This is the first time I have read the 2003 revised edition of this book. I had a copy of the original when I was a teenager, and remember liking it a lot. The book came up in a discussion I was having in the dystopian novels book club. The person I was talking to was talking about how much she loved this series, and this book in particular. When I was reading the series it was incomplete. There were only three books, and it ended with The Waste Lands. It’s a little daunting how much there is of it now that it is complete, but I think I’ll make my way through it.
This first book is short. There are five sections, each acting like a short story on the main character’s journey to find The Man in Black. Roland, the main character, is essentially Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western films. In one of the earlier sections in particular, he tells the story of his time in a town named Tull. It all happens very much like in one of those films, the pilgrim wanderer appears in a small town of wooden buildings and saloons. He gets caught up in the lives of the people there and it ends in a big shoot out. The difference is that The Man in Black set it all up for him. He performed magic and enchantments on the people which triggered it all going the way it did.
The story is not just a western though. There are multiple flashback sequences where we see Roland as a young man. He is training to become a gunslinger, like his father. He and his friends are being taught by a brutal man named Cort. Cort is physically and verbally abusive to the boys, and they must be subservient to him. It is Cort’s job to make them into hard men capable of killing without a thought. In one particularly good sequence Roland is furiously angry because a man appears to be controlling and abusing his mother with his father doing nothing. The way the gunslingers become men is to challenge Cort to a fight in what is known as the coming of age ceremony. Roland challenges Cort, who is convinced that Roland is too young and throwing his life away. The boys only get one chance at the fight. Roland gets a choice of weapon, however, and chooses his hawk, David, which eviscerates Cort’s face and dies in the process. Roland manages to win the fight, and get his guns.
There are also ties to our world, it’s clear that this is not a pure fantasy. Roland encounters a boy, Jake, in what appears to be the remnants of a petrol station. Jake has no memory of how he got to be there, and Roland hypnotises him in an attempt to find out. Jake starts talking about his life leading up to this moment, and to the reader it is clear he is talking about our world. His story ends with him being brutally run over by a car after being shoved into the road. It appears Jake died, and woke up in Roland’s world.
Roland ends up effectively sacrificing the boy. They journey through subway tunnels on the heels of The Man in Black, and end up walking across rotten train tracks suspended over a chasm. Jake falls to his death, and Roland did not even really attempt to catch him. In his internal monologue we hear that this is because he knows that if he did it would be death for both of them. Jake’s death is foreshadowed heavily, and it’s the part of the book that works the least for me. It all felt very much like the author trying to put something very dark in, but I don’t think he put the work in for it to pay off. Or at least, put the work in to why Jake had to die. We’ve definitely seen that Roland can make snap brutal decisions, and that The Man in Black is laying traps. The bit that doesn’t work is why Roland just accepts this one without a word, and knows what the consequences would be if he doesn’t.
The book ends with a meeting between Roland and The Man in Black. They talk about The Tower, about the possibility of the universe being inside the atoms of a single blade of grass, and whether the world “moving on” (as they describe the post apocalyptic nature of this place) is the result of that blade of grass being cut. Roland wakes up from a dream after having apparently aged 10 years knowing that he must “draw” three more people into his world.
There are only a couple of female characters in this book, and they are referred to in a really creepy way throughout. I’d suspect that this is King attempting world building, but it’s consistent in pretty much every book I’ve read of his. Every description of a female character begins with a very unusual description of their breasts. It’s just very odd.
It has been so long since I read the original version that I cannot see every difference that has been made, but there are references to characters in later books that I’m pretty sure were not there before.
Overall I thought this was pretty great. Not exactly literature, but that’s not what he’s going for. It was a fast-paced fun read with an interesting premise and intriguing world.