Read: Song of Susannah–“2nd Stanza: The Persistence of Magic”; “3rd Stanza: Trudy and Mia”; “4th Stanza: Susannah’s Dogan”; “5th Stanza: The Turtle”
Three recurring elements of King’s Dark Tower storytelling technique appear in these chapters:
1) His seeming inability to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. In Chapter Two, there’s page after page describing magical pendulums plumb lines and shit. In a world with giant cyborg bears, who cares?
2) Random characters who get introduced, seem like they’ll be come important supporting cast members, then disappear. This harkens all the way back to The Drawing of the Three, with Eddie’s stewardess and Odetta’s driver and the cops who try to stop Roland/Jack Mort. This time around this poor Trudy woman even gets her name in a chapter heading, but as far as I can tell that’s the last we’ll see of her.
3) Using the promise of answers to drag the reader (well, me at least) through stuff I don’t give a damn about. I still don’t care whether Susannah lives or dies and wish the other gunslingers would just leave her for dead and get on with it. (I feel the same about Eddie, and Father Callahan has gotten pretty irritating pretty quickly, too. Jake and Oy are pretty cool, though. God, how much better would this series be if it were just Roland, Jake, and Oy, a sort of Lone Wolf and Cub and Cub deal?) However, I’ll put up with her if Mia really is gonna spill the beans to her about her demon baby and whatever the hell else is going on.
I’ve also picked up on a couple SPOILERS, somewhat inadvertently and somewhat not.
1) Thanks to that Dark Tower comic that Marvel put out that I was flipping through yesterday, I know what the Crimson King looks like. Familiar, is how I’d put it.
2) I also know that there’s a big cameo on the way in this book, thanks to the back-jacket copy. Argh, is how I’d put it.
Re: #2
You gotta get over this, man; it’s a signature of King’s, like De Palma’s thing with voyeurism or Elmore Leonard’s dialogue. He likes to flesh people out… and as such, I consider it a pleasure and not a distraction. I’d say characterization is King’s #1 virtue.
And in Drawing of the Three, I’d argue the device of the stewardess and the driver give us a window into who these new characters are, through someone we as the audience can identify with. We understand the basic assumptions of life that a stewardess or driver has, because we have them too; the same cannot be said for Roland. I guess you could call them framing devices.
I’m having oodles of fun reading the Blogslinger series, though. Carry on, carry on…
No, I know that. As far as my complaints go about this series, it’s not even really a complaint, just an observation. But keep in mind I’ve read a lot of King and this is the first time that this has really thrown me for a loop. It’s not just fleshing people out, it’s structuring the writing in such a way that it suggests we’re meeting new main characters, rather than just fleshing out a random background guy.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October-November 2007–Index
Here you shall find links to all of the posts in my blogathon reading of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. This post will be updated with each new entry. Day 1: Introduction Day 2: The Gunslinger Day 3: The Drawing…