Part of me wishes I had more time, that I didn’t have two deadlines looming so that I might take enough hours to write the obituary and tribute that Terry Pratchett deserves. The other part of me knows that even if I had an open calendar, there just aren’t enough hours to do so.
Pratchett, who had been suffering form the earlier stages of Alzheimer’s for a number of years, passed away this morning at the age of 66. I find myself crushed to learn of it. My emotional reaction to the news is far more intense than I would have thought, and I’ll probably need some time to unpack exactly why exactly this is.
I suspect, however, that the answer is this: There are many writers I think more skilled than Pratchett, and certainly more than a few who write with more depth. Goodness knows there are scores who stand far in front of him on the Important Works shelf. But what I think I am fully realizing now — right now, as I write these words — is that there has never been an author who I have enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed Terry Pratchett. Indeed, I can never even quite figure out how to best catalogue him in my mind. Fantasy writer? Humanist writer? Humorist? Satirist? Philosopher? A really, really good teller of tall tales? You’d be reading one of his books, just enjoying the deceptively difficult craft of spinning a page-turning, light-hearted, laugh-out-loud yarn, and then — BAM! — he’d sneak up on you with a sentence so utterly profound that you’d be stopped in your tracks, reading it over several times and knowing that you’d remember it for years to come.
My first taste of his work was almost twenty years ago, when I was traveling around the state by car as part of my job. I’d picked up an audiobook recording of Small Gods from the local public library on a whim, and I found myself transfixed by both the narrative and Nigel Planer’s wonderful voices.[1] After Small Gods came Pyramids, and after Pyramids came the Rincewind books.
It’s funny now to note that there were three types of Discworld Books — the books about Death, the books about the Night Watch, and the books about the witches — that I resisted reading for a long time because I thought they sounded dull and uninteresting. Now, of course, these are my favorites. The books about Death surprised me by being so tender and loving. Pratchett used the character of Death like Star Trek used Spock and Data: a perennial outsider whose perspective allowed us to poke at what it truly means to be human. The Night Watch books ended up being terrific procedurals that smartly dealt with topics such as class, racism, nationalism, and — through the city’s morally ambiguous ruler — the steep price we pretend we never have to pay in exchange for living in a peaceful civilization.
My absolute favorites, though, are the books about the witches. Of all the Terry Pratchetty things Terry Pratchett did, the Terry Pratchettest of them all was to make the Discworld’s lone action-hero protagonist a small, withered, old spinster with a name like Granny Weatherwax. All of the witch books are, in their own unique ways, books that pretend to be adventure stories but are in fact about the power of stories to shape our realities. In a sense, each of the witches books is the same exploration told from a different persecutive. Wyrd Sisters explored the power of stories told through performance, while Witches Aboard did the same with the stories of folklore. Lords and Ladies looked at how our most important stories evolve and change over time, sometime at the expense of undermining their original lessons. Masquerade reveled in how the pull of music can amplify stories, and Carpe Jugulum, the last of the series, used a stark an unblinking eye to look at those stories that come to us through religion.
This past Christmas I bought the first two books from the young-adult Tiffany Aching series for Jason and Boegiboe’s amazing and delightful daughter, who reminds me so much of that plucky young protagonist. I am realizing now, with no small amount of shame, that it’s still sitting on a desk in our living room under a pile of other books. I never got around to mailing it, because… well, because sometimes in life things get all mixed up, and for a while you mistakenly think that laundry and shopping and earning a living are the true Important things in life, which are far more important than the mailing of a book about a teenage witch to a young girl who lives thousands of miles away.
This afternoon, I will head to the post office and correct that mistake.
[1] I cannot stress Planer’s voice work enough. To this day, I cannot read a Pratchett book without hearing his voice — all of his voices — inside my head. A few years after I listened to a few of his Discworld narrations, many of Planer’s voices found themselves unashamedly stolen by me in the use of reading Dr, Seuss’s, Maurice Sendak’s, and basically everybody else’s books to my boys.
I wonder if Sir Pratchett will ever be required reading in American High Schools?
