Dear Wal,
I've been trying to finish The Dark Tower series, as you all know, for about a year. Any other series of seven books, I would have finished by now, but these books are just so long, and so..pointless. Yes, Roland and company are trying to reach the Tower. Yes, they encounter many adventures and trialls along the way, but really..it didn't take Frodo and company this long to reach Mordor. They did it in three books.
Needless to say, I'm tired of this series. Don't get me wrong, all the books are extremely well written and the interconnectedness of every tiny detail is at times fascinating. Plus, King is really good at dramatic, often morbid irony. He's Stephen King. He would be.
Up until The Dark Tower, the final book in the series, I was willing to follow along with King's story, and absorb every little detail of it, but this last book is at best ponderous and frustrating. King's tendency to stretch out a story longer than it needs to be has blotted out most of the good qualities of this book. I was really looking forward to the end, the final epic battle to save the universe, but The Dark Tower has been one huge disappointment.
SPOILERS. Don't read on.
It took two hundred pages, I repeat, two hundred pages, to cover the day before Roland and company finally got through the door to Thunderclap. Why did it take so long? Allow me to explain. King feels the need to cover every possible angle of a scene, by jumping back and forth from characters. This is refreshing when the characters are grouped together, because it really gives you a window directly into their thoughts, but when the characters are separated, it works out so that King tells the same events over again, even thought you already knew what had happened. In Song of Susanna, this wasn't so bad because the dynamic between Detta, Susanna, Mia and occasionally Odetta all in one mind was so fascinating, but this last book.
I don't know how I'm going to make it to the end, and I so badly want to finish this series.
/endrant
No comments:
Post a Comment