skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (elizabeth book)
[personal profile] skygiants
Dear Diary:
Today I was crazy and my brother was entertainingly pompous (i.e., "when you're in DC you should look up my friend, [cousin of Hilary Duff]. He's the best-looking man on the planet.")
Today I was kidnapped by DC bus drivers, never to be seen again.
It was the best day ever!

All the bus driving (despite the fact that Greyhound reading lights apparently do not work) allowed me time to finish The Talisman, which I've been reading for the past week.



I was surprised to find myself enjoying it less than most of the other Stephen King novels I've read. After all, it's much more 'fantasy', which is what I tend to prefer. After the lights went out on the Greyhound and reading the other book that I'd brought with me became impossible, I started trying to figure out what bothered me about it.

At first I thought: well, it doesn't have any secondary characters, so you're stuck with Jack, which is what threw me off. This isn't quite right, though. There are secondary characters - Wolf and Richard, most notably. Wolf is kind of pretty much a giant plot device, though, in that his whole personality is plot-related. As for Richard, I think I only realized how frustrated I was getting with the book when Richard came along; I liked and sympathized with Richard much more than I did with Jack, and every time the book threw authorial support behind Jack during the whole 'Rational Richard goes crazy' sequence, I was like "oh, come on, King-Straub conglomerate, Jack can be wrong sometimes. And to be fair, Our Hero really does sound a little crazy. Or, you know, a lot crazy."

And there, I think, is what really bothered me about the book. I'm usually pretty good at accepting the occasional deus ex "because the author says so", and King especially throws a lot of these, without apology. (As is proven by the Dark Tower series.) I found, however, that I had a lot of trouble accepting things in The Talisman that the characters, or at least Jack, tended to accept without much confusion at all. Maybe it's just the fact that Lily let her twelve-year-old son start wandering cross-country alone, dying or not, that stretched my suspension of disbelief to its limit straight from the start. So when things start happening pretty much Because King And Straub Say So - which, okay, the whole premise is built off a Because King And Straub say so, but especially towards the end there's a lot of "this will work!" "But why?" "....because it's magic! And Meant To Be! >.>" - I began rolling my eyes a little. I also rolled my eyes a little at Jack's transformation into Super Beautiful Jason Boy, but that's 'cause, uh, Jack's a Sue. Not just because he's Super Beautiful and everyone's in love with him, but because he always gets authorial support in disputes with other characters. Always. I'm not saying he's never wrong. It's just that the characters who argue with him are never right.

I also found some of the scenes of beating-on-Jack gratuitous. This is also not a problem I've had with other Stephen King books, and there's always a lot of beating on the main characters in those, so I'm not really sure why it bothered me this time, but it did.

None of this is to say that I didn't enjoy the book, because I did, overall. I just also got really frustrated with it. And I'm not even going to start about the lack of female characters/Lily Cavanaugh-Madonna thing.

Date: 2006-12-31 07:44 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com
What's all this about DC?

Date: 2006-12-31 09:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jezrana.livejournal.com
My boyfriend, when he read The Talisman, had different problems which I think may be caused by the same thing, which is that King and Straub both have tropes that they can get away with in their own works, but get a bit carried away with when they collaborate. His main problem was the amount of Gratitious Ick in it (see: Reul Gardner), which I think is one trop like that, and from what I've read of Straub on his own, I suspect the Boy Hero Who's Brilliant and Special and People Love Him Except The Evil And/Or Authority Figures Trying To Bring Him Down may be another.

Like, Bill Denbrough is a Brilliant and Special Boy Hero, and all the Losers love him, but...not the rest of the world. So he comes off, to me, as less Sue-ish than Jack.

Date: 2006-12-31 10:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jezrana.livejournal.com
Yes. (And I just have this very amusing mental image of King and Straub in a room together, going "Oh hey you know what would be TOTALLY AWESOME?" "What?" "If Reuel Gardner's head EXPLODES INTO WORMS." "........YES!!" and they keep egging each other on and upping the ante and nooobody stops them.)

Date: 2006-12-31 02:04 pm (UTC)
batyatoon: (Default)
From: [personal profile] batyatoon
I ... may be incapable of reading The Talisman critically.

Because those are all true things that you're saying, and yet I can't care.

Date: 2006-12-31 07:33 pm (UTC)
batyatoon: (Default)
From: [personal profile] batyatoon
Oh, I get that. I think.

That's probably what it is, really, 'cos I like Jack Sawyer. And if I didn't, I suspect the same things you're complaining about would be getting on my nerves too.

I'm wondering if you might not like him better in Black House.

Date: 2006-12-31 06:34 pm (UTC)
ext_21680: Blocky drawing of me (ladybug)
From: [identity profile] e-mily.livejournal.com
Ah. Hahaha.

I had to go back and check which book it was you were reading, because I saw "Wolf" and you talking about him and how you didn't like him and it made me VERY VERY SAD.

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