A couple of days ago I started to read the first book in the latest series of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. It’s been many many years since the Second Chronicles ended and I didn’t believe there would ever be a sequel, so I was really excited to see that he’s begun The Last Chronicles. In the two days since I’ve had the book I’ve read over 200 pages, and it’s been like coming home: I’m comfortable with the characters, with the plot, with the development of the story, and I’m totally confident that Donaldson isn’t going to disappoint me.

This wasn’t how I went about reading the final instalment in The Dark Tower sequence. In my review of Song of Susannah, I said that I was hoping to get through the last book in a weekend. It actually took me some weeks to read it – not because I was particularly busy but because I was deliberately taking my time. However, I wasn’t dragging it out in order to make it last, or because I didn’t want it to end – I was actually very nervous about how it was going to end and whether I was going to be happy with it or not. I’d adored the first three books; then Wizard and Glass had disappointed me; Wolves of the Calla had been fantastic; and then Song of Susannah had disappointed and annoyed me so much that I was genuinely concerned that, after living with this story for twenty years, I was going to get to the end and find that I hated the conclusion.

I finished the book over a week ago and I still don’t quite know what to say. Parts of it were superb, but some of it was awful. I can’t really come up with a word to describe (a) how I feel about that one instalment or (b) how I feel about the ending of the entire series. I’m kind of ... numb! All I do know is that I don’t feel content. After twenty years, there ought to be some feeling of finality – whether disappointment that it’s all over, or satisfaction that the story has finally ended – but I just feel ... I dunno, almost cheated. The impression I got from the final instalment was that Stephen King was fed up to the back teeth of writing it. There was no sense of freshness, no sense of eagerness to complete his longest work – generally speaking his writing felt like he couldn’t wait to get it off his back and was rushing to get it over with. I feel that the story could have been completed so much better, and wonder whether he rushed into this final instalment too quickly after Song of Susannah. If he’d left a couple of years in between the two books, would the final one have been better?

Spoilers follow, including a lot of discussion about the very ending, so you really shouldn’t read on if you haven’t yet read the book and don’t want to know what happened!

Mordred – what was the point of him? He seemed to end up being a total waste of space. He wasn’t much of a threat, he didn’t distract our heroes from their job, and then he just fizzled out at the end. The only ‘important’ thing he did was to kill Oy, and that was hardly essential to the plot. I’m wondering whether King’s ‘muse’ gave him the original idea and then wandered off without telling him what to do with this initially threatening creature.

The death of Flagg/Walter was shockingly unshocking. Flagg is a character who terrified the bejasus out of all of us who read The Stand – he was powerful and evil and important and scary. His all-too-quick and unresisting death at the hands of Mordred should have made me feel that Mordred was indeed a creature of great power: all it left me feeling was that Flagg deserved a much better – or, rather, a much more dramatic – ending!

By the end of Song of Susannah I had already figured out that Roland would reach the Tower alone and that it was more than likely that at least one, if not all, of his companions would be dead by then. It didn’t make Eddie’s and Jake’s deaths any easier to cope with. They were the two moments in the book when I could barely read for tears streaming down my face.

In my review of Wolves I commented that I hadn’t liked the colour illustrations because I had built up too strong an image of what everybody looked like. I still didn’t much like them in Song or in this book, but the picture of the final ‘group hug’ of the ka-tet which appeared a page or two after Eddie’s death brought tears to my eyes again, as did the beautifully emotional one of Roland carrying Jake’s body into the woods.

A really careless moment from King: shortly after Eddie’s death, somebody said something (I can’t recall specifically what it was now) and in reaction Susannah “leapt to her feet”. Um, Stevo? Need you be reminded that Susannah doesn’t have feet?

Another sign that King was getting tired of the story: he suddenly introduced new habits to his characters which we’d never seen before. One example was Roland’s new habit (introduced in Song) of impatiently twirling his finger to hurry people up when they’re talking. I don’t recall him ever doing it before then.

King’s self-insertion never did justify itself. Again, it seemed like something that struck him as a great idea at the time but never went anywhere specific enough in order to justify itself. And yes, Steve, we all know you got knocked down by a van in real life but do you really have to tell us all about it now?! You’ve got a story to finish, man!

Not only that, but Steve blatantly advertised some of his other books, especially Hearts in Atlantis. The Tet Corporation’s insistence that Roland should take a copy of the book back to his own world and read it – because it was really really relevant to the Dark Tower story itself – made me furious, and on a point of principle I will never buy that book! I decide what I’m going to read, and no author’s gonna persuade me otherwise by ramming the damned thing down my throat! The advertising was made even more blatant by the fact that Steve couldn’t even be bothered to keep up the pretence that the book was relevant to the plot and so had Roland leave it behind.

