“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
And so begins the epic tale of The Dark Tower. Maybe it’s just because I like the story so much, but I think that opening line is one of the best of all time. It’s probably just because it gets me thinking about all there is to come in this monumental epic.
For those of you who don’t know, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (which will heretofore be referred to simply as The Gunslinger) is the first in an epic 8 book series. This series, which King wanted to be his “Lord of the Rings” is the tale of Roland, the last Gunslinger, and his journey to find The Dark Tower. The series is so big, it actually even ties in to several of King’s other stories, which is pretty cool. The series originally ended with book 7, but King felt that he still had stories to tell, and went back and added an 8th book which just came out this year. From what I understand, this new book is essentially just back stories which will have no real effect on the overall main story, just provide some more information, and actually takes place between book 4 and 5.
I think the hardest thing for me to do with reviewing all of The Dark Tower books will be to just focus on the book at hand. Once you’ve read them before, it’s always impossible not to think about the future books when re-reading them. Especially as you start to notice things that foreshadow future events. Things you miss the first time around because you don’t know what those future events are going to be. So it’s going to be very hard for me not to think about those things.
In fact, I think it would almost be silly to try. Part of the enjoyment of this journey is to write about all my experiences while reading and many of those experiences are going to be “second reading” experiences. I will try to be sensitive to those of you who may not have read these wonderful books before (and if you haven’t, you really need to check them out, especially if you are a Stephen King fan… umm….err… *cough* Ellie!! *cough*). But at the same time, for those of you who have read this series, I think this will be a great chance for me to share with you some of the things I’m noticing that you (and I) may have missed the first time around. I think it would be a disservice for me not to do that as well.
And let me just put it out here now, this post will contain spoilers. Not just spoilers for The Gunslinger, but possibly for the entire series as well. I will do my best not to give warnings before any major spoilers, but just know that due to the nature of these books, in order to be able to share my complete feelings about them, I will have to share some plot points. If this concerns you, I do apologize, and would just say go read the books, then come back and read my thoughts.
This was my fourth time reading The Gunslinger; so needless to say, I knew the story pretty well. That did not change my enjoyment of it one little bit though. It’s hard to choose one book out of a series that is all connected and label it as your favorite. Especially when all of the books connect and flow so well together the way The Dark Tower books do. That being said, The Gunslinger is probably not my favorite in the series, but it would be high on the list. This is the book were we get to meet Roland for the first time. We don’t learn a whole lot about him here, and we don’t learn a whole lot about his ultimate quest, but we do learn one thing; Roland is awesome (the scene in Tull when he takes out the entire town is absolutely epic). In fact, Roland just may be my second favorite character of all time (Dr. House is, and will always be, my favorite).
Despite this being my fourth read though, in some ways it was brand new to me. This is because this is the first time I’ve been privileged to read the original version of The Gunslinger. Back in 2003, when King finally got around to finishing the final three books of the series after recovering from his accident (something that I will discuss later on in the journey; for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s just say we are very, very lucky we even have an ending to this epic story), he decided to go back and revise The Gunslinger in order to clean up some of the inconsistencies that occurred as the story evolved. These inconsistencies arose because King’s style of writing is to not have an outline and rather just let the story flow out of him as he goes. That approach, and the fact that he started The Gunslinger when he was very young and took over 12 years to fully finish it, led to quite a few “changes” in some of the details over the later course of the series. To correct this King published a “Revised and Expanded” version of The Gunslinger, and this is the only version I had ever read.
That being said, I am going to do my best to focus on just the original version for this review and save any comparisons of the two until I re-read the revised version later on in the journey. Although, there may be a few necessary comparisons to be made now depending on how they pertain to my thoughts on the original version. We shall see.
I mentioned that The Gunslinger itself took King over 12 years to write. It’s important that you understand that I’m talking about just The Gunslinger, and not the whole Dark Tower series. Just this first book took him 12 years to write. And that’s pretty interesting when you consider that it is the shortest of all of the books in the series (I think it’s even shorter than the newest one). Of course “short” for Stephen King is probably about normal book length for many other authors 🙂
Back to the 12 year writing period though. Knowing that going in this time, and knowing that this was not the “revised” version, I could definitely tell that the early part of the book was written by a young, inexperienced writer. You can just tell that the end product is just a little rough and unpolished. It’s choppy and rough and just doesn’t have the usual finesse that King’s writing usually does. And while this is noticeable while reading, it doesn’t make the story any less enjoyable. In fact, I think that speaks to just how good this story is; even the noticeably poorer writing does not take away from it. However, by the end of the book, the writing has definitely improved. I think what’s interesting about this is that there isn’t any one point where you can say, “Yes, right here. This is where the writing stops being bad.” Part of this is due to the fact that by the time you reach that point, you are so engrossed in the story that the quality of the writing is the last thing you are thinking about. The other part of that is probably due to the fact that the book is broken into 5 distinct sections. Each of these sections was written at a different point in King’s life, and he actually lets us know which was written when in short afterword at the end of the book. He tells us what part he wrote just after finishing ‘Salem’s Lot, and which part he finished after The Shining. So in some sense, if you wanted, you could say that after a particular section the writing gets better. But as I said, by that point you aren’t really thinking about it.
Another interesting fact is that these 5 sections were originally published one at a time as individual (albeit connected and continuing) stories in a magazine. They were only later collected and published all together as an actual novel. And this is also apparent because each “section” contains is own little self-contained story that has a beginning, middle, and end with only the briefest thread of connection to the stories that came before it (oh, but what an important thread it is). It’s interesting to read something that was originally written as 5 different stories. Yes they all connect and flow together, and you could just think of them as 5 chapters. But, when you are writing something that will be read by itself, it has to be able to stand on its own as well. Obviously, if you just read section 3, you’d be pretty confused as to what is going on and who the characters are, but if you could get over that, then the story would hold its own… for the most part.
