The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

And with that, I'm halfway through the Dark Tower series. This is the twenty-first blog post on the franchise if I've counted correctly, easily outnumbering any other series to date. But this is just the second post on Wizard and Glass, a pivotal center-point for the story of Roland and his ka-tet and their quest to reach the Dark Tower. It is a book in which, paradoxically, almost nothing happens to Roland and his ka-tet with regard to their quest for the Dark Tower. And not due to brevity - this is the longest Dark Tower book yet, clocking in with a word count of 264,000. In the rest of the series, only the final installment is longer.

I'll stop being coy; the reason this book matters even without advancing the plot at hand very much is that it is almost entirely a flashback. The ka-tet resolves the cliffhanger from The Waste Lands - where a demonic train is hellbent on killing them all unless they can satisfy it with good riddles - before stumbling out into what appears to be Stephen King's version of Kansas from The Stand. They set out and follow I-70... eastward? Westward? It doesn't matter; more on this later. Regardless, they eventually come across something called a thinny, and that prompts the usually tight-lipped and guarded Roland to share a great big long story from his past. That flashback takes up the vast majority of the book. It's an odd choice by King, and a daring one, but one I'm glad he made. I've complained throughout this series that I just can't get all that invested in the vague goals of an obscure protagonist in an unfamiliar world. So this right here, a several-hundred-page helping of pure  Roland background story, was Stephen King's chance to rope me all the way in for the back nine.

Before I go any further, though, it's time for a collaborative exercise between bloggers. Sween told me about a week ago, when I was halfway through this book, that the flashback had these three purposes:

1. To flesh out Roland's character
2. To explain the thinny
3. To teach the ka-tet a lesson

If this is the case - and granted, these are Sween's words, and not a statement of intent made directly by King himself - then perhaps I can best gauge the extent to which the book succeeds by visiting each of these in order. Here we go.

1. Flesh out Roland's character: Check.

Over 500 of these 700 pages are spent on Roland's past, detailing his relationships with his original ka-tet and also with his first (and perhaps only?) love, Susan. Here at last was all that character definition I've been waiting for. I've still got plenty of questions about Roland and his quest, but I've finally bought into the protagonist of the series. This is no small feat, as I was openly question why I should be rooting for him after reading the first book, in which Roland murders an entire town's population and leaves a little boy to die so that he can continue obsessively stalking someone. Yeah, Roland, it turns out, is pretty quiet and serious because he's been through a great deal of shit. He loved, and he lost. And he blames himself for it. And then he accidentally kills his mom. None of this is shocking or anything, but it's nice to have this, going forward. I would have liked to find out what became of his original ka-tet, but perhaps that's a story for another book in the series.

2. Explain the thinny: Check.

Granted, this was explained in a matter of pages. We didn't need a great big flashback to learn that thinnies are places where "reality is eroding away." They'll lure you in despite giving off terrible high-pitched whining noises. Don't go near them. Maybe force your enemies to do so instead. Also there are a lot more thinnies in the present day because the Dark Tower is failing to hold all the different worlds at bay from each other and realities are beginning to collapse or meld into each other, I think.

3. Teach the ka-tet a lesson: Unknown.

This one's a puzzler for me. It could just be that I'm leaning too literally on Sweeney's casual G-chat line, but I think I'm missing something. (Some spoilers follow, for anyone who cares.) Is it that the ka-tet learns what Roland has sacrificed and will sacrifice in order to reach the Dark Tower? That seems to fall more under fleshing out the guy's character. The group definitely finds themselves completely united and bonded on a deeper level as the book ends, but beyond understanding Roland's particular circumstances a bit, I can't put a finger on what, specifically, they learned. Sweeney, care to help me out here?

Lastly, it's become a tradition for me to talk about these books in stray thought bullet form. The gist of my experience is contained above, but who am I to break with tradition? Onward!

• "Eastward? Westward? It doesn't matter," I said above, and that's because it's just plain impossible to put Stephen King's Mid-World on a map. Here's the consensus attempt to do so, as seen on the Internet. This image completely contradicts everything that was hammered home in the first book (where Gilead-to-Tull-to-the-Way-Station is "west") and also requires a ridiculous suspension of disbelief for the crew to end the second book just north of "The Doors" and start the third one near "Shardik's Lair." At least everything from that point forward seems to consist of a direct beeline for the Dark Tower; no map is needed from here on out to understand the geography of Roland's quest. (And honestly, none was needed once the third book began. I'm a bit late, but, good riddance!)
• In the book's afterword, Stephen King points out that twenty-six years had now elapsed since he'd begun writing The Dark Tower. It shows! I just re-read my post on The Gunslinger, and man, was I brutal in that one, just ripping on King's over-reliance on mystique and "telling, not showing." I still don't love King as a writer, but he's clearly learned a lot about how to tell a story and build a character in those twenty-six years. Good for him.
• In the same afterword: "I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland's young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard." Props to King - he described himself here perfectly. I know I've railed on his shortcomings a lot on this blog, but I'm not saying anything about the guy he wouldn't freely admit about himself, it seems. It's also interesting to me that he "knew" the fourth book needed to tell Roland's backstory.
• Let's zoom out for a moment and consider the picture at large. Through four books, I'm 625,000 words into The Dark Tower overall. The series in total is 1,300,000 words long. (This excludes The Wind Through the Keyhole.) So despite having four books down and three to go, it appears I'm actually less than halfway through King's saga. That's only enhanced by 500 pages of this fourth book being flashback-based. Although I've read plenty about the ka-tet, even more is still in store, apparently. Nice. I look forward to it, even though I've had my issues with this first half and most people suggest that the back half isn't even as good.
• Alright, this one has nothing to do with The Dark Tower but I went down a rabbit hole and here are some interesting comparisons. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is 473,000 words long, and that jumps to 565,000 when you include The Hobbit. Some of the longest well-known single novels out there, like Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and War and Peace, are around 575,000. Sources differ, but most peg the Bible - both testaments - at around 775,000 words. Harry Potter just cracks a million at 1,080,000, but you could cut either of the first two books entirely and still clear a million. A Song of Ice and Fire is already sitting at 1,770,000 words, and that's through just five books; if rumors that there could be eight books are to be believed, that thing could easily clear three million when all is said and done. You know, if all is ever said and done. And no one's done the hard counting, but estimates for Goosebumps and Animorphs, respectively, are 982,000 and 1,417,000. Imagine that! K.A. Applegate, putting more pen to paper for her magnum opus than Stephen King for his. So what if half that shit was ghostwritten? Also for whatever it's worth (nothing?) if you include all 42 Give Yourself Goosebumps books and six short story collections in addition to the 62 in the main series you get to 1,742,000. There's no way in hell I read all of those as a kid, but, guys, consider - R.L. Stine just may be among my top ten most-read authors. Wow!

That last one really got away from me. My apologies. Good night!