The Curse of The Dark Tower – or Why You Should Avoid Literary Allusion and Choose a Descriptive Title

A recent article on the BBC website brought it all back: what I’ve come to think of as ‘the curse of the Dark Tower’. The allusion is to my fourth novel of that name, which was published by Arbuthnot Books in 2010.  The Dark Tower deals with that particularly bloody episode in British colonial history known as the Anglo-Zulu Wars, whose bloodiest battle took place in what is now KwaZulu Natal, on a bleak stretch of ground beneath a conical hill, the name of which – Isandhlwana – would thereafter be associated with the worst defeat the British Army had ever suffered.  A hundred and thirty years after the ‘defeat that stunned Victorian Britain’, as the BBC article puts it, the site has become a shrine to the memory of those on both sides who fought and died there, and a symbol of Zulu resistance to the colonial forces that set out to crush them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25728231#story_continues_2

Just as the battlefields of the First World War have become places of pilgrimage, so Isandhlwana, and its companion site, Rorke’s Drift, have achieved a similar fame. An entire industry has grown up around the Anglo-Zulu Wars, with tours of the battlefields in which you can see for yourself the spot where Colonel Durnford made his last stand at Isandhlwana, and the now-restored hospital at Rorke’s Drift so bravely defended by the men of the 24^th Regiment. And of course there are numerous books on the subject – although not, to the best of my knowledge, any other novels. In this sense at least,  The Dark Tower can be said to be unique.

If only the same could be said for its title, which – even at the time I was writing the book, I knew had already been ‘taken’ – by Stephen King, no less. This was for a series of seven fantasy novels whose overall title – like that of my own novel – alluded to Robert Browning’s haunting 1855 poem about a doomed quest for the Holy Grail. Even though it was obviously a risk, giving a literary novel the same title as a work by one of the most popular and prolific writers of the era, it was one I was prepared to take – after all, our respective readerships could hardly be said to overlap…

And it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been other ‘Dark Towers’ before this – a fact discussed in a piece I wrote at the time, which traces the origins of the dark tower legend in ancient myth, and considers some of its more recent manifestations – from Shakespeare’s King Lear to WB Yeats’ 1928 collection of poems, ‘The Tower’; from the ‘Dark Tower’ section of JRR Tolkein’s epic saga, The Lord of the Rings, to the twentieth anniversary episode of Doctor Who, featuring five Doctors, and a Dark Tower.

http://www.christinakoning.com/archives/2010/06

Of course there were reasons for choosing the title, beyond the desire to evoke certain literary echoes. The British campaign in South Africa during the late 1870s was a ‘quest’ in every way as romantic in theory and as disastrous in outcome as the one described with such sinister power in Browning’s great work. For the officers and men who took part in it, there was the same sense of adventure – of being caught up in a great ’cause’, to the greater glory of the British Empire – which inspired those who volunteered for the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. There was also the same sense of ultimate disillusionment. The elusive ‘dark tower’, or Grail, towards which they were journeying was to prove as much an illusion as, well, the notion of Empire itself. Yes, on reflection, there really was no other title the novel could have had.

But I knew this, even before I was halfway through writing the book, because it was then that I visited Isandhlwana, and saw for myself the weirdly shaped mountain from which the place takes its name. Some accounts described it as shaped like a sphinx, and it is certainly true, that from some aspects, it resembles that mythological being. But from head-on – the angle that the soldiers encamped on the plain below would have seen it – it looks like a fortified tower. To my soldier-protagonist, Theo Reynolds, the resemblance is unmistakeable:

‘…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.’

So, even though a more descriptive title – ‘Disaster at Isandhlwana’, for example – might have attracted more readers interested in military matters, I still think my choice of title was the right one. Perhaps, after all, I can learn to live with the ‘Curse of the Dark Tower’.