As you may remember from my last couple posts on Roadwork and The Running Man, I’ve been a little obsessed with the main character’s names and how they are used. Maybe obsessed isn’t the right word, but I’ve made comments about them. So I found it quite interesting while reading The Gunslinger that the main character himself does not have his name revealed until page 126! It was a little weird at first, knowing what his name is and not seeing it used at all. In fact, Roland’s name isn’t used at all in the first story in the book. He is simply referred to as “The Gunslinger”. And when his name is finally mentioned, it is completely out of the blue. It’s not in a dialogue where he is introducing himself or anything like that. It is merely in a descriptive sentence where “he” could have been used just as easily. In fact, if “he” had been used it almost would have been better because for someone who has never read the story before to be reading along and all of a sudden they read “and then Roland took the skull” they have to stop and ask themselves “Wait, who is Roland?”
And then Roland’s name isn’t used again until page 134 in a flashback story. Where again, if you didn’t “know” that Roland was the gunslinger, it might be a little confusing to be reading this backstory about a young boy named Roland and his friend Cuthbert and not really being sure which one of them is going to turn out to be “The Gunslinger” that you have been reading about to this point. Perhaps that’s the reason for the use of Roland’s name on page 126… but I doubt that. Anyway, for me it was more of just an interesting thing to notice than it was anything that caused any confusion. But I did find it interesting.
Along with that, there is no mention of The Dark Tower itself until page 111. You know, the tower that the whole series is named after. Yeah, that tower. Not mentioned until a third of the way though the book (of course, it’s still mentioned before we find out the name of the main character). And really, we don’t find out much about the tower at all in this book. We don’t even really find out much about Roland’s whole quest until the end of the book. And even then we just find out a little bit. As far as we are concerned for the majority of this book, Roland is simply trying to catch the Man in Black. And that is part of the reason why this book is so captivating. We know he is chasing the Man in Black, but we have no idea why, so we keep reading in the hopes that we will find out. You may have noticed that I didn’t give my usual story synopsis with this book. And that is because I think the opening line (see above) tells you all you really need to know about this book. The Man in Black is fleeing across the desert, and the Gunslinger is following. Everything else is really just details. And for details, you really should read the book yourself 🙂
Ok, so those are the big long things I wanted to talk about. The next couple things will just be short things I found somewhat interesting as I was reading. Again, I may reveal more story details as they pertain to these items. But some of these just may not make sense if you haven’t read the book.
In one of the flashbacks, Roland finds out about a plan by “The Good Man” to annihilate everyone living in the town of Farson. The only reason this is really all that interesting is if you’ve read the series before, you will know that in book number 4 we first meet “The Good Man” and find out his name is John Farson.
The next thing that I thought was incredibly funny was during the flashback scene where Roland must prove his readiness for manhood by fighting his mentor, Cort. At the end, when Roland has won, he grabs a key from Cort and has to resist the urge to “thrust it up to the sky in victory”. Again, this is only interesting to you if you are a fan of Zelda. I also find it interesting that this book was published in 1982, and Zelda didn’t come around until 1986, so clearly King is not emulating this is anyway, but that is sure the image that it brought up in my mind 🙂 Maybe Shigeru Miyamoto had read The Gunslinger, and these scene stuck out to him when creating The Legend of Zelda.
Ok, last thing of interest here. This one will probably give some stuff away. So sorry for that. This one will probably also require some knowledge of the series to fully understand, so sorry for that too. Ok, ready? Here we go.
I was always under the impression that the Man in Black, who we eventually find out is named Walter, and Marten (a person from Roland’s past who we only find out the briefest about in this book but learn more later) were the same person. However, at the end of this book, the Man in Black makes it very, very clear that he is not Marten. He makes a comment about how impressed he is at what Roland has done (chasing him down over the course of 12 years) and says that Marten never could have done that. He then later says that he worked though Marten, but again indicates pretty clearly that he is a separate entity. And still later when Roland finally figures out that the Man in Black is Walter, Roland himself recognizes that he (Walter) had worked with Marten, still further solidifying the separateness of the two.
Now, before those of you who have read the books before (Amanda, Joe, Kathy, and anyone else) start getting all upset at me and yelling at me insisting that Walter is Marten and blah blah blah…. Keep in mind one thing. This is the original version of the story, not the revised version from 2003. I fully expect to have a lot more to say about this subject when I finish reading the new version 🙂
But for now, just accept that fact that Walter is not Marten. There is no ambiguity at all. It is very clear that these two characters are separate. That was kind of a head turner for me when I read. Because for 3 different readings of the series, I was always under the impression they were the same (again, for good reasons which will be discussed later). But it’s interesting to see that at the very beginning, it is clear they are different.
And that’s about all I have to share with you about The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. The book is a nice quick read, so if you haven’t read it yet I would highly suggest that you do. It’s really good. Of course, be warned, this book is short and a fast read, but it will get you hooked. You will want to find out what happens to Roland on his journey (because there is definite set up at the end for the next one), and his journey is not short. The second book is significantly longer than this one; the third is even longer, the fourth longer still. I’m pretty sure the fifth book is longer than the fourth, and the seventh is the longest of them all (disappointedly, King broke his cycle with the 6th book, as it was shorter than both the 5th and 4th). So, while this series is great and well worth the read, just be warned, it’s a long one. But it’s oh so worth it.
And if you need any further encouragement to try this series out, let me again give you the hook that starts it all…
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
*Chills*
Thank you for reading.
One Page At A Time 