Whoa. Good myth.

[rivkat]

I believe that Stephen King's books will be read a hundred years from now, outlasting a lot of better-respected current names. True, part of that may well be for the reasons we read Sinclair Lewis, to get the sense of a time, place and class more than to enjoy the writing, but the man can tell a damn good story and can really convey the messiness and idiosyncrasy of individual thought. I'm not sure the Dark Tower books are going to be the ones people read next century, though.

I'm going to discuss Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower together; there's really no point in treating them separately, because neither mean much on their own. Song of Susannah is another stage on the journey to the Dark Tower, wherein Susannah gets separated from the other gunslingers and has to deal with the psychic/physical manifestations of the riders she's been carrying with her, Mia the succubus and Mia's "chap," the son of Roland and of the Crimson King. How can Mia be pregnant but Susannah not and both be in Susannah's body? That's just the way it is, at least until the Low Men get ahold of Susannah for the very bloody delivery.

King is at his best with specificity, little details and fragments of memory influencing current thoughts and reactions, and this makes for an odd fit with a sweeping mythic narrative. Trying to formulate this thought, I realized I was sounding as if I expect my myths to be featureless, but that's not it – I just don't expect my myths to be singing snatches of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and confronting monsters taken from a chance childhood viewing of a particular cheesy dinosaur movie, which is what happens here. It's as if the myth needs some clothes to wear, some details to fill in the outlines, so it picks up the cultural detritus at hand. The narrative doesn't fail to work, but the awkwardness of that construction suggests that King isn't tapping as deeply into the vein of experience as he can when he's at his creepy best. "Cain Rose Up" is a King short story that I think does a much better job of combining myth/allegory with a specific human being who finds that one way to explain his life is to fit himself into a particular (unfortunate) archetype.

Maybe another way to get at the issue is that King has always had the most trouble with explanations: why are there vampires? Why is It killing children? He did his best ever on this issue in the story "The Moving Finger," in which the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is answered, "Because they can." "Because" is the bedrock of horror, and The Dark Tower half tries to get beneath that bedrock and half tries to dress it up in a multiple-worlds schema of fate, destiny, "ka," and the like. Neither tactic works all that well. The sense that King is trying to explain "why" but having trouble actually makes King's self-insertion feel organic – King has always liked to write about writers, which is to say about himself, so having a "Stephen King" character is not a big step from his writer-selves in The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, et cetera. He is the deus ex machina, moving characters and events around until they work, and he's just not as comfortable with that role in the Dark Tower books as gut-wrenching horror requires him to be.

As an aside, I find it extremely amusing that, although the book describes King's near-fatal accident – he was hit by a drunk driver while he was walking on the side of a road near his house -- and identifies the man who struck him by name, using many details that also appeared in news accounts of the incident, the book nonetheless contains the ridiculous disclaimer, "Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental." This isn't even a lie, really, because you'd have to be nuts to believe it and the publisher knows that. Yet there's something unsavory about this statement, corrupt even, perhaps especially in a Stephen King book which always collects bits and pieces of reality like a magpie's bower.

The series is clearly deeply personal, a project pursued across decades despite the fact that the books don't sell as well as his straigher stuff. And he's a fine storyteller, there's no doubt, good enough that he can survive off his normal turf of real life turned suddenly, shockingly horrific. But his genius has always involved the flotsam of American popular culture, and so his fantasy societies – particularly the culture of his hero, Roland the gunslinger – are a lot flatter than his various Americas. Roland is an alien, and Stephen King is not. Perhaps this, too, drove him to find a Stephen King character to participate in the book, like the other Americans pulled into Roland's world, humanizing it – King states very explicitly in the narrative that Roland is not an easy fellow with whom to identify.

The Dark Tower is a long book, but one that moves at King's usual furious clip, just as Roland's newborn son grows with unnatural speed. The ending is appropriate, though I suspect King's right to guess that not all readers will find it satisfactory.

Comments

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Finally letting myself read this and yeah, I agree; much as I've enjoyed them, the series ultimately fails for me. To further your argument about King's brilliance with America popular culture, I find myself continually jerked out of the later books of Dark Tower by the fact that these worlds within worlds are entirely American; there's no "rest of the world" in any of the cosmos, nobody's ever heard of England even, to a point I find offensive. American myopia is all well and good in certain contexts, but not if you're trying to paint on a canvas that encompassases all universes that have ever existed but can't find South America on a map.

The other thing is that--yeah, while King's always been self- reflexive, the hero (and sometimes the villain, to give him credit) of his own stories, it doesn't feel right here. I don't so much mind SK the character as much as I mind SK the narrator nervously talking about deus ex machinas and kind of trying to disguise his loss of control over the narrative as postmodern meta. I LOVE postmodern meta, but this felt wrong to me--he kept writing himself into corners and then admitting he had, and then he kept footnoting his references as if he were embarrassed of them (ok, I got this from Browning and this from Clint Eastwood and this from the Wizard of Oz and this from--yeah, Steve, we KNEW that, and it was okay, we were fine with it, until you started chattering nervously like a prisoner in an interrogation room.) If you're going to make shit up, do it brazenly, without apologizing--the narrative voice here seemed to me to be caught between enjoying his tale and nervously fearing that it wasn't somehow up to literary snuff, and the latter feeling was contageous. I found myself wishing, instead, that he'd just brazenly let his imagination go--DO the deux ex machina, HAVE the goddess sweep down from a chariot, but don't TELL me that's what it is, and that it's a cop out, but hey, artist's perogative. Just DO it. To paraphrase another writer, hesitancy in a horror writer is like modesty in a prostitute--who wants it?