Wizard and Glass - The Dark Tower: Book Four (Part II)

The second half of the book is where things pick up and the plot really develops. For Roland and his love affair with Susan, things get passionate until they reach a hot, sweaty climax typical of western romance stories. For him and his ka-tet, however, things get super badass as they morph into gunslinger mode. And for the town of Hambry and indeed all of Mejis, things twist themselves into a murderous, maddening rage similar to what we saw in Book I with the town of Tull going nuts and Roland having to go full Cormac McCarthy on each and every man, woman, and child in that town.

No one is safe. The sound of the thinny is a constant reminder of the serious peril that lies just outside of town, and the witch that Roland deals with in order to protect his lover becomes obsessed with avenging the death of her snake/toy. People are going to get hurt; it is just a matter of when and where.

What I admire most about this book is how it is done, not so much what happens. King’s take on the game Castles, wherein you keep yourself disguised until you are ready to attack and come over the hillock, thus exposing yourself yet hoping you have enough momentum to impose an unbending will on the opponent, is a fictional game that is a perfect metaphor for what the ka-tet is doing with Jonas’s Coffin Hunters. After some minor peaks at each other’s offensive capabilities, Jonas makes a move and destroys the boys’ guest house. Roland isn’t biting. He feigns complete ignorance, a guise they work well under, until they are captured, arrested and jailed for the deaths of the mayor and his right hand man. Murders that were actually carried out by the Coffin Hunters. This is their “all in” and aggressive attack in the game of Castles. Too bad for them, Roland is game.

After Susan breaks them out of jail we get our first look at the real gunslingers. And my goodness is it awesome. The final 2 days of the season, the Reaping Festival under the Demon Moon, are the most significant, action packed, bloody and tragic. But it is not just what is going on, again, that is my favourite part. It is admiring the universe King has created, that I enjoy most. The seasons, the Demon Moon, its effect of putting people into a trance, bringing out their rage, all the while shining down on them like an evil, bloodthirsty god. It is so brilliant.

Many sci-fi and fantasy authors have created unique universes, sure. Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg’s Nightfall, for example, involves a planet with seven suns and a never-before-seen moon, and as people study the skies in constant daytime they contemplate the impact the sky has on them, and how terrible it could all be if their stars (suns in this case) were to align themselves in the ever-so-rare fashion that brings about an unrecognizable change. Meanwhile, fantasy books like The Kingkiller Chronicles or The Belgariad Series have fantasy worlds celebrating different seasons than ours but something we still recognize: growing seasons (summer); harvest (autumn); dark, cold dormant seasons (winter); and times of rebirth (spring).  But I don’t feel like anyone has captured it all, the ominous skies, the parallel seasons to ours, the wickedness you would expect from a demonic autumnal post-harvest celebration (Halloween, anyone?) quite like Stephen King has. Everything about it is worked out so well, so meaningful is each and every variant of the phases the Moon goes through. And I love how it crashes violently into the wild nature of people saying goodbye to the most lively, productive part of the year. Queue the insanity.

The Wizard’s Glass is another fine touch in this story, too. It is pretty much directly responsible for Roland’s threats to the witch, the capture of Susan, his loss of youth, the quest for the tower and several other horrible crimes he commits after he leaves Mejis. And it reappears, Wizard included, to issue more warnings to Roland and his new ka-tet of Susannah*, Eddie, Jake, and Oy. The Wizard is powerful, yes, but vulnerable, we see. After all the drama, Roland has apparently lost himself only to have the ka-tet bring him back to his senses. They are not breaking up, there is no going back, and they will all push on towards the Tower. A great continuation of the series, in my mind.

