May 24, 2015
I was going to save The Dark Tower series for when I'm officially on summer break. But this one was available through the elibrary, and none of the other options were tripping my trigger, so I got a jump start. This second volume makes me really excited to continue the series. The Gunslinger was pretty good; this book was great.
It starts off with Roland losing two fingers and a toe to a carnivorous giant lobster-type thing. The lobster thingie also poisons him, so he's more than in a bit of a bind. But he continues his journey in search of the Dark Tower. In this book, the man in black's prophecies are fulfilled. Roland encounters three doors, all leading to this world...or the past, as it still seems like Roland lives in the very distant future. Through each door, Roland takes on a person's perspective; that person has some hand in Roland's destiny.
Eddie and Odetta/Detta/Susannah are fascinating characters. They are the ones through the first two doors, and are destined to join Roland on his journey. Eddie was a heroin addict, so obviously coming through to Roland's barren world helps solve that problem. Odetta's issues are a bit more complex, to say the least. She's a schizophrenic whose legs end just below the knee. In spite of her handicap, her other personality, Detta, is very dangerous. When Roland goes through the third door and kills the man who twice tried to kill her, she literally splits into her two distinct personalities. They merge into Susannah, who is tough, smart, yet kind as Odetta always was. She and Eddie are in love, and both accept their fate to accompany Roland, come what may...and Roland acknowledges that they will face many dangers.
Roland's first and third trips through the door were exciting. When he got Susannah, he got her back through quickly because Detta was freaking out. In Eddie's time (1987, the year the book was published), Eddie was smuggling coke in from the Bahamas. He and Roland end up in a shoot-out with the mafia boss who'd hired him after Eddie's brother O.D.'d while being held hostage. Eddie's twisted relationship with his brother was interesting, as he'd always been made to feel guilty about the sacrifices his brother had made to care for him. Henry was the one who led him to getting hooked on heroin in the first place; talking it all out with Roland helped Eddie to finally see his brother's flaws.
Jack Mort, the man through the third door, was never meant to accompany them to the Tower. Roland was meant to kill him, to force Odetta/Detta to confront each other at last. Mort was a wealthy accountant who killed people for fun; he'd dropped a brick on Odetta's head when she was a little girl, and pushed her in front of a subway when she was an adult. When Roland came into his mind, he'd been preparing to push Jake (yes, that Jake) in front of moving traffic. Roland prevents this, thus saving the life he'd once taken...does that fix things with Jake? Will we ever know?
Mort reminded me of Patrick Bateman. Maybe Bateman was inspired by this character, to an extent? Anyway, Roland knows the guy is a piece of shit, and he feels good about being able to kill him, getting him run over by a subway, the same one that had paralyzed Odetta years before.
Odetta was interesting, even without the split personality. A wealthy black woman in the 1960s, she was active in the Civil Rights Movement. Before getting forced into Roland's world, she'd been in Oxford, Mississippi, to protest or something. The situation with Ole Miss and James Meredith (which Bob Dylan sang about in a song that Eddie vaguely remembers) was a couple of years before that, I think, but it might have been related.
Eddie, Susannah, and Roland seem like a motley crew, but Roland admires the grit of his two companions. He acknowledges them both as gunslingers as they continue their journey. It's unclear why they (especially Susannah, it seems) are so important, but I assume it will all become clear as I continue the series. I can hardly wait, though I may hold off on reading the third volume for a couple of weeks, when I'll officially be on summer break.
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