Iâve been rereading Terry Pratchett for a couple of weeks; been meaning to since his death. I suspect who Pratchett was, is more or less known to anyone who might be reading this, but if not: British fantasy novelist, primarily known for a long, long series of sort-of comic fantasy novels set on a sort-of planet called the Discworld, which made him until fairly recently the best-selling British f.n. since Tolkien and Lewis. Diagnosed with Alzheimerâs eight years ago; wrote and made documentaries about the ethics of euthanasia; last month, tweets appeared on his account in which the personification of Death from his novels greeted him (âWE MEET AT LAST, SIR TERRYâ) roughly contemporaneously with his publishers announcing he had died peacefully at home etc., a statement they followed with another announcing and it totally wasnât suicide, I donât know why you would think otherwise, leave us alone.
The metaphysics of Pratchettâs books: on the Discworld, anything believed in strongly enough tends to exist. Death, cowled and scythed and c., is aware that he is an anthropomorphic personification of a natural force, faintly melancholic about it, rather lonely, with a fondness for cats.
That Pratchett (or his assistant) had his creation address him as âSir Terryâ is fairly revealing, in ways I donât want to limn too obtusely. His comment on his OBE for âservices to literatureâ was âI suspect they consisted of refraining from trying to write any.â â On the internet you can watch a video of him debating the value of fantasy with Terry Eagleton and A.S. Byatt, not that youâd want to. â You can also find him defending himself against J.K. Rowling fans on alt.fan.harry-potter, circa 2005.
The Discworld books start as a silly romp through fantasy topoi; the first paperback of The Colour of Magic, the first novel, calls it Jerome K. Jerome doing Lord of the Rings, right there on the front cover, though the immediate antecedents are in Leiber and Howard way more than in Inkling stuff. Joke: a septuagenarian sword-and-sorcery hero called Cohen the Barbarian. Joke: a Japanese tourist wandering around whatâs basically Lankhmar. Your patience for this will forever depend on the kind of person you were at thirteen. A word which is used a lot is âparodyâ, which I guess the books are doing in the way that, say, Diana Wynne-Jones is doing in A Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which we can credibly say is parodying both those same fantasy topoi and the Rough Guide series. Iâm less assured of the claim that Wyrd Sisters, which imports chunks of Hamlet and Macbeth, is parodying Shakespeare, or that The Last Continent, probably the nadir of the series, is parodying Australia. Iâm not sure where Iâm going with this. I guess that parody requires assumptions about shared context and distance that donât really work when looked at from certain angles.
The usual highbrow argument for his defence, which isnât entirely wrong, is that in the long-term effort of writing tens of thousands of words set in this world (which, altogether now, rides on four elephants, which ride on the back of a turtle ⊠) Pratchett develops something like moral depth and seriousness of purpose.
The lowbrow argument for his defence is that heâs just funny and you donât need an argument for his defence. (Obviously I donât care for this argument.)
Thereâs a line in Equal Rites â something along the order of âfog swirled around the rooftops as the wizard strode across the bridge, although the two did not have anything to do with one anotherâ â which is something like Beckett in Watt, which I wasnât expecting. There have been few more like that, though there was a not very good Beckett joke in Wyrd Sisters.
The claim Iâd want to develop is that Pratchettâwhile himself vocal about the genreâs possibilitiesâwas perfectly positioned, in the 80s, for his very silliness to expand into a critique of its limitations. That his awareness of this was probably the motor, on some level, for him to keep writing the things. Itâs an agon thatâs hard to precisely describeâDiscworld cuts across a buncha fantasy tendencies of the last three decades, sometimes looking a bit like a cottage-industry version of TSRite shared-world licenses, sometimes thumbing its nose at the grimânâgritty, and pre-empting or running in parallel with Mievilleish revaluations of how urban space works in the fantastic. And sometimes, yes, it throws all that up to make jokes about wizards and boomerangs: I suppose part of the claim Iâm making is that this is also a strength, but Iâm not very invested in this part of the claim.
The book after the wizards-and-boomerangs book reconceives Cohen the Barbarian in a dumb gag which is also Beckettian, if you look at it sideways for long enough: heâs on a quest âto return fire to the Gods.â
I was going to reread them all in order, and write about them one-by-one on here, but I prevented from doing so by circumstances (even in Seoul thereâs a lack of really good English-language bookshops)âbut given the lack of a coherent design is, I guess I just claimed, one of the seriesâ strengths, maybe thatâs for the best: also, I have plenty of other projects to not finish--
So mostly Iâve been reading the Tiffany Aching books, which I hadnât read before, and the earlier books about witches, which I had, but I feel like I didnât read them with sufficient attention or justice when I was fourteen, because I thought the ones about Rincewind were funnier. Â The Tiffany Aching books seem at least a little motivated by the desire to earn some of that adolescent wizarding megabucks but, hey, if you've read Interesting Times, say, you'll think, well, at least being motivated by something is a benefit ...
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