Returning to the Tower I: The Gunslinger

I first read The Dark Tower when it was released in 2004. A friend of mine started me on my first trip to the Tower a year prior, and by the time book VII dropped in 2004, I was ready to buy it in hard copy the week it was released. 21 years later, my congealed guilt from hanging out over in r/TheDarkTower and r/darktower (where many Tower junkies/constant readers have made numerous trips) was activated after I finished watching season 1 of Welcome to Derry.

I'm not much of a re-reader, and the truth is with one notable exception (we'll come to that in the final post of this series) my last re-read was probably Return of the King before going to see the movie in 2003. It's fitting in a sense, given how Tolkien makes up half of the helix that is The Dark Tower's DNA, that a media event tied to the author's work was the last instigating event that led me to re-read a piece of fiction. Obviously there's some distance between a cinematic silver screen adaptation of the same work and a novel prestige TV creation expanding on a book that is adjacent to the series, but I suspect that my prior reticence to start a re-read juxtaposed against the initiating media experience says something about me. I haven't the faintest idea what it is, but I wanted to at least acknowledge it.

So, carrying the weight of social media guilt (admittedly less noble or inspiring than a solemn oath), I picked up The Gunslinger again for the first time in over two decades maybe a week ago and found that I was having trouble putting it down. Even before I finished it, I started thinking that I should blog my thoughts on the series. After getting a head cold shortly after Christmas, I finished The Drawing of the Three earlier today and realized that I better start filling in the backlog if I wanted to write anything at all. These posts are not going to provide deep analysis of the books. Plenty of words have been spilt on that already. Instead, they're going to offer my reflections on the experience of returning to Roland and his Ka-tet 21 years later (two years too late some might argue).

The Gunslinger is relatively short, and for that reason I'm taking it on in a single blog post. It's 272 pages to be exact in the case of the 2003 NAL publication. That's the version I have which I bought new, and that's the reason that I know my buddy Charlie (not the Choo-Choo, say thankee, we'll come back to him in a few posts) got me started on the series specifically in 2003. I mention all of this not just to establish your expectations for this post, but to express my shock upon learning that my memory of my first trip to the Tower was incorrect about an essential detail, or really an array of related details. I thought that I had read the original version, but that 2003 NAL pub is the first revised and expanded version. Sai King edited that one after he had charted out the last three books, and it's very clear that he had a full outline of the rest of the series even though only Book V - Wolves of the Calla had a release date planned for November of 2003 when the NAL pub dropped in June of that year.

At this point in this blog post it should be, as Sai King would say, achingly clear that these words are intended for those who have completed at least one journey to the Tower. With that perfunctory bit finally clearly stated, let me get to the heart of the matter. There are numerous details that are clearly intended to prepare the reader for Roland's arrival at the Tower scattered throughout the beginning of the revised and expanded version of The Gunslinger. Knowing that the thing existed, it was impossible not to see at least some of the details that Sai King had added. The emphasis on the Horn of Eld passing through Roland's mind in his moment of resumption as he remembers his friends long gone, the specific mention of a Taheen in his conversation with Brown, and for that matter Algul Siento...a location that had no mention in the first four books. It left me a bit dumbstruck and wondering what else had been added into this version?

The most bizarre bit for me is that I read all seven books within a litle over a year. I got that shiny new copy of the NAL pub right after it came out, and I know this because Charlie got me started on that first trip to the Tower in the summer of 2003 before I left for New York to start on my Masters. Oh, right, it might have some bearing on my connection to this series that I had been accepted to Columbia Teachers College that year, and after visiting New York in April, decided there was nowhere else I could possibly be. The City had its hooks in me immediately. It has a way of doing that. It seems like it did the same to Sai King as well, at least in some manner even though he never made it a primary residence as near as I can tell.

The point though is that I had no memory of reading anything about a Taheen or Algul Siento in Book I by the time I had gotten to Book VII, or at least I didn't retain that memory in retrospect. I'm almost certain that I didn't at the time because I remember being struck by these new beings as they appear in books VI and VII. It was a genuinely unsettling moment, and it was unsettling in a way that was weirdly comforting in its resonance with the world King created and the cyclical experience we find Roland caught in. What cycle am I on myself here? Is this just a result of the world moving on? I guess I've found myself asking that question since 2016.

The next thing that hit me about The Gunslinger is how well written it is. I have said countless times that for most of his early and mid-career, King was a great storyteller but a rather middling writer. I found myself qusetioning whether I had any proper perspective on the series at all! Now I can assure you that having finished Book II, I am actually very much reassured that 27 year old me actually had a pretty good eye for writing after all, and that whatever may or may not have shifted in this world around me, it isn't the quality of writing King was generally producing during the span in which he wrote almost the entirety of The Dark Tower. For that span of King's career, The Gunslinger is the exception. The writing is extremely tight. There are no wasted words. King shows much and has to tell very little. I won't say more about The Drawing of the Three for now, but it certainly did allow me to focus in on the fact that The Gunslinger is genuinely a special book among the eight for more than one reason.

There was another thing that stood out for me as oddly disjointed between my memory of the story and how it was actually told, and this was the fact that it is there with Jake that we first begin to learn of Roland's backstory. I think that somewhere between my memories of Wizard and Glass and later repositioning of the whole narrative with Wind Through the Keyhole, I thought he had at the very least told that story to the whole Ka-tet. I certainly didn't remember that it was nestled there in the middle of The Gunslinger. But then, of course it is. It sits there perfectly. We get this full picture of Roland before he sacrifices Jake in his quest for the Tower as Jake himself pushes Roland to relate his premature Trial of Manhood. This one didn't unsettle me, but it did make me reflect differently on what lies ahead on my second journey to the Tower with Roland. Sai King's choice to put a story bottled within the larger tale in Wizards and Glass is not a departure from precedent, but a resumption of it. Wind Through the Keyhole becomes more inevitable, because Sai Deschain is every bit as much a teller of tales as Sai King. We are left with no doubt that even if Roland is not a self-insert by any measure (which would be entirely unecessary given who lies ahead), that he is in some way a fun house reflection of the author. There are bits of Roland that are very much King, and we are meant to see it the longer we sit with it.

My final thought on The Gunslinger (for this blog post) is that the rest of the tale is remarkably sticky. In the 22 and a half years since I read this book, only those small revised details had gotten away from me. The story from Roland's youth had come ungrounded in sequence. Additionally, for some reason the specifics of the scene with the Oracle were not nearly as fresh in memory as they had been when I first closed that final dry and leafy page two decades prior. Also of course, my memory of the quality of the writing was overshadowed by the less elegant pages to come (pages that are for more numerous), but the story itself is so powerful and the telling of it so expert that the rest of it was left imprinted quite clearly.

In the next post, I will address at the very least The Prisoner. It may be that I could take on the entirety of The Drawing of the Three in a single post, but even if I could I suspect it will benefit from being broken into at least two parts. If nothing else, my thoughts on how King takes up race and racism in that book deserve their own room to breathe.