I wonder how the driver of the van that hit Steve in real life felt about being included in the story as a drugged-out idiot when, in reality, he may have been careless and allowed himself to be distracted but wasn’t even charged by the police.

The introduction of Patrick: was he intended as anything other than a deus ex machina? It seemed like a total cop-out to me – Roland probably would have made it to the Tower eventually provided he managed to avoid the Crimson King’s skeetches until he ran out of them.

Oh, and another careless moment here: Roland thinks to himself that he should be alright shooting the skeetches out of the air provided the Crimson King doesn’t throw more than 12 at a time. However, only a few paragraphs before, Roland had realised that Susannah had taken one of his guns with her through the Door, so if he only has one gun, surely he can only shoot six skeetches at a time?

Talking of the Crimson King – this was the character who we’d been warned was worse than Flagg?? He was nothing but a madman! There didn’t seem to be anything particularly evil, scary or threatening about him.

An hour or so before I reached the end of the book, I suddenly realised how it ought to end: the last line should read something like “Roland entered the Dark Tower.” We should be left to draw our own conclusions what happened next. Any details of what happened inside the Tower would just ruin it. So when I got to the end of the main book, I was absolutely delighted when that was exactly what happened. I actually yelped, “Oh yes!” out loud. I was so thrilled that the twenty-year tale had ended exactly as it should do.

I went on to read the Epilogue. It didn’t do much for me but I thought that it was appropriate that we should be given some idea of what happened to Susannah after she went through the Door. I wasn’t particularly taken with the idea of her meeting up with another version of Eddie and Jake, but it was a fairly tolerable ending, though again Steve seemed to be too tired to bother doing anything special with the gun that had been so much a part of the story from the beginning. For it to go old and rusty and for Suze to just drop it in a wastebin seemed almost disrespectful.

It was late at night and I was really tired, so when I saw that there was another section called the “Coda”, I assumed that this was Steve’s afterword. I decided to leave it until the next night, and so for about twenty blissful hours I was happy with the ending of the Dark Tower saga.

Then I read the Coda.

Oh, holy friggin’ crap. There aren’t words. Those last few pages ruined everything. If there was ever a sign that Steve had had enough and was too tired to stick to his guns, this was it. It was just a major cop-out for the benefit of the readers who wouldn’t get it otherwise and would send him hails of abuse for leaving the ending open. I can’t even attempt to express my contempt for his cowardice. Some people might argue that this was always the way he intended the story to end. I don’t believe that. Steve has been willing to leave tales open before and incur the wrath of readers who want it all spelled out for them. I remember his defiance at the abuse he received when he allowed the little boy to die in Cujo. This whole ending just stank of “can’t be bothered” – and it wasn’t even a good ending. For Roland to have to re-live the entire trauma over and over again made no sense. Nor did it make sense that he should re-enter the timeline at the beginning of the events of The Gunslinger. If the Tower really did intend for him to live it all again, shouldn’t he have gone back to the moment of his birth? Or at least to the beginning of his quest for the Tower? To be sent back to such a specific moment in time suggested only one thing to me: the author couldn’t be bothered to think up any better reason.

All the above is, of course and as always, my humble opinion. I hope that others loved the ending – and loved the last couple of books, for that matter. Me, I think that Steve has been suffering from burnout for some years now and only rarely produces a masterpiece these days. If he carries out his plans to retire from writing, I wish him well. It’s just such a shame that what should have been his final epic work just fizzled out towards the end.

I agree about a lot of your points there, particularly Mordred. He really didn't have any great significance to the story, and the way he was built up with little phrases here and there like "....and later they would all regret turning their backs on him...." (or something like that) I really thought he was going to have some huge effect on the story, like mortally wounding the gunslinger, or catching him just before reaching the Tower. As it was, Mordred shows up, Roland kills him, next chapter.

But, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I really like the ending. Yes, at first I felt a bit cheated, like King had just fizzled out long before the end, but then the more I thought about it, the more it seemed right. It fits in with the whole notion of "the wheel of Ka", but with that faint glimmer of hope that things may be slightly different this time around, and may even someday end.

It's not what I was expecting, and not what the first few books hinted at being the final end of Roland's quest, but I for one liked it.

Stand and be true.

Another sign that King was getting tired of the story: he suddenly introduced new habits to his characters which we’d never seen before. One example was Roland’s new habit (introduced in Song) of impatiently twirling his finger to hurry people up when they’re talking. I don’t recall him ever doing it before then.

He did it quite a few times in Wolves of the Calla.