Literary models for The Dark Tower

Writing The Dark Tower necessitated a good deal of historical research – not all of which was factual. Novels, such as The American by Henry James, The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope, A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, The Egoist by Meredith – all of which were published in the year of my novel (1879) or just before it – helped me get the ‘tone’ of my story right. I also looked at poetry – Robert Browning’s Men and Women, The Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the poems of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Heinrich Heine – which I felt my characters would have read, and which would have helped to form their world-view.

Because it seemed to me that these people – most of them drawn from the late-Victorian upper middle-class – would have had a very ‘literary’ take on things. I wanted to show how this would have conditioned their experience, so that even the extreme events of war would have been seen through the ‘lens’ of a classical education. When, for example, my character, Theo Reynolds, is reminded of a ‘picture he had once seen: ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’’ as he watches his regiment on the move, he is aware that the comparison is not an exact one – for a start, there are no elephants (although this is Africa):

‘But such an unwieldy progress, with so many stops and starts, and so much heaving and cursing and shouting, as the men in charge of the teams urged on their beasts, and such a smell of horseflesh and leather, and a dazzle of polished brass and steel, seemed worthy of a Roman – or Carthaginian – army.’

Later, he quotes some lines from Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci – again half-ironically – to describe a fellow officer in full regalia:

‘Hallam would laugh to hear himself described as a knight from the days of King Arthur – but that was what, in that moment, he and his comrades had appeared to be.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake
And no birds sing…’

It is Theo who invokes the image of the Dark Tower – quoting as he does so, from Browning’s famous poem of that name – as he prepares himself for what will turn out to be the most fateful day of his life:

‘…Theo gazed once more at the mountain: a sphinx, yes – especially from its eastern aspect. From the west, its shape reminded him more of a fortress. A dark tower, rearing high above the plain, like the outpost of some ancient, alien power.

“What in the middle but the Tower itself? The Dark Tower – blind as the fool’s heart,” he murmured softly.’

All too soon, as it turns out, these literary and artistic conceits will be shattered. The Arthurian knights and Carthaginian armies of Theo’s imagination will be superseded by the brutal realities of war; the moral certainties of fiction will prove no match for the ambiguities of experience.

Apart from wanting to stress the importance of literature to my Victorians, I felt I should show what a large part the written word played in most people’s lives at the time. In the days before email and mobile phones, letters were a vital means of conveying, not only essential information, but the thoughts and feelings of those writing. During the Anglo-Zulu wars everyone – from the private soldiers to the officers – wrote and received letters almost every day. From these contemporary documents, one receives a powerful sense of what being caught up in such a campaign was like. In telling at least part of my story in the form of letters, I hoped to achieve a similar immediacy.

Choosing to make another of my characters a journalist, covering the war for his newspaper, was another way of examining the relationship between real and narrated experience. In his dispatches for the Illustrated London News, Septimus Doyle is only too aware of the gaps between events as they actually happen and events as they appear in newspaper reports, as well as of the inadvisability of telling the unvarnished truth.

‘What the public wanted was tales of heroism and sacrifice, not beastliness. ‘The Saving of the Colours’ or the ‘Defence of the Mission Station’ – those were tales of which people could not get enough, it seemed. He himself had contributed his share…’

Selling newspapers, then as now, was all about putting the right kind of ‘spin’ on events – of giving people what they wanted to read, rather than making them think too much. I felt that Septimus, whilst deploring this, would have accepted it as inevitable.

Another device that enabled me to show the discrepancy between the way events are experienced and the way they are described was the – quintessentially Victorian – habit of keeping a journal. Part travelogue, part confessional, this offered a way of conveying my characters’ innermost feelings. In these first-person ’journal entries’, there would sometimes be gaps between what the writer thought he or she was saying and what was actually being said; just as there would be silences, and omissions.

‘She had sat up until late last night reading the journal. Its observations seemed to her to be that mixture of the quotidian and the profound which reflects that of life itself. His letters had been more considered, both as to content and to style. Realising the implications of this, she had been prepared for harder truths than had been revealed by the latter. But there was nothing untoward. Only a few pages torn out, towards the end…’

It was these ‘gaps’ and ‘torn out pages’ that interested me most, of course. Because underneath it all – the poetry-reading and the letter-writing and all the other constructs of late-Victorian society – there might indeed lie ‘harder truths’, requiring a different kind of language in which to express them.