• In which the featured image does not display the books in chronological order, but in the order that I write about them.
• This is the first in a series of posts about books I’ve read this year. Find the introduction here.

Oops! All Terry!¹

I pound sand every day that I got into Discworld as late as I did. I always knew where it was, yet for some reason I never bothered with it until last year. I got through the first page of Equal Rites, swiveled in my chair, exhaled deeply and said, “Where has this been my whole life?” The way the words just fit all the grooves in my brain was like melted wax that’d found its mould. All I could do was point and stammer, “That– That’s how I want to write!”

When I think I can’t write a single thing worth a damn, I go to Discworld. Part of Pratchett’s style, I think, is leaving you with the impression that here is a man who wants to tell you a story, and he’ll go as fast or as slow as the plot demands; he’ll make you stop, think, and flick back through the pages to jokes that have just landed in your head; by the time he’s done, he wants to tell you two more stories.

What gave that style so much strength was Pratchett’s untold ability to keep fantasy real. In advising other would-be fantasy authors on doing the same, he said: “Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees.” He talked the talk and walked the walk – when I read Discworld, I can feel that mindset.

Most people I think read² Discworld for the stories. I see a lot of people quoting Discworld online, making memes of memorable bits and suchlike, but it’s not the prose that makes them memorable. In all the books I’ve read so far, when Pratchett wants to expand the Lore™, he will. He hits most of the time, but when he does miss, it’s definitely noticeable. I’ve heard Discworld’s prose got better and better as Pratchett developed as a writer.³ Perhaps that makes them more appealing to you – more power to you if it does.

You know what gets me writing more than someone’s prose? Being someone who’s not afraid to write on an industrial scale, no matter how they’re feeling, no matter what words spring forth from the pen. That’s the impression I get from Terry Pratchett’s writing. That’s who I want to be – a guy who swears off writing for six months, locks himself away from his typing utensil in a screwy, Tex Avery-esque fever, only to close his eyes and open them again at his desk with two manuscripts.

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It admittedly took a while to figure out what the gonne was in Men at Arms, but when it hit me, it did so like many Discworld titles do and reminded me what a clever little double entendre it is. Then I’m sucked back into the story and oh my god there’s an assassin with the only sniper rifle on the Disc.

In these interesting times, to not about Sam Vines’ Boots theory comes with immense difficulty. And in Men At Arms, we see him in a position he both really wants to be in, but also really, REALLY doesn’t. He wants to be a copper who’s fair and lays down the law and puts holes in the Patrician’s walls for being told not to pursue cases further. He instead is about to embark on a strange, vertical journey not many people in Ankh-Morpork ever get to make – social mobility.

As the story progresses and Vimes gets closer to marrying Lady Ramkin, the woman of his dreams, he gets ever closer to being a part of society where he can buy all the expensive fifty-dollar boots he’ll ever need to keep his feet dry forever more. That, more than anything else, eats him alive.

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Small Gods is a story about a small god, Om, both in the sense that he’s accidentally manifested himself as a tortoise (not the great white bull he was expecting), and that his true believers are becoming few and far between. The theocratic desert state of Omnia supposedly worships him, but, as is explained to newfound companion and last sole believer, Brutha, all they believe in is the rules and rituals of the Church.

None of the religions in Small Gods are real, but in-between Brutha’s accompanying the Quisition on a diplomatic mission to Ephebe (the Disc’s equivalent to ancient Greece), and finding true believers to give Om his power back, we learn much about what believers in a Church will do in the name of their god. Vorbis, the head of the Quisition, has much to teach Brutha about the trivial and fundamental truths:

“There are some things which appear to be the truth, which have all the hallmarks of truth, but which are not the real truth. The real truth must sometimes be protected by a labyrinth of lies… That which appears to our senses is not the fundamental truth. Things that are seen and heard and done by the flesh are mere shadows of a deeper reality.”

Vorbis, Small Gods (Gollancz, p. 170-1)

In the trivial sense of the truth, there is Om, and everything is prohibited to guide the faithful to salvation. Non-believers who think everything is permitted face the Quisition. In the fundamental sense of the truth, Vorbis alludes, it is the exact opposite – if Om exists, then everything done in his name is permitted. That is all that matters

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Moving Pictures being thirty years old at this point, I’m not ashamed to admit I had its APF entry handy whenever I started to read it:

https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/moving-pictures.html

It’s a faithful enough Discworld adaptation of how motion pictures developed on Roundworld. A group of alchemists in Ankh-Morpork invent the Disc’s first film material, and discover a way of making moving pictures without using magic, and overnight, the clicks industry bursts into life like a firecracker. On Roundworld, a bunch of people really did pack up their things and left for Hollywood in pursuit of a budding industry that promised adoration thitherto untold.

On Discworld, folks can’t seem to find the answer as to why – one day, Holy Wood was a nondescript stretch of beach on the Sto Plains, and overnight, it transformed into a diverse, thriving community. Trolls and dwarfs living together usually causes mass hysteria, yet prejudice is cast aside in the pursuit of making clicks.

There’s an oft-repeated expression that there’s an experience you can only get at the cinema. The climax of the book certainly shapes up to be that – the clicks start coming to life, and it’s like King Kong meets Lovecraft meets the War of the Worlds radio hoax. All that, with a 1000 elephants.

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I can appreciate Guards! Guards! as being an incredibly funny book, but what made it stick, for me, is that the dragon is not played up as some spectacle you’d find in a D&D campaign. Yes, it’s the murderer, but its supernatural tendencies are what drives Vimes’s skepticism, and to that end, it’s also a kind of MacGuffin. Very much like Columbo, the appeal of the story is knowing who summoned the dragon, how it kills its victims, how it evades detection, and how Vimes and the rest of the City Watch figure out its M.O..

There must be a reason why things happen on Discworld, and sometimes a shared belief in something is enough to act as the catalyst that brings things to life. The noble dragons, we learn, never simply vanished – they retreated into our imaginations, dormant, waiting to be summoned, and when they are, it doesn’t matter if they defy the physics of Discworld. Belief by its inhabitants alone seems enough to sustain its existence until recalled.

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To be honest, I’ve not much to say about Sourcery and Eric. I feel like I ought to find Rincewind a funnier protagonist than he is. The wizards are honestly at their best when they’re not the main focus of the plot, like in Reaper Man or Hogfather. I don’t remember if it’s in Eric or Sourcery, but there’s this great big loredump about inspiration particles and how one is on its way to collide with Rincewind’s mind to solve the plot, and so on. It’s interesting, for sure, and goes to explain how serendipity works in Discworld, but my god it goes on forever.

But the Luggage. The Luggage, my beloved. It’s the strong, silent