A reminder on this Day of Fools and Follies that mimes and all related performative mimery are strictly prohibited by decree of the Patrician under pain of death.
I’ve been on a Discworld re-read for about a year now, and it just struck me how Pterry gets progressively angrier and less subtle about it throughout the series.
Like, we start out nice and easy with Rincewind who’s on some wacky adventures and ha ha ha oh golly that Twoflower sure is silly and the Luggage is epic, where can I get one. Meanwhile Rincewind just wants to live out his boring days as a boring Librarian but is dragged along against his will by an annoying little tourist guy and honestly? Fuck this.
We get the first view of Sam Vimes, and he’s just a drunken beaten down sod who wants to spend his last days as a copper in some dive but oh fuck now he has to fight a dragon and honestly? Fuck this.
The first time we see Granny Weatherwax, she’s just a cranky old woman who has never set foot outside her village but oh fuck now she has to guide this weird girl who should be a witch but is apparently a wizard all the way down to Ankh Morpork and honestly? Fuck this.
Like, these books deal with grumpy, cranky people. But mostly, the early books are a lot of fun. Sure, they have messages about good and evil and the weirdness of the world, and they’re good messages too, but mostly they are just wacky romps through a world that’s just different enough that we can have a good laugh about it without taking things too much to heart.
But then you get to Small Gods, in which organized religion is eviscerated so thorouhgly that if it was human, even the Quisition would say it’s gone a bit too far while at the same time not condemning people having faith which is kind of an important distinction.
You get to Men at Arms and I encourage everybody with an opinion on the Second Amendment to read that one.
You get to Jingo, Monstrous Regiment, Going Postal (featuring an evil CEO who is squeezing his own company dry to get to every last penny, not caring one lick about his product or his workers or his customers or anything else and who, coincidentally, works out of Tump Tower. I’m not making this up).
And just when you think, whew, this is getting a bit much but hey, look, he wrote YA as well! And it’s about this cute little girl who wants to be a witch and has help from a lot of rowdy blue little men, this will be fun! A bit of a break from all the anger!
Wrong.
The Tiffany Aching books are the angriest of all. But you know what the great thing is?
The great thing is that Pterry’s anger is the kind of fury that makes you want to get up and do something about it. It upsets you, sure. But it also says It’s up to you to change all of this. And you can change all of this, and even if you can’t. Do it anyway. Because magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
It’s the kind of anger that gives you purpose, and it gives you hope. And that concludes my essay about why the Discworld series is so gloriously cathartic to read when it seems like all the world is going to shit.
So go. Read them, get angry and then get up and fight. Fight for truth. Justice. Freedom. Reasonably priced love and, most importantly, a hard-boiled egg.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
first, what they said^
second…. the later books – the latter Tiffany Aching books, Going Postal, Making Money, Snuff… when Pterry was writing those he knew he was ill.
He knew he didn’t have as much time as he wanted or needed.
He knew he was running out of time, and he kept writing anyway, because he still had stories to tell.
And god, I’m glad we had those last books.
“The great thing is that Pterry’s anger is the kind of fury that makes you want to get up and do something about it. It upsets you, sure. But it also says It’s up to you to change all of this. And you can change all of this, and even if you can’t. Do it anyway. Because magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
^^ THIS. Especially because he did exactly that in real life. When he was diagnosed with the Embuggerance, he did everything he could to raise awareness, he poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into Alzheimer’s charities, and he made documentaries about living with the disease. He gave speeches, radio talks, he met with the prime minister to convince him to put more money into dementia research, he spoke out in support for terminally ill people’s right to die with dignity. All while continuing to write us these beautiful stories and characters full of that same passion and rage. He was absolutely incredible.
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; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.
The anger is always there, an engine that drives. By the time Terry learned he had a rare, early onset form of Alzheimer’s, the targets of his fury changed: he was angry with his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that would not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing.