He should. The kids would probably truly enjoy reading his works, and they’d actually learn something in the process.Report
I think that School Boards would find a lot to complain about with Terry Pratchett. Selecting some of his works for high school students would be interesting. His best works are the Discworld novels and the best of the Discworld novels are the middle and latter ones, after he gets a bit of grounding in what he wants to do with Discworld. Yet, Discworld is a series and you need some background before you could jump into the middle and latter novels. Latter books refer back to earlier books many times.Report
I know, it would be so awful if kids had to read more than one enjoyable, very easy to read book in a year.
😉Report
I don’t think there’s a single Discworld book that can’t be read and enjoyed on its own.Report
Well, The Colour of Magic can, although the desire for The Light Fantastic should make your claim a little bit true.Report
I dunno. Small Gods would be an interesting book to teach, I’d bet.
Wee Free Men as well.Report
The only bit of the Rincewind stories that gets referenced elsewhere is the Librarian having been turned into an orangutan, and they explain that every time he shows up.Report
@mad-rocket-scientist
One problem with that is the Sci-Fi / Fantasy ghetto. His books have dragons in them therefore they can’t be considered proper literature.
Incidentally, knights are addressed by their first name so it’s Sir Terry, not Sir Pratchett.Report
I always screw that bit about Knights up.Report
DittoReport
Sir Pterry, surely.Report
We read a Wizard of Earthsea in my high school.Report
We did Wrinkle in time in primary schoolReport
“sometimes in life things get all mixed up, and for a while you mistakenly think that laundry and shopping and earning a living are the true Important things in life, which are far more important than the mailing of a book about a teenage witch to a young girl who lives thousands of miles away.”
No one’s dead, the package can still be sent.
Learn from this, but I think you got away scot free.
Some messages misplaced and lain unsent
no longer have people to be delivered to.Report
I have never read any of his books, but it’s clear to me that a lot of people loved his work. Been a bad month for sci fi folks.Report
We lost Iain Banks last year. Bad year for UK writers. 🙁Report
I’d advise caution on his later books. The threads were showing terribly in his later Moist von Limpvig books and his later Sam Vimes books. There was good in with the bad but you could feel it struggling painfully in parts.
And Raising Steam was agonizing; occasional nuggets of gold but so much that was just… not. When I closed Raising Steam I finally acknowledged that he was going to die.
And then he went and died and it’s terrible bad. With him and Nimoy both gone I feel distinctly adult at my whopping 35 years… hell I think I could manage to even feel a little old.
Pratchett could make you howl with laughter then turn a phrase and bring real tears. I got some real ones from Night Watch.
RIP Sir Pratchett ~ How do they rise up…Report
Did you read Dodger? It would lay to rest any worries that his illness had affected his writing.
Raising Steam had the feel of a transitional book, for lack of a better term. That weird bridging book that is neither fish nor fowl and suffers because it doesn’t fit in with what came before or after. Read in that light, I found many of my concerns with it went away. Of course, no book will follow after now. 🙁Report
@morat20
Apparently he completed one more book before his death.Report
I don’t think I’ve caught Dodger, I’ll check it out.
That said there’s no excuse for a lot of the ways the characters talked in Raising Steam. There were a lot of sections that read like a bloody fan-fic with Moist filling in the role of Gary Stu. It may not have been his illness, maybe he was simply trying to shove too much into it but I thought RS suffered grievously. He had a smaller, similar problem with Making Money.Report
I’ve always felt that Making Money’s biggest flaw was that it was a book on how bankers were evil without the hindsight of the big banking crisis. Reading it reminded me of watching those pre-2001 movies where middle eastern terrorists hit NYC with a devastating attack that kills 15 people.Report
I’d be very interested to know what the respective commentariate’s favorite Pratchett novels and characters were (they don’t have to be linked).Report
Hmm. Night Watch or Hat Full of Sky.
Tiffany Aching and Vimes were my favorites, with Susan close behind. (Her comments about the never ending battle to keep Jason out of the stationary cupboard were hilarious, and according to me wife Pratchett summed up the entirety of the struggle of teaching children in a handful of scenes).
