Welcome to my message board.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
Comments
'The Dark Tower': Pulp Metafiction
Published: October 17, 2004
(Page 2 of 2)
That's not to say there is nothing to enjoy about ''The Dark Tower.'' For starters, there is the sheer absurdity of its existence. You're left astonished at the devotion of the readers who will follow King down his labyrinthine pathways of plot, through the thickets of ALL CAPS paragraphs, only to emerge from a story within a flashback. As a writer, King is willing to describe anything, no matter how hackneyed or strange the scenario. (The high point might be when Susannah, already plagued by two personalities, is invaded by a third personality, who somehow becomes pregnant.) More fascinating, perhaps, is King's inexhaustible supply of similes and metaphors, which he seems to write without a backward glance. Every so often, they are unpleasantly memorable, like this description of a beach: ''It was the color of an undergarment which has gone a long time without washing.''
With a little more preparation, ''The Dark Tower'' might have turned out better. The young King had the right idea: Tolkien's ''Fellowship of the Ring'' is the ideal of fantasy. Tolkien created a beautifully constructed interlocking world, and the purity of his design led to unusual developments: sophomores speaking to one another in Elvish, grown men naming their sons Gandalf, an entire country (New Zealand) rebranded as Middle Earth. The books have an internal logic: when you follow Frodo's adventures, you can be fairly certain he is not going to blow off someone's head with a magic wand. The world of ''The Dark Tower'' is insane and lawless. Roland and his friends find doors on the beach that transport them into our world; they grow new legs; they learn how to throw decapitating dinner plates; they also, alas, meet Stephen King.
The revelation of the penultimate book in this series, ''Song of Susannah: Dark Tower VI,'' was that King had put himself into the book as a character. Roland shows up in Maine in 1977 and hypnotizes a young horror writer, telling him he must finish the ''Dark Tower'' story because the fate of the world depends upon it. By introducing an element of metafiction, King placed himself at the center of the series and instantly became its most believable element. He closed out the book with excerpts from a lightly fictionalized diary and a newspaper story about his death. At this point, you may feel as though you had wandered far from the Dark Tower and arrived on the outskirts of Derrida.
As for Roland and his ka-tet, they continue their reality-bending trip in this new book, but it's harder to care about them. You can see the puppet strings, and the suspense sinks to the level of a B horror film: which character is going to get killed first? The fictional King also returns, and we learn how this series was the one story he had no control over, the one he could write only when the voices in his head were speaking to him. In the end, King doesn't have the writerly finesse for these sorts of games, and the voices let him down. The ultimate battle borrows a device from the Harry Potter books, and at the foot of the Dark Tower the voices throw up their hands: ''Some moments are beyond imagination.'' That's the sound of a writer shouting ''mercy.'' King has talked about retiring after the publication of this book. But that seems unlikely: he's unburdened himself of his sprawling fantasy, and he's free to write something new. If we've learned anything about King by the close of this series, it's that he's terrified of endings.
Michael Agger is on the staff of The New Yorker.
:-/
It's the New York Times. And furthermore, the reviewer is a 'staff for the New Yorker'. Having an editor at the New Yorker who loves SK's works and allowed it for publication doesn't mean that the other staffs would change their 'stunted attitude' towards our favorite writer.
In fact, I've already given up on the NYT reviews, especially their Sunday Book Reviews. I only frequented it as a registered member to browse the weekly bestseller list as well as to locate other news not having to do with books. Just copied out this one out of sheer boredom and me thinking that this site would need a new review or two that is vastly different from before
This sounds like one of those, and frankly I stopped reading it when he mentioned Oy as a badger-type creature - anyone with an ounce of sense would vet and proof-read their reviews before posting them and know that in fact Oy is a billy-bumbler, vastly different to his kin.
The way I see it is if you can't do a decent review (complementary/non-complementary), and at least be familair with King's work in order to review such an extensive and important series in his writing career...then..
Reviewer's: SHUT THE FECK UP!!
Gan
I think this guy is just jumping on the bandwagon for King wannabe's...jealousy, plain and simple
I for one thought this review was awesome. It actually had me laughing out loud. I don't necessarily agree with it , but I totally respect the dude's opinion...I mean, The Dark Tower is completely ridiculous when you stop and think about it. Some of us (the ones who dig fantasy novel) choose to suspend our disbelief. Some people don't have that ability.