And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry’s underlying sense of what is fair and what is not.
Whenever I feel in a witchy rut, like I don’t know what to do next, or simply stalled in my practice, I go back and re-read the Witches Sequence of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett.
Nothing will teach you more about witchcraft than Granny Weatherwax.
‘I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult,’ said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’ ‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.’
— Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
‘The thing about witchcraft,’ said Mistress Weatherwax, ‘is that it’s not like school at all. First, you get the test, and then afterwards, you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.’
“`Moons are very important.’ […]
`I’m blowed if I’ll let a ball of shiny rock tell me what to do.’"
one of my favorite things about Sam Vimes’s character arc is that it’s literally your classic “gruff cop with ideals gets worn down by reality, descends into cynicism and booze” journey in reverse.
I mean, it happens the normal way around the first time, but we don’t really see the first time- in Sam’s first introduction, he’s literally lying in a gutter. He’s already been chewed up and spat out, already seen the ugliness of the world and bent beneath it.
And then every book from there on out has him getting back up. It’s not a straightforward road, but he takes it anyways, and sure, he’s still cynical and still worn down, but he’s still got his ideals (though I’m not sure he’d like to call them ideals- maybe standards would do) and he cleans himself up and bit by bit, he works on cleaning up the world around him, too. He gets a family. He learns to accept others more openly than he had before. He still sees the ugliness in the world, but he confronts it instead of accepting it as just the way things are. Because there’s a way things should be, and he cares about it.
Sam Vimes, gruff cop with standards, ascends from cynicism and booze, starts wearing down on reality.
“And that… boy,” the captain added, spitting the word towards Polly, “kicked me in the privates and almost clubbed me to death! I demand that you let us go!” Blouse turned to Polly. “Did you kick Captain Horentz in the ‘privates,’ Parts?” “Er… yessir. Kneed, actually. And it’s Perks actually, sir, although I can see why you made the mistake.” “What was he doing at the time?” “Er… embracing me, sir.” Polly saw Blouse’s eyebrows rise, and plunged on. “I was temporarily disguised as a girl, sir, in order to allay suspicion.” “And then you… clubbed him?” “Yessir. Once, sir.” “What in the world possessed you to stop at once?” said Blouse.
– this whole exchange is gold |
Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”
And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.
So I’ve been thinking for a while about the Discworld books, and how they can be divided up into three rough thematic phases; not based around the focal characters, but rather what the story is about.
The first wave, which begins with The Colour of Magic and I would say ends with Guards, Guards! or Faust Eric. These books are parodies of existing fantasy, and thematically spend a lot of time exploring the conventions of these stories, both mocking them and codifying them as fact for the Disc. We get a lot of witches and Rincewind books here.
Having set up the status quo, the stage is then set for the second wave to enter, starting with Moving Pictures. This is when Pratchett starts to branch out in terms out his parodies, and moves from fantasy parodies to other areas of society and culture, from the movies in Moving Pictures to shopping centres in that weird Reaper Man subplot, to guns in Men at Arms. Notably, all of these are based around external forces disrupting the status quo, and having to be set right. My favourite example of this is probably Jingo, where the external force disappears by itself when the island sinks back into the sea. Hogfather, Carpe Jugulum and Thief of Time all fit into this wave, which has kind of a fuzzy boundary with the third wave.
Fantasy has always, as an overall genre, had a problem with the idea of growth and change. The idea of “Setting right what went wrong” and protecting the existing status quo has always been a major element in a lot of fantasy stories. “Restoring the true king” is a popular one which is lampooned by the character of Captain Carrot, but Discworld itself has, up to around 1996, had a problem with this itself (notably, the point of the Carrot subplot in Men at Arms is that he is the true king but delibrately chooses not to reveal himself in order to defend the status quo) Its plots, while often having some changes for individual characters, rarely allowed the setting itself to change, and the change that occurs is put right by the end.
