur-kindle, and leave Wes to his life. Which, on the cusp of reconciliation with Ellen and with newfound wonder at the multiverse, is considerably brighter than where it was when the story began.

"Ur" is a quick read and I still really enjoy it. There are so many great lines (the spite one quoted above, as well as this really odd but wonderful detail about one of Ellen's colleagues at Moore College: "The current coach was a drug addict who liked to tell people that he had seen The Wrestler twelve times and never failed to cry when Mickey Rourke told his estranged daughter that he was just a broken-down piece of meat.") there's fun English-major detective work (although one wonders how many current English majors would actually be able to cross-compare a canon of old white guys like John D MacDonald or James M. Cain: for the sake of argument - and to avoid thinking about the Guy Montag-ization of English Lit - let's pretend at least a couple), and there's compelling drama, hard choices, and some unsettling slapping of an old drunk in a parking lot. 

So many of the moments like this:

"And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gore-happy debs long enough to write A Farewell to Arms. He always wrote A Farewell to Arms, it seemed; other titles came and went, but A Farewell to Arms was always there and The Old Man and the Sea was usually there.

He tried Faulkner.

Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs.

He checked the regular menu and discovered plenty of Faulkner. But only in this reality, it seemed.

This reality?

The mind boggled."

really landed with me. What would you do with an Ur-Kindle? And like I say, the English major detective work appeals to me. Here's where a very particular skill set - and really, not to harp on it, but a skill set deliberately compromised these days by the very people we trust to impart it to the next generation(s) - comes in handy. I'd like to see the comic book or film version of the device. 

And, like it says up there, therein lies the danger. The last thing I want to see, actually, is such a device. I would fall into it and never come out. Who needs the Wizard's Rainbow when you've got this thing?

I love, too, that Don and Robbie are both diehard Red Sox fans, in Kentucky. It's not totally unrealistic - you'll find both New England expats and Red Sox fans anywhere you go, God bless us - but it made me chuckle. It's like King forgot he set the thing in Kentucky for these parts.

"Bonus points for you Roland of Gilead fans out there 

who catch references to a certain Dark Tower."

So says King at the end of his intro to this one. Uhh. If there is a Roland of Gilead fan out there who didn't catch the references, that's beyond 'shame on them,' that's into 'clearly you did not read this story' terrain. 

There used to be a page up at Cemetery Dance detailing the differences between the "Ur" in Bazaar of Bad Dreams and the one published as the original Kindle Single, but it appears to be inactive. Here's a link to a very uninformative Reddit on the topic with some negative reactions from folks if that's something that appeals to you for some reason. Anyway, it's my understanding the similarities to 11/22/63 (which had not been published yet when King wrote "Ur" originally) were smoothed over and maybe a reference updated here or there. 

Basically, the references are: (1) a Dark Tower icon on the Ur-kindle screen, and (2) a visit from the Low Men at the end who reclaim the device. These Low Men seem much nicer than the Low Men who reclaim Ted Brautigan. They still serve the King, though, although maybe this is a kinder, gentler, more library-ly King than the one we met in bk 7 and Insomnia. They seem more like embarrassed FBI agents covering their asses than malevolent non-people with hungry cars and coats. 

My favorite King blog liked this a bit less than me. "There are some very big ideas in "Ur," and I'd argue that they are perhaps a bit too big for the story that is wrapped around them.  I'd also argue that Wesley's weakness is never satisfactorily resolved by the story, nor is it explored sufficiently for the story to serve as any sort of judgment on that weakness."

That's a good point, and it speaks to something King writes about in his intro to the whole book: short stories are a different, tougher animal than any other genre of writing. Every sentence selection matters, pretty much. Chekov's rule about guns being introduced in act 1 having to go off in act 3 is true a hundred times over. So, if the story begins by establishing some weakness for Wes, the events of the story must re-enforce, play out tragically, or transform these qualities.

I'd argue that it does, though, or does it enough, but perhaps once things are set in motion the characters more or less just play the scenes out. The dramatic confrontation with the drunk driver represents the action/ transformed-arc of Wes, but it almost (perhaps) doesn't quite fit. (It also does seem kind of weird that two men could slap the crap out of this lady in the parking lot and no one called the cops? It was witnessed, and other customers were yelling after them. Does this seem right?) More importantly, the Low Men make perfect sense to us Dark Tower readers but might seem kind of anticlimactic to anyone else. It's like, oh here's the Men in Black but no answers. 

Still, it's an incredibly entertaining read and one of my favorite things from King. 

~