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#there's still another wizard leon I also sketched around that time
b4kuch1n · 3 years
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the-gsos · 7 years
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Wizard and Glass Blether
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So I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series since the end of last year, when I decided I needed something to fill the epic fantasy series void while GRR Martin continues to do his ‘asthmatic ant with heavy shopping job’ on the Game of Thrones books.
I’m enjoying the books and the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass, which I’ve finished just recently, is probably my favourite so far, but I’ve got a few more specific thoughts on it that I’d like to share with the two or three of you that have clicked on this link, saw that the article isn’t about Italian football (or Scottish bars + pubs) and somehow, inexplicably decided to keep reading. Warning - it’s going to be pretty spoiler-ific throughout, I don’t really see any way to avoid that, so if you plan to read the books or you ARE reading them and just haven’t got to number four yet, you should probably give this a miss. Oh, and there’s the small matter of the film adaptation that’s released in just over a month’s time, which is apparently going to be followed by a TV series that specifically depicts the events of Wizard and Glass (which will sound like a weird idea to the uninitiated, but W&G is a prequel, y’see), so anyone planning on watching those without ever having read the books should also probably stop reading this.
Huzzah, now that I’ve thinned my readership down to about minus three, let’s begin!
My overall impression was that Wizard and Glass is that rare type of book that’s very good but could have been great if only it hadn’t taken the wrong turn at a few key plot junctions.
(Here, have you noticed that I’m adopting more of a conversational, almost vlogger-ish tone with this article? What was that “so” all about in the first line? Eurgh.)
In the intro that’s printed at the start of each Dark Tower book King talks about his inspiration for the series, how he realised at the age of 19 that he wanted to fuse The Lord of the Rings with the Spaghetti Western, to write “a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop”. Now obviously I haven’t read volumes five, six, seven and eight yet, but of the first four books it seems to me that Wizard and Glass is the closest he comes to achieving that vision, albeit it does in many ways pick up the stylistic thread of the first volume, The Gunslinger. The Dark Tower books are a bit of a bewildering mixture of genres and influences, but whereas volumes two and three transport the reader (and characters) back and forth between New York in the sixties, seventies and eighties and dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes, one and four are basically Westerns with fantastical elements laced through them.
It’s no secret that King is willing and able to bash out some pretty hefty tomes, with The Stand, It and Under the Dome all clocking in at over 1,000 pages, and going by my extremely amateurish internet research Wizard and Glass is the joint fifth longest novel he’s ever penned (although different editions seem to have different numbers of pages; mine has 840, others have 787). That’s pretty remarkable when you stop and think about it, especially given that A) every other Dark Tower novel up until then had been 500 pages or less, and B) it’s essentially one big flashback, a story told round a campfire by protagonist Roland Deschain to quest companions Jake, Eddie and Susannah. The main plot, the one centred on the four characters I’ve just mentioned, only progresses about two inches forward in this enormous book.
The question is, does it need to be quite so long, and the answer is a pretty resounding no. Again, I must stress that I enjoyed it, the last time I read a book that long it took up six months of my life; this took roughly two, so ol’ Stevie’s obviously doing something right. However there are countless passages about the weather and nature in Mejis - where the tale is set - when one or two would have sufficed. Yes, they add a little atmosphere and help the reader envision Mejis, but they also give you the very strong suspicion that King is stalling for time.
“There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch…”
“The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant…”
“Some called the Huntress the last moon of summer, some called it the first of fall…”
SO many chapters begin like this, and it’s particularly frustrating given that King has already assembled a great cast of characters by that point and established tension - of both the sexual and violent kind - between them. It’s almost like he’s written a brilliant script for a play and got all the actors he wanted, but is making them wait in the wings while he obsessively tinkers with the stage design and lighting.
Another bugbear is the teenage love story between Roland and Susan Delgado. King admits in his afterword that he procrastinated with the writing of Wizard and Glass because was “scared to death” of writing that story, and well, you can sort of see why. There isn’t a sock in the world strong enough to withstand the force that your toes curl upward with when reading these scenes, which soar beyond even Attack of the Clones’ Padme and Anakin love scenes on the cringe-ometer.
For example: “He uttered a small moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place. Those two places were meant for each other, as she was…”
Yeah, you get the picture.
That said, teenage love by its very nature is cloying and sickly sweet, King freely admits this sort of stuff isn’t his bag and there’s no way around it if we’re to fully understand why Roland is still so fixated on Susan so many years later. His relationship with her and the agonising manner in which it ends is the central, formative event of his entire life.
More than anything else though, the main thing stopping Wizard and Glass from ascending into the echelon of fantasy classics is the way the antagonists are dealt with. The Big Coffin Hunters are an undoubtedly brilliant creation. Reynolds and Depape may be slightly thinly sketched, but the physical touches - Reynolds’ long cloak, Depape’s gold-rimmed glasses - are enough to make them memorable, and the ringleader Eldred Jonas is a magnificent villain. Cunning, cold and mean, he’s a character that never loses his aura, even when he strides naked onto a balcony at one point. The scene is set for an almighty showdown between Jonas and Roland, but we don’t get one. Instead both Jonas and Depape are shot down easily and matter-of-factly by Roland out in the desert, and Reynolds escapes, but not to be put to any particular use in the remainder of the story. Part of the thinking behind this is presumably the need to demonstrate just how much of a badass Roland was even at the age of 14, and that’s fair enough. No-one’s expecting or wanting him to die; indeed, given the nature of prequels, we know that he can’t. But surely after establishing all that tension for all of those pages, and crafting such a formidable foe in the shape of Jonas, the reader deserves something a bit more prolonged, a bit less one-sided?
There’s also a hint of a bait and switch to it, as Rhea, the demented but ultimately deadly witch character, comes to the fore and plays a leading role in Susan’s demise. That particularly scene is incredibly well done, and while I don’t want to say that I ‘enjoyed’ reading about an innocent teenage girl being burned at the stake, it certainly lives with you.
One more thing: why do both Cuthbert and Alain survive after Roland has hinted at their demises in his interior monologues in the first three books? Does that mean future volumes will include yet more flashbacks? And would that be an admission that King is struggling to pad out the main plot? In fact, don’t tell me the answer to any of those questions.
Anyway, for all its flaws - which I hopefully  haven’t been too rant-ey about - Wizard and Glass is still a helluva page turner and hasn’t changed my mind about wanting to read the remaining books in the saga. I just wish King had made one or two better decisions when it came to the business end of things. Sort of makes you long for those Choose Your Own Adventure books of your childhood…
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