Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures"
For a long, long time I've been a huge fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, many of which I have read so often, my softcover editions are about to fall apart. Recently, for a long distance flight, I selected a few to read and ended up rereading "Moving Pictures". And boy, is that one good. It's almost line-by-line genius, Pratchett in full stride.
But what makes it genius and Pratchett's series good? Let's have a look.
My first encounter with Pratchett almost drove me away. I was a huge Douglas Adams fan at the time. (Which didn't prevent me from tearing "Mostly Harmless" apart and tossing it.) I just loved his way of taking things to their logic but unreal end, that kind of humor. Knowing that, a friend recommended me to read Discworld.
The internet had just shown up and the first people were sharing e-books, which at that time meant text files, not scans, which made reading them (and keeping track where you were) about as much fun as pulling teeth. I tried reading "The Colour of Magic" and it didn't click. And looking back, I can tell why. On the one hand, my friend and I probably had different expectations of a book. And in his first books, Pratchett just hadn't learned to work his magic yet.
You don't start at the start, that's what.
"Moving Pictures" is not the first really good Discworld novel. That honor goes to "Wyrd Systers", number 6, chronologically. From there forward Sir Terry started to seriously knock them out of the park. He also knocked out a lot of books, but he was not simply prolific, he also was a really good novelist.
Discworld, in turn, is known for its "sub-series," each featuring a particular set of characters prominently. And "Moving Pictures" is the start for the Wizards' series. In order to become the start of its own thing, though, Terry had to rescue the wizards from his own worldbuilding mistakes. Magic featured prominently in the early books of the series, which in turn were the most "fantasy" ones. But there was a problem.
Burning down what you've built, again and again
The first two Discworld novels - "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic" probably see the most world-building in the whole 41 books Sir Terry wrote set there. But thanks to main character Rincewind, we see most of that in the rearview mirror.
The core cast of these two novels consists of Rincewind, the world's worst wizard and coward; the Agathean tourist Twoflower, and a monstrosity called the Luggage, a many-legged chest.
But whenever any place or situation is developed, Rincewind will just run away from it, and the Luggage after him. This leads to a storytelling that feels heavily like the "and then" style, hardly pleasing.
Rincewind makes a poor protagonist, and would prove to be largely unsalvageable. The only novel featuring him as main character I find truly worth reading is "Interesting Times" (#17), though you could argue he was co-starring in that one. As late as #22 ("The Last Continent") Pratchett proved that these stories can be severely lacking, and in the whole run of Discworld I consider that one story the low point in mid-series. Again, we see Rincewind run past things spoofed and satirized that are meant to amuse us, and nothing really comes together. His best appearance is as a notable side character in "The Last Hero" (#27).
In fact, most any (surviving) character from early novels will become a side-show to better characters created later, enshrining them in the end as beloved cast members. But it's easy to see why Pterry had to give up on Rincewind as the lead of his books. He just makes it so terribly hard to establish anything. And the whole humor of heaping so much misery unto one character quickly gets old. The errant fool is not enough.
The other early mistake was to establish wizards as having a murderous hierarchy.
Climbing the career ladder for wizards meant offing somebody on the step above them, which made wizards ruthless, inventive, and some degree, funny. But out of the wizards from the early novels only two survive: Rincewind and the Librarian, a wizard turned into a mon... I mean, ape (!) who likes it so much, he remains as such. The first has no chance of rising (or stopping) and the second holds a position he's near-ideal for and which his new form is even better for.
The Librarian became one of the most beloved characters, and that's probably where Sir Terry took his hint for changing things for the better. With "Moving Pictures", the career pyramid for wizards ends at Archchancellor, and by putting a sort of keystone there holding everything in place, everybody kind of settles down. Unseen University becomes a lot more like a regular British university in terms of eccentric professors (or senior wizards) and suddenly you can have this fantastic, growing side cast you can develop.
Characters all the way down
And developing a great cast is what Discworld became all about.
6. "Wyrd Sisters" (kicking of the Witches)
7. "Pyramids" (standalone)
8. "Guards! Guards!" (starting the Watch sub-series)
9. "Eric" (a Rincewind-ish novel)
10. "Moving Pictures" (reinventing the Wizards)
While Pratchett coins or really deepens some great locations (Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, Ephebe) in these novels, the true stars are the characters populating 4 out 5 of these.
All these series are marked by a likable, quirky ensemble cast that bounces dialogue off of each other. And Pratchett starts to color more inside the lines by wrapping all of these in one plot instead of a series of humorous events. Combine this with his witty observations about human nature disguised as descriptions, and a winning formula was born.
And while he had cast recurring through most of his novels, "Pyramids" proves that even that is not necessary for a great book. It's entirely self-contained.