I think Tiffany Aching, more than anyone. Because she had Second Thoughts and occasionally Third Thoughts and the way she thought, when everything was on and she focused was just…I lack the words for it.
It captured the way people think, and what that really means, in a way I’ve never really seen before.Report
I dearly loved the first Tiffany book. Her relationship with her Grandmother really struck a note with me.
My favorite book was probably Night Watch with Lords and Ladies close up behind.
Despite that my favorite character was Granny. She was, just, everything.Report
@north
Definitely Night Watch for me, though I’m also fond of Thud.Report
Did you ever read The Science of Discworld? The Wizards irritably supervising macro-evolution on round world over the eons had me rolling in the aisle. Especially when they talked about seals where Ridicully was flipping out because the seals were going back to the sea. Backsliding! Ingrates! I’m laughing now.
I can’t believe there won’t be more. I just… I don’t know it just doesn’t seem real.Report
Thud was the first one I read and remains my favourite. And Vimes is one of my favourite characters (probably second-favourite, after Death).Report
Death always felt so… large… that he didn’t compute as a character for me exactly- more like the sky or the land or the wind on Discworld. It may be because I read most of Sir Terry’s work backwards (starting around the Opera house one then going backwards then reading forwards).Report
Masquerade! I kind of liked that one, but I think I missed a lot from reading it before I’d read The Phantom of the Opera.Report
My favorite Discworld novel was Hogfather. I liked how it deconstructed but reaffirmed the various aspects of Christmas, childhood and more at the same time. The live action adaption that was produced for British TV was awesome. Death, once Pratchett worked out his personality, was an awesome character.
The auditors of reality: There are rules.
Death: And you broke them.Report
Hmm, yes. The lines about believing in the little lies before you can believe in the big ones like truth and justice.
And also the bit about it being the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Fantastic book, Hogfather.Report
The Watch books, by far, especially Vimes, Carrot, and Vetinari. Granny and Nanny Ogg are great characters, but they never change, so six books about them seems excessive,Report
Vimes evolves a great deal, as does the Watch in general. (He’s obviously built on Robert Peel. Very obviously, up to and including the ones he trains being called “Sammies”).
One thing I liked about Vimes is that a lot of the later books had an element of ‘Master training their successor’. The Patrician had chosen Moist, Granny had Tiffany Aching, and even the Archchancellor was slowly training Ponder.
Vimes, on the other hand, didn’t train just one person to replace him. He trained everyone, as best he could. A network of people who could do his job, spread across the Discworld. He didn’t want to be the indispensable man. He wanted, from the very beginning, to fix the odd tendency of humans to bend at the knees.Report
From a column Neil Gaiman wrote about Pterry a few months ago:
There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. It’s also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus.
That makes perfect sense to me. I’ve never seen an interview with Python Eric Idle where he failed to mention that the headmaster at his primary school used to call him “Idle by name, Idle by nature”, and hasn’t he proven the old so-and-so wrong.Report
And Pratchett even said something like it in one book; “the atheist who was angry at the gods for not existing”.Report
Seriously, though, just don’t bother reading the Rincewind books. Discworld isn’t like the Big Fat Fantasy series we’ve all been conditioned to enjoy, the ones where if you didn’t start reading at Page 1 Book 1 then you have no idea who anyone is.Report
I like Rincewind. Not my favorite, but I like most of his stories more than I like most of the witch ones.Report
I don’t like the Rincewind stories either. Discworld books are accessible enough that you can start at any point and still have a good grasp on what’s going on, and the middle-to-later books are the best ones, so a person’s more likely to like Discworld if they start in the middle than if they try to start at the beginning.Report
Thanks for this, Tod, very well done. We’re reading Harry Potter with the little one now; last night she said she’s Hermione Granger, and I couldn’t be happier.
It’s been 20 years since I started reading Discworld books as well. I believe Mort was my first, and I recently reread it. Have you had a chance to read The Last Hero? It’s wonderful to have those illustrations going along with the story. And it strikes me that Cohen at the end of that book is probably how Sir Terry would want us to imagine him right now.
Looking forward to your mail!Report