Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, The

Inhoud

The end of King's quantitative magnum opus, the Dark Tower, some 34 years in the making and god knows how many thousands of pages long, begins where Song of Susannah left off. Boy gunslingers Jake and Pere Callahan (once upon a time, the priest of 'Salem's Lot) are entering the Dixie Pig Cafe in Manhattan, in whose backrooms the heir of two fathers--the evil Crimson King, lord of the Dark Tower, and the saga's hero, the gunslinger Roland Deschain--is aborning. Chief gunslinger Roland and Eddie Dean, whose fellow gunslinger and wife, Susannah, is bearing the horrid child in tandem with the formerly immortal Mia (two dads require two moms, though the moms are merged, the dads poles apart), are speeding to the rescue from Maine. Neither birth nor rescue is short-circuited, but abandon all hope that either develops straightforwardly. The tower is ever so digressively approached, and many die in the process. It would be unforgivable to leak just who in Roland's ka-tet--he, Eddie and Susannah, Jake, and the billybumbler Oy--achieves the tower with him, but saying that the tower is achieved gives nothing essential away. Despite plenty of action and quite a few unforeseen bombshells, this massive conclusion may strike some as drawn out. King leans on his talent for covering 30 seconds of action in, say, 30 pages, rather too often. But what the vast, allusive (to several other King books and plenty of others) tale is all about is more teasingly evident than ever before: it's a fable, possibly theological, of creativity--among, indubitably, other things.

Bespreking

And so the saga ends...

The final battle is about to begin. Pere Don Callahan and Jake Chambers, as always accompanied by his pet Oy, get ready to enter the Dixie Pig, a New York restaurant on Lex and Sixty-first, to get face-to-face with the vampires. These evil foes are the only things that stand between the ka-tet and the door through which the pregnant Susannah-Mia disappeared. Susannah is going to give birth to something that might jeopardize their quest for the Dark Tower. But that is not the only danger, as Roland Dechain and Eddie Dean find out in the Main of 1977. The life of the 'writer' turns out to be strongly linked with the existence of the Dark Tower and time is running out.

Writing the final episode of a great fantasy series that has captured the hearts of millions of readers was a lost cause right from the start. No denouement will ever satisfy fully the imagination of that massive audience. So, how do you deal with this if your name is Stephen King. You let the narrator state that the fun it is all in the journey itself and surely not in the finale. Also you make clear that the audience will be utterly repulsed by reading the conclusion, say true. So stop reading! Honest indeed. Even fair, if you are willing to ignore the fact that people pay some good bucks for the book. But why not pay more attention to delivering the promised excitement? After writing six wonderful novels and raising quite some anticipation on what the evil force will be all about, it is quite silly to portray the ultimate evil as something that can be wiped out without much fuss, not?

Although the story is decent and the narrative excellent, as can be expected from King, you better be prepared to be disappointed in the end. Maybe it will turn out to be not so bad after all? Let's hope.