The majority of his "series" revolve around their protagonists, yet some do not. The Wizards are practically always the side show to whoever is leading the story ("Moving Pictures", "Lords and Ladies", "Soul Music", "The Last Continent", "The Last Hero", etc), but they enrich every story they're in by simply mucking about in their own way.
While filling a lot of pages, the wizards actually don't play any kind of central role in "Moving Pictures". They're just a humorous addition, really, not plot-essential except for providing transportation once. And yet, all, the pages they fill, they fill them quite well. Like their robes, really.
This patterns persists until the end. The wizards may get their own story thread or may be utter side cast, but are never quite cast aside. They co-star with Death and Death's granddaughter, Susan; Rincewind, the witches from Lancre, even. And they have an endless amount of cameos. They come front and center in "The Science of Discworld" - or do they become sidelined by Science itself...?
They will definitely become part of what makes Discworld feel alive, this sense of being able to walk into a place and they will be there, caught up in their own thing (most likely: eating big meals and bickering).
This happens with a fair share of great Discworld characters... Nanny Ogg might be called upon as a midwife, Vimes of the Watch may end up part of a military campaign in a distant land, same for the newspaper from "The Truth". They become the movers and shakers of the world, and they end up in a lot of places.
"Moving Pictures" is a great novel in itself. Since it introduces a whole set of characters (the Wizards and Gaspode), it feels quite alive and uses them to their full extent in terms of funny. The unofficial sequel, "Soul Music", however, is not as good.
"Moving Pictures" and "Soul Music" have basically the same plot. A group of people does a kind-of forbidden thing inspired by an infectious idea, movies and rock n' roll music, respectively. Eventually this threatens to bring down the weak fabric of reality. There are differences, of course, but they're so similar even in the construction of their titles, it's hard to argue they're not related to each other.
In "Moving Pictures" our protagonist is a stand-in for Errol Flynn, but the scenes are so well-described, that even without knowing a lot about early Hollywood or the black and white era, you can have a lot of fun with the book. (A lot of what most of us know about the silent movie era is usually from a few iconic clips and not from having watched a full length movie, after all.)
"Soul Music" has a stand-in for "Buddy Holly", and it's quite on the nose about that fact, in comparison. It's quite on the nose about everything, considering. It reads much more like a satire or parody than "Moving Pictures" does, as if Sir Terry had a much shakier grasp on the topic of music. When it came to "Moving Pictures", he certainly had one of how to shape stories and their magic which might explain the difference.
I mean, come on. "Soul Music" tries to reuse jokes out of the movie "Blues Brothers"! In case you haven't seen this classic, the jokes just hang there, in a weird way. While "Moving Pictures" is enhanced by being able to recall the scenes it references, the humor is all there, baked into the situations itself. It's organic.
"Soul Music" then suffers from the fact that Death plays a somewhat pivotal role in it. The closer Death is to being central to the story, the less engaging a story becomes... it takes Pratchett a long while to write a truly compelling, funny, riveting story that features Death and Susan at its core: "Thief of Time" (one of the best Discworld novels, no doubt). Which is also their curtain call as protagonists. Some people really like the Death novels, but I find Death as a character at his best when he's not front and center. Ironically, the anthropomorphization of the end of all things is poison to most stories he's applied to a greater extent.
"Soul Music" is one of the novels that is actually summed up by the statement I loathe in most Pratchett softcovers intro pages. "Satire at its best" - by some book review in a paper somewhere, meant to sell the book. "Soul Music" largely remains satire, it doesn't develop a life of its own. "Moving Pictures" feels like it moves beyond satire and tells a story just bursting with character.
How is "Moving Pictures" beyond satire? Take the scene with the animals that get drawn to Holy Wood because they match cartoons of the early era. They're allusions to "Tom & Jerry" and the "Looney Tunes/Toons", just as Gaspode and Laddie are references to "Rin Tin Tin" and "Lassie".
But they are on the page merely for a few lines and they immediately develop their own personality. Because they resent the stereotypical names they are given. It's dead funny and funnier than mere satire. The animals don't act like the characters they're meant to represent (unless made to do so by Holy Wood magic), but they become this disgruntled community doing their part, full of an attitude of their own instead of copycats.
In ways I find hard to explain, "Soul Music" doesn't come together like this. To me, it feels like a greater love shines through the pages of "Moving Pictures" than its lesser successor, the magic doesn't quite come back. It still reads well, but I'm much less likely to pick it back up.
Usually one wouldn't even comment on this in a sequel, because that's how it goes for most follow-up books or movies. So much so, we gladly remember those that buck the trend. It is a credit to Terry Pratchett as a writer that he not only was able to create so many good stories, but so many of them sequels featuring a similar cast.
