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Steven King work of intriguing metaliterary gamesmanship that
suggests Nabokov ...
suggests Nabokov ...
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From: Sandy P. Klein
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2004 12:19 PM
Subject: intriguing metaliterary gamesmanship that suggests Nabokov ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/books/review/04OHEHIT.html
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January 4, 2004
'Wolves of the Calla': The Quest for the North Central Positronics
By ANDREW O'HEHIR
or the last 33 years, Roland Deschain, Gunslinger of the line of Eld, he of Gilead-that-was, has been trekking across the desolate landscape of Mid-World, a sort of postapocalyptic second cousin to our own world. Roland is on a quest, of course; he is searching for the Dark Tower, a quasi-mythical edifice that holds together all of time and space -- his world and ours and all the others -- and is in danger of imminent collapse. What he carries with him may be even weightier than that: Stephen King's literary ambitions.
King began writing his fantasy epic ''The Dark Tower'' in 1970, as an unknown 22-year-old. As he recently explained, he was inspired by Tolkien's ''Lord of the Rings'' (and by Robert Browning's narrative poem ''Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'') and decided to write ''the longest popular novel of all time.'' King is one of the best selling novelists in history, if not No. 1 of all time, so it's hard to imagine a better candidate for the job. But ''The Dark Tower'' has never found a large readership (by King's standards) and it sometimes seems like the awkward, left-footed stepchild of his work.
The five volumes published thus far -- the final two have already been written, and will appear later this year -- suggest that ''The Dark Tower,'' for all its oddities, has more to offer than sheer girth. King's longtime fans, along with new readers curious about his ever-widening influence and the half-grudging respect now accorded him in literary circles, can find here a sort of skeleton key to what one of King's characters might mockingly call his ''oover.''
''The Dark Tower'' is nothing if not ambitious: it seeks to blend disparate styles of popular narrative, from Arthurian legend to Sergio Leone western to apocalyptic science fiction. More than that, it tries to knit the bulk of King's fiction together into a single universe (or a set of interlocking universes), and on some level even to accommodate all stories, known and unknown, into a master narrative that encompasses the whole of creation.
In King's speech at the National Book Awards ceremony last fall, where he was awarded the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he castigated intellectuals for disdaining popular culture and suggested that bridges could be built between literary and popular fiction. For better or worse, ''The Dark Tower'' is clearly an attempt to communicate between these realms. It is a sprawling, eventful tale of demons, monsters, narrow escapes and magic portals -- but it is also beginning to display an intriguing metaliterary gamesmanship that suggests Nabokov or Flann O'Brien.
The publication history of ''The Dark Tower'' is nearly as tortuous as King's epic itself. The first volume, ''The Gunslinger,'' began appearing in a fantasy magazine in 1978, and was published in hardcover four years later by the small New Hampshire house Donald M. Grant. (One index of the work's strangeness is the fact that it took Plume five more years to publish it in paperback.) The second installment, ''The Drawing of the Three,'' was published in 1987, followed by ''The Waste Lands'' in 1991 and ''Wizard and Glass'' in 1997. All were published by Grant before reaching paperback, and now Viking has reissued each of them in illustrated hardcover editions to coincide with Grant's publication (in association with Scribner, now King's hardcover home) of ''Wolves of the Calla.''
To complicate matters further, King has substantially revised the new edition of ''The Gunslinger.'' If he's never seemed entirely comfortable with this book, it's no wonder. Its spare, almost Hemingway- inflected style is strikingly at odds with most of his writing. We first see Roland pursuing his nemesis, the mysterious Man in Black, across the bleached desert of Mid-World, although we learn very little about Roland's back story or the nature of his quest. We also encounter Jake Chambers, a young boy who is transported into Roland's world from mid-1970's New York (and whom Roland ultimately betrays).
In ''The Drawing of the Three'' we meet the other members of Roland's ''ka-tet'' (roughly, those joined by destiny) and, like Jake, they have been sucked out of 20th-century New York. Eddie Dean is a drug addict from 1980's Brooklyn (although it's not exactly the same as ''our'' 1980's Brooklyn), and Odetta Holmes is a disabled, schizophrenic African-American civil rights campaigner from 1964 who eventually becomes Eddie's wife and takes the name Susannah (it's a long story).
As their adventures progress, we begin to understand that the relationship between Mid-World and our own world is closer than it at first appears -- and that the relationship between Roland's story and other quest narratives (those by Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Charles Dickens and King himself, among others) is more than a question of emulation or inspiration. The ruined city of Lud bears a striking resemblance to New York, and a deranged monorail train, a relic of a defunct civilization, takes our heroes to Topeka, even if it's not exactly the Topeka of our world. In fact, it's the plague-ridden Topeka of ''The Stand,'' King's enormous apocalyptic novel -- and Randall Flagg, that book's demonic villain, turns out to be Roland's Man in Black in another guise.
Those impatient to get to ''Wolves of the Calla'' may be tempted to skim or even skip the earlier works. But as logorrheic as King can be, and as much as he can get sidetracked with expository digressions, his narrative is tightly interwoven. For all readers, Robin Furth's ''Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower': A Concordance, Volume I'' provides invaluable aid whenever you want to puzzle out all of the references to the sinister North Central Positronics, or find a refresher course on who's good and who's evil in the barony of Mejis.
King's great strength as a horror writer has always been scratching at the surface of everyday American life -- especially everyday American boyhood and manhood -- to find the terror and irrationality that lie just beneath it. There isn't much in his work to suggest that he possesses the breadth or the mythic sensibility for epic fantasy. But the longer you stick with this lumbering, likable epic, the more its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink enthusiasm and its hypnotic blend of suspense and sentimentality begin to work on you. Roland's ka-tet companions are contemporary Americans, more or less, and King keeps finding doorways that bring them back to New York in the late 70's, where a lone rose growing on a vacant lot on Second Avenue may be the linchpin of all existence.
Early in ''Wolves of the Calla,'' Roland asks Eddie about 20th-century America and its narrative preferences. ''Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time?'' he inquires. ''Does no one eat stew?'' Eddie, himself now a hardened gunslinger and Roland's second in command, replies that some in his world indeed eat stew. But ''when it comes to entertainment,'' he continues, ''we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don't let any one thing touch another thing on your plate.''
Even a casual reader may hear an echo here of Huckleberry Finn's famous complaint about Widow Douglas's cooking (not the only reference to Twain's novel in ''The Dark Tower''). In what has been widely read as a metaphorical description of the American nation, Huck tells us: ''In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.'' King is a believer in mixing up and swapping around, and throughout ''The Dark Tower'' he seems determined to cram as many flavors into the stew as possible.
Roland, Eddie, Jake and Susannah are enlisted to defend the remote village of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where almost all the children are twins. Once a generation, strange soldiers dressed as wolves come sweeping out of the dark lands to the east and abduct one member of every set of twins, only to send them back a few weeks later ''roont'' (in King's sometimes painful ruralese), as physically imposing imbeciles who die young.
''Wolves of the Calla'' is an agreeable and modestly mysterious adventure story, and fans of the series will appreciate Jake's painful coming-of-age (as well as his plucky companion, the talking dog-badger creature named Oy). But there's something Wagnerian about the book, and not entirely in a good way: endless pages of ''palaver,'' as Roland would say, are followed by action scenes that end almost as soon as they begin. King's dialogue is often clunky and his humor leaden; although he's an old hand at these backwoods settings -- and the resemblance between the Calla and rural Maine is not accidental -- a little quaint local color goes a long way. Then there are Bernie Wrightson's color illustrations, done in a broad comic book style, which strive to rob the story of whatever subtlety it might possess.
Furthermore, the entire Calla episode (which strongly resembles one of the principal plots of ''Wizard and Glass'') is just a device to move King's larger narrative wheel creakily forward, to get Roland and his ka-tet a little closer to the Dark Tower and the sinister Crimson King who rules it. Why should we spend so much time reading about the Calla's political intrigues when what happens there may not, in some Kingian sense, even be real? By the end of the book, Eddie and Jake have begun to notice that Mid-World (or wherever they are) is increasingly unstable, and has become infected with fragments of cultural debris from their world: patterns of coincidence out of Dickens, Beatles songs, weaponry from ''Star Wars,'' villains from a ''Spider-Man'' comic.
By the same token, every time Eddie or Jake returns to New York -- to save that precious rose from the bulldozers -- the city seems increasingly invaded by Mid-World. King has always been a master at making ordinary objects seem ominous, and in the increasingly haunted Manhattan of ''Wolves of the Calla'' every restaurant signboard, missing-pet notice, graffiti scrawl and snippet of music becomes fraught with dire meaning. (King is a devoted rock fan, and the theme song to ''Wolves of the Calla'' seems to be Elton John's ''Someone Saved My Life Tonight,'' which is mentioned several times.)
Neither Eddie nor Jake nor Susannah (whose personality disorder is acting up, and who is pregnant -- but not with Eddie's child) is capable of noticing all the cultural and conceptual leakage between Roland's world and theirs; they don't seem aware, for example, that Roland's semi-mystical conception of ''ka'' is borrowed, more or less, from Egyptian mythology. They do, however, start to wonder whether someone named Harry Potter might be a mythic hero from Earth's future. And in the course of defending Calla Bryn Sturgis, they meet a defrocked priest named Callahan whose destiny seems a little too neatly tied to theirs. Callahan once had an unpleasant encounter with a vampire in a Maine village and has been wandering the byways of time and space since then. As alert King fans will notice, he is in fact a renegade character from the novel '' 'Salem's Lot.''
King has sneaked inside jokes into his work for years, and ''The Dark Tower'' has already incorporated elements from ''The Stand,'' ''The Eyes of the Dragon,'' ''Insomnia,'' ''The Regulators'' and ''Hearts in Atlantis,'' among others. But with this latest installment he has raised the stakes. At the end of ''Wolves of the Calla,'' Roland's ka-tet has been broken and one of its members is in dire peril. These characters may also be about to discover that they themselves are fictional, that their level of the Tower (like, perhaps, all the others) is itself a story made of other stories. How will this change their quest? Will it point them toward a man who sits in a room in Maine, in a world very much like our own, writing about them while a medal from the National Book Foundation glows mysteriously on his desk? We can only hope so.
Stephen King addresses the 2003 National Book Awards dinner in New York City, after being presented the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in November.
WOLVES OF THE CALLA
The Dark Tower V.
By Stephen King. Illustrated by Bernie Wrightson.
714 pp. Hampton Falls, N.H.: Donald M. Grant in association with Scribner. $35.
Andrew O'Hehir is the books editor of Salon.com.
The New York Times
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