Review of Stephen King’s Song of Susannah (Grant, $30 hardcover)
by
Michael O’Rourke
Self-indulgence: some might define this term using a dictionary. I define it by reading the last two books of The Dark Tower series.
Things have been heading this way for a long time. What started out as a fine adventure/fantasy series has turned into some kind of commentary on the connectedness of all narrative, an idea that might seem cool if it weren’t also self-consciously Meta. It’s as if Stephen King has finally listened to all those critics who have been after him to “finally write something serious.”
Not that the idea itself isn’t still an interesting one—it is. It’s just that the Gunslingers of King’s seven-book series don’t need that kind of high-falutin’, twelve-dollar concept to be interesting, fun, and memorable. The first four books were just fine before we stumbled across the wolves dressed like Doctor Doom and the whizzing grenades named after Harry Potter devices.
What’s happened, in this writer’s opinion, is that King’s grand design has actually gotten in the way of his story. I liked things just fine when the Tower was merely the nexus of all realities and the room at the top might or might not have contained God (or even King himself). I was down with the books when the Crimson King was the ultimate devil, Voldemort to Roland’s Harry Potter, as it were. And I was perfectly willing to follow the gunslingers (and Oy the billy-bumbler) to the field of roses, even if they all died before they reached the Tower itself.
Now…well, I don’t know what to think. I’m sure I’ll still pick up the final volume, but I’m more worried about where it’s going than excited.
Song of Susannah feels less like a complete book than a prologue to the final chapter. Perhaps that’s the nature of this beast, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it; thirty bucks is a lot to pay for a preview.
Basically, we begin where Wolves of the Calla left off—with Susannah/Mia headed for New York to have her demon-spawn; with Roland, Eddie, Jake, Oy, and Father Callahan in hot pursuit; with Calvin Tower doing really stupid things; and with me on the edge of my seat, wondering how King will put himself in the narrative and not seem like a fool.
For the most part, he pulls it off. The section wherein King (or a fictional version of himself) appears isn’t really annoying or distracting; it just seems unnecessary. I wonder where all of this is going and why it only began to happen in the last third of the fifth book.
As for the rest, well, now we’ve got a King Arthur storyline, complete with Mordred (which I should have seen coming, given all this “Arthur Eld” stuff we’ve been reading about for years now). We’ve got split stories—Jake, Oy, and Callahan in one “when,” Roland and Eddie in another—with nary a Tower in sight and only one book to go. We’ve got Susannah vacillating between helping “Mia” and trying to sabotage her. And that’s pretty much where the book ends.
I’m waiting to see what happens next—and how things finally wrap up. But I’m also readying my guns, in case everything turns out to be some kind of hypertextual cheat. I know the book is already written, but I’m still praying that what we get is a focus on Roland and his quest, not a crammed-full text in which the gunslingers become guest stars in their own story.
B