The first two parts of the Dark Tower series are rather different. One is quiet, focused yet fractured; the other is more sprawling, introducing monsters and parallel worlds and multiple personalities. King realised that himself, later retconning some of the content to bring the first part – the amazing Gunslinger – into line with later books. The series was written over a 30-year period, and is still going, in dribs and drabs. I assume that when he started writing it, King wasn't entirely sure what form it was ultimately going to take. I suspect that The Waste Lands, book 3 in the series, was the point where the bigger picture started to reveal itself to King – because that's certainly where it all starts happening for his Constant Readers.
The Waste Lands takes its title from TS Eliot's poem of nearly the same name: a major work of modernism, disjointed in its voices, which looks at society through historical and mythical allusions. Referencing it so directly is perhaps the first indication readers were given of King's intentions in the creation of his fantastical world: while this is not our world, the connections and links to it are strong, albeit wholly fractured. This would be a theme that King would carry through the rest of the series, dipping in and out of our reality, of the myths and stories that we tell.
Another thing that's shared by both texts is the debt that they owe to their influences. Sources and references abound in both, with Eliot taking in Homer, Spenser, Chaucer, Conrad, Milton, Huxley: the sum of what made him a writer, spilling out through his own words. The same is true for King. Take Shardik, the cyborg bear that the ka-tet come across in the early part of the book. He's named for a fantasy novel by Richard Adams; and characters think of rabbits when they encounter him, bringing to mind Adams' most famous work, Watership Down. But the presence of the bear also owes a debt to Tolkien; and in his cyborg construction, there are nods to Caidin, to Dick, to Ellison. King takes anything he fancies for his new creations, allowing them to step beyond their origins.
That's demonstrated ably by Blaine the Mono. In The Waste Lands, Roland and the ka-tet travel to Lud, a city that was once beautiful and advanced, but has since been ruined by war. It's not hospitable, and after some shenanigans – involving Jake being kidnapped, and Roland having to rescue him – they find The Cradle of Lud, a monorail station that houses Blaine. Blaine is a highly intelligent AI-driven monorail whose intelligence has degraded over time, giving him a slightly split personality. Blaine forces the ka-tet to beat him in a riddle completion before he'll help them. You've read this before, in The Hobbit – we've already seen Beorn, and we've now met Gollum. Split personality, degraded from years of solitude; riddles; an offer of help; and, just like Gollum, Blaine simply is not trustworthy. (We know this because Blaine's appearance is foreshadowed by a book that Jake brings with him, the story of Charlie the Choo Choo, a train who had a smile that "couldn't be trusted". King loves his foreshadowing, and he's never more blunt with it than in this series.) But Blaine is not just a stand-in for Gollum: he's a reference point, an idea taken and pushed further, broken and bent to fit King's means.
That's how all of his allusions go in these books, even the ones to his own work: they're all part of the stew, and they all go towards making up the worlds that these novels take place in. Everything is fair game as a reference point. Here's where the main idea of the Dark Tower starts to form: all is story, and all is part of one whole. This idea is something that we – and King – will explore further as the series goes on.
There's a story in this novel – of course there is – but it is also the point at which the Dark Tower books stopped feeling like standalones. At the end of this volume, you're led straight into book four, which picks up the action exactly where this leaves off. But that's no bad thing. If you've made it this far into the Dark Tower series, you won't be stopping now. They're not for everybody – there's no neat bow to tie them up with, no monster in the cupboard to point to as the reason the books work – but they're supremely satisfying. For King's Constant Readers, though, it would be a long wait until the next Dark Tower book: Wizard and Glass wouldn't be published for another six years …
Next: You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need. It's Needful Things!
