Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Town and Ka-tet“
Nothing beats the catharsis you feel when characters do exactly what they should do. In this case that thing is answer by proxy the prayers of a million angry Lost critics and just sit around and compare notes. (Lost‘s creators are fond of citing their storytelling debt to King, with whom they’ve formed a mutual admiration society; maybe the bard of Bangor should point this passage out to them and say “how about you have Jack, Locke, and Juliet just sit down and explain shit to each other for about 45 minutes?”)
The menace of Charlie the Choo-Choo/Blaine the Mono continues to grow. I’m still concerned it’ll be much ado about nothing, but for now I’m content to enjoy the strength of the images conjured in that storybook. Using Underworld’s “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”, which was the song that played during the withdrawal hallucination sequence in Trainspotting if you recall, as my mental soundtrack for all things locomotive in this book is certainly helping.
Two other notes:
1) I think I realized why Susannah and Eddie just don’t work as foils for Roland, even while the mere hints and suggestions we’ve received about his former companions like Alain and Cuthbert are so fascinating–it’s because the former feel like real people and the latter like mythic archetypes. That sort of thing can frequently work in the real-feeling characters’ favor, but not in this dark fairy-tale world.
2) For a second there, when Roland was upbraiding himself for mistaking Eddie’s free will for his ka, I thought I’d suddenly and finally figured out how the Presbyterians reconcile predestination and free will. You’ve got a path (predestination/ka) laid out for you and you’re gonna travel it one way or another, but you can still choose to do so or not. But this falls apart when applied to the Presbyterians, because while it seems conceivable that someone’s ka could draw them into a quest like Roland’s against their will, I’m pretty sure no one’s supposed to go to Heaven thinking “man, this is bullshit!”