The first book to sort of challenge this is probably the fantastic Feet of Clay, one of my favourites, where the role of the Golems is examined and by the end, the concept of a Golem owning itself is introduced. This is a major change for golems in the setting, but it isn’t really played with much here. The two books that really kick off the third wave come, fittingly, at the turn of the Millenium; 1999′s The Fifth Elephant, which examines dwarf politics, and the 25th Discworld novel, 2000′s The Truth, which is the first time we really see a persistant technological change in the setting. The newspaper set up by de Worde is a major factor in all the later books, and notably it is the protagonist of The Truth that is trying to disrupt the status quo with the creation of the newspaper. It isn’t films or rock music, which are eldritch abominations that must be stopped, but an organic and important change in the setting. This is the main theme of the third wave: the Disc is changed and shaped in lasting ways by the actions of the main characters, particularly on the wider social level. Cherry Littlebottom helps to change dwarf gender norms, goblins and orcs are introduced to society at large (admittedly in rather easy ways), and the biggest change of all is the introduction of everyone’s favourite conman, Moist Von Lipwig, who progressively creates or helps create the postal system, paper currency, and the first train network. In the Tiffany Aching books, we see both changes in the social structure that were made far earlier and then ignored (the female wizard Eskarina Smith in I shall Wear Midnight), and a double whammy in the death of Granny Weatherwax and appointment of Gregory as the new witch for her old area in The Shepard’s Crown. In the three waves, we go from stasis, to active defence of the status quo, to challenging and changing it.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect model. While I think the switch between waves one and two is fairly clear, as I noted above waves two and three are far more fuzzy in their boundary. Most notably, while I said that The Truth was the first major wave three book, between it and Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal, we have the second wave’s last hurrah; Nightwatch.
Nightwatch is entirely build around the idea that nothing changes. Carcer’s actions threaten to change history, and Vimes has to put it back, while on the other side of the thematic coin, the revolution that the past characters, including young Vimes, are fighting for explicitly just results in more of the same, putting Mad Lord Snapchase in charge.
Except that…even here, we know that this is not true. Vetinari is in charge of Ankh Morpork in the modern day. Vimes has risen through the ranks to become the commander of the watch and a lord himself, a far cry from his humble, improvished beginnings.
The world will change, and sometimes those changes must be fought, but often we need to fight for those changes ourselves.
also: the films and rock music and shopping malls are all actual, literal eldritch abominations in addition to being figurative ones
I was going to bring that up, (and we can add the elves, Granny Weatherwax’s sister and the Auditors to this as well), but there’s the subversion in Hogfather where the mundane (Mr Teatime) kills the eldritch being (the Hogfather) and explicitely becomes a monster while doing so? Like, there’s a whole other theme of “The Other” in Discworld that evolves as well that would be cool to write about. Look at how the Summoning Dark, Iron Girder and Nightshade are treated in the final Discworld books compared to the earlier examples. But yeah, good point.
Digression on The Summoning Dark: this was a really weird one for me.
It’s an entirely valid and very Pratchett concept – it examines a standard genre trope…
(the violent-angry-justice urge in the hardboiled detective type that drives him toward vengeance and vigilantism, that is useful in as much as it drives him forward and protects him from his foes, but dangerous in as much as it provides a ‘we’re not so different’ lever for villains. It’s also why this type has to cling so hard to his code, to force himself to follow the rules, because that’s what saves him from being lost to this dark side.)
…by making it a literally-existing supernatural thing, then taking that seriously and exploring its consequences. In that way, it’s just like the thin girl inside Agnes, the Auditors, or Narrative Causality itself.
But it’s weird in the case of Vimes, because (character-wise, at least, it starts giving him supernatural powers in Snuff) it doesn’t actually change anything.
Because Vimes already was a parody-turned-reconstruction of a hardboiled detective type, he already had a standard, non-supernatural version of the same exact thing, that in earlier books I think he referred to as ‘the Beast’.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.