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The Dark Tower VII is not for beginners. Whereas previous segments of the septet had explanatory apparatus, the author, in his afterword, asserts that aids are now redundant. By this stage, readers are either in or out. And entrance to this last instalment is strictly via the preceding six gates.
Do you qualify? Can you, for example, make sense of this exchange: “‘What just happened to us?’ asked Eddie. ‘Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?’ ‘I think it was a bit of both,’ Roland said. ‘There’s a thing called aven kal, which is like a tidal wave that runs along the Paths to the Beam. We were lifted on it.’” If you don’t know a todash from a towtruck, return to volume one, The Gunslinger, or click on the cribs supplied by www.thedarktower.net. Or buy the Dark Tower Concordance volumes compiled by Robin Furth, King’s faithful research assistant.
Myself, I have always preferred the master’s novels set in our world. The Dark Tower’s Mid-World fantasia has confused me since I first came across it 30 years ago. As far as I can make out, this is the scenario. The 19-year-old King was inspired to embark on his epic tale by two seminal sources. One was Robert Browning’s enigmatic poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (itself inspired by a line in King Lear). Browning’s poem tells of a knight’s quest. What Roland is in search of, other than a mysterious pile of bricks, we never learn. The second influence was Sergio Leone: hence King’s Roland is a Clint Eastwood-style gunslinger, not a knight in clanking armour.
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King’s Dark Tower is a structure holding the universe and its many “worlds” in place, via a network of “Beams”. The Beams are giving way, and various strata of reality are running into each other. Roland is quite likely to encounter Elvis or Homer Simpson. As the Beams buckle, Mid-World decays into End-World. Roland is fin de ligne, the last of the aristocratic gunslingers. Slow Mutants and other humanoid filth are taking over. Wastelands abound where once Edens stood. The force of Char is overwhelming Khef (don’t ask).
Hovering over this decay is a cosmic arch-villain: variously Randall Flagg, the Man in Black, Walter O’Dim and, in this latest instalment, Mordred — a “were-spider” (King suffers from acute arachnophobia). Mordred is the demon offspring of the Crimson King — who has, we apprehend, installed himself as usurping dinh of the Dark Tower. This monster was introduced in Insomnia — a novel whose conclusion, as King reminds us, eerily forecast 9/11. Towers here, towers there, towers towers everywhere. All, like London Bridge, falling down.
Roland’s two-fold mission is to vanquish his foe and to ascend the tower. Over the years, he has acquired a motley band of companions — his ka-tet. By this stage, few will much care about what secret the Dark Tower contains or what final adventures will beset Roland on his way there. What fascinates in this novel is the authorial megalomania. Has King, one wonders, lost the plot — or, more precisely, got lost in his plot? Roland, for example, is haunted by the sense that it is not the Crimson King, but a certain writer of much the same name who is calling the shots. Like T S Eliot’s Fisher King, this semi-divine Writer King must die and be reborn.
Switch to our world. King was mowed down, on the Maine highway, on June 19, 1999, while taking his daily constitutional. A drunk driver, Bryan Smith, accompanied by his rottweiler Bullet, veered off the blacktop, turning the world’s top-earning novelist into “a bag of bones”.
In The Dark Tower VII, Stephen King actually dies: his death is announced by the newscaster, David Brinkley. But Roland and his ka-tet buddies do a time jump, and intervene. “When we saved the writer, did we save the world?” one of them asks. Deep question.
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A central section narrates King’s death and resurrection, from his, Smith’s and Roland’s viewpoints. Smith subsequently copped a plea (King was angry that Smith didn’t serve time) and, mysteriously, for a healthy man in his early forties, promptly died of unknown causes, alone in his trailer. No Roland dropped in from Mid-World to save poor old Bryan. Nor, judging by this novel, did King shed any tears.
Is this King’s farewell to fiction? Yes, he tells us: “There’s nothing left to say now that Roland has reached his goal.” There is a corroborating terminality in this final episode. Seven novels, seven seals of the apocalypse. King began writing the saga aged 19, and “died” on June 19, 1999. The Dark Tower septet has been 33 years in the writing — an age that (as with Jesus Christ, another “king”) resonates powerfully with the author. Time to check out.
Perhaps not. A horror novel called House of Blood has been announced for publication this December. It’s a “debut novel” by Bryan Smith. All we know about Smith, from his website, is that his birthday is — you guessed it, June 19. The King is dead, long live the King!!!
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