*Author’s Note: Can I just say (oh of fucking course I can! This is my blog, what am I drunk? Who prefaces statements with that other than drunks?), in a quick, unrelated, side-bit about Susannah, that as much as I absolutely despised her as a character when she was first introduced, mainly as Detta Walker, that I now enjoy her equally as much, if not more so? Not because of a monumental change in character, but because she remains an artistic rarity. Think about the character she represents: confused, multiple personality disordered, racist southern black lady who may be handicap yet is still as capable as a gunslinger. But in terms of modern pop-culture black protagonists, she is quite the opposite of what we’re used to. Django Unchained, a very unoriginal and uncomical take on comedy legend Blazing Saddles, tells a story of one African American’s revenge on a greedy, slave driving white frontiersman. Stephen King could have used Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker as his contemporary of the year-2013-cliché-racial-allegory-to-promote-white-hate-crime-comitting-awareness. Yet he did not. Instead, he uses her as an example of how horrible one person can be, driven by racism, and yet how they can overcome that, gain hold of their senses, and turn into a leader and key contributor to a small group on a very important mission. Almost making it as though whichever side of the 1960’s/1970’s race war she is on, completely irrelevant. And for that, I give Stephen King mad props. Because it seems it is just way too easy for people to in Hollywood and pop-culture these days to say “here’s a colored person who is showing outrage to illustrate how hateful/corrupt/racist white people are, let’s watch it happen and talk about how brave this person of color is, but only if the white people fail miserably and/or die.” Stephen King brings an element of not really giving a shit about colour, only pointing out that extremists lose sight of what is really at issue. But they can recover, and redeem themselves. For that, I tip my hat to you, Mr. King.

Doctor Zhivago

This blog gets a little too “happy” from time to time. Unrealistic fairy tale love stories, people who work their problems out, utopian societies, good triumphing over evil, holocaust/apocalyptic worthy diseases being solved by scientists, the Land of Do-As-You-Please and those annoying, unrealistic happy endings.

Well I thought I’d go Russian, again, for a chance to get my feet settled back on familiar hard ground. Hard, unapologising, unrelenting and completely unforgiving ground. Doctor Zhivago is a tale of…love? No that’s not quite right. War? Famine? Revolution? Journeys through the dark, lonely unknown to discover that ultimately nothing in life can bring you happiness? It is all of those things, but even more.

One of the most incredible books I have ever read, and I don’t always say that even about books I like. I have never come across a character so conflicted, from so many different facets of a life full of despair and unfair disadvantages. Even second chances are cruel to the antagonist.

I have read of characters that have perhaps more severe conflicts and sources of torture: Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin, Frank Herbert’s Paul Atreides, Nabokov’s Edgar H. Humbert, Dumas’s Edmund Dantes, and so on. But no one has so many converging ideals and changes of belief, changes of heart from warring sides than Doctor Yury Zhivago.

Raised without a father – who committed suicide after losing his wealth and being misled by a conniving laywer – Yury rises through a dangerous Moscow to eventually become a member of the bourgeois class after attaining a medical degree. He sympathises with the working class’s ideals, however, being very much in touch with the heart of Moscow and realizing how unfair the current system can be.

But after traveling to the front lines of World War I, his ideals begin to shift. He no longer thinks violence should be used to convey a message, and that there are no ideals strong enough to warrant the taking of innocent lives.  And when he returns, he is appalled by the violence of the October Revolution and flees with his family and father-in-law to a small town in the Urals. Did I mention the Mother-in-law didn’t make the trip because she dies a miserable death early on, tortured so much by her past with the yet-unconnected but exact same conniving lawyer who has influenced Yury’s life? Well despair overtakes her and she tries killing herself with lots of poisons, but Yury saves her life and gives her a few more dark, depressing years.

Now that the remaining happy family has survived World War I, the February and October revolutions, they make their way out of Moscow to live on their own in the Urals. Along the journey Yury meets and deals with desperate people on the run, similar to him, as well as soldiers fighting for causes some feel passionately enough to kill for and others aren’t so sure, and become deserters even at the threat of the death penalty for these actions. Once in the Urals Yury rekindles an old flame with Lara Fyodorovna, wife of a Pavel Antipov and neighbor/acquaintance of Yury’s growing up Moscow as well as a nurse he came to know and admire and, secretly, love during their time together in hospitals near the frontline in WWI. Lara had tried to pursue her run-away husband who left her because he felt he didn’t deserve her and sought to gain renown as an infantryman, fighting gallantly to defend, and in the near future help reform Russia.

The plot thickens as Yury develops an affair with Lara, and before he comes to terms with admitting to his wife Tonya what has been going on, he’s captured by the “Forest Brotherhood,” a guerilla fighting force led by a cocaine-addict that is actually a separate entity from the Red Army, but still fighting viciously against the Whites. Forced to treat people fighting for a cause he doesn’t support, Yury begins to lose taste for his profession, especially after being pinned down by White Army cadets (which is a nice way of saying teenagers with guns fighting for the cause he does support) and forced to take action and shoot at them in order to escape. He begins to contemplate leaving the Forest Brotherhood, which is risking his own life, because of the conflicts he feels being a medic for a Red-sympathising guerilla force.

But of course, these mixed emotions about the ongoing conflict just aren’t complicated enough. So the Whites throw in an extra element when they torture a man by removing one arm and one leg and force him to crawl through the forest back to the Brotherhood’s camp. There he tells them of the unimaginable horrors in store for them all as the Whites begin to close in on their region.

Strelnikov, a displaced Pavel Antipov who is now a former POW with a new name and blood lust for White Army soldiers, ends up breaking through and the Reds move on to victory after Yury escapes from the Brotherhood. He’s no safer in public now, however, and must keep a low profile, abandoning a force fighting against the Whites in time of war is reason to face the firing squads in this time, and after he learns that the Soviet government now looks unfavourably upon the Forest Brotherhood, likely for being too independent, he has no one he can trust. Even Strelnikov falls out of favour with the Soviets (as his mysterious and charismatic nature gained him loyal followers, he also gained the attention of the Communist Party as a potential threat moving forward) and is on the move, all alone, much like Yury.

The two of them meet, whilst both in hiding, and after Yury tells Strelnikov that Lara is as inaccessible to him as his estranged wife Tonya (now living in exile in Paris with their kids and her father), Strelnikov shoots himself. Of course he does. Yury winds up making an attempt to salvage his life as a poet and translator in Moscow, living the slums, taking a wife, having children and then leaving her too and eventually suffering a heart attack on the streets. Lara makes it to his funeral and is later arrested and put into a Gulag, a sort of concentration camp in Siberia Stalin was very fond of using.

The story ends with Zhivago’s friends, Dudorov and Gordon, talking about how they survived the Gulag’s to become WWII servicemen, as well as talk of a young girl named Tonya who very much resembles Yury and Lara and the physical/personality traits by which these two came to associate them.

Needless to say, Boris Pasternak was in deep shit with the Soviet Union, Stalin, the KGB and Writer’s Soviet when the book leaked out of the USSR and was printed in several other languages before the USSR ever authorized its publication in Pasternak’s homeland. He was also “encouraged” by the KGB to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature he won that year.

I think people of my parent’s generation are much more familiar with this story, as the movie was a huge hit when it came out and everyone at the time was a big Omar Sharif fan. But for my generation, I think this book goes largely unnoticed. And I can’t see why. There are probably too many lists out there of the top 100 novels, or top 100 modern novels, or any essential book collection, and Doctor Zhivago doesn’t seem to be prevalent enough on those lists. There is no reason it should ever be placed outside of the top 25 on most of these lists. But, we do live in America, and most people can’t handle this much conflict.

The Handmaid's Tale

My first Margaret Atwood book. It was fair to say this book was highly anticipated in the book club to which I belong, mostly because it marks the beginning of a set of science fiction books hereon until the end of this list. Something like eight books remained (including this one) and they all can be classed as science fiction.

I had no idea what to expect for the plot of this story, and the only warning I had going into it was the level of despair with which the antagonist recounts her days in the dystopian society. Ah, my fave, dystopias and human despair. But I think reading Doctor Zhivago (review coming up soon) just prior to this desensitized me to any sort of sad, terrible emotions the dark and depressing style with which Atwood writes was supposed to instill in me. This left me, I thought, able to appreciate the story for all it was worth. And I looked very much forward to what was going to happen without being slowed down or deterred by how awful this fictional society really is. In other words, I could see through the main character’s pain to appreciate everything this story was really about. But, to my dismay, it wasn’t about much.

I liked the idea, don’t get me wrong. It was powerful, and it represents actual societies that we know about in existence today (Taliban rule in Afghanistan, for example). But there just was not enough of a story line to make me feel it was worth all the shit she goes through. It was just a telling of what happens, almost a documentary, as there was no real climax or resolution to the plot. No solving anything.

So if I could shelve this one under “fictional documentaries,” it would probably be tops on that list. Unfortunately, it goes in my dystopian society list, and with the potential it has at the beginning I feel it disappoints by the end.

In a more positive light, I do like her writing style. It made me feel it was actually written by a reformed woman who may once have been an educated member of society but couldn’t resist the severe oppression of her new patriarchal police state. I also very much enjoyed the mysteries, the ideas that no one really knows what’s going on because viciously governed police states are great at censorship, and keeping from their people any idea of what the outside world is like (1984 anyone?). And the first page of the first chapter lets you know that this is how this society operates.

I may give Atwood another go, but overall I’d have a difficult time recommending this book to anyone who was not particularly a fan of the dystopian sci-fi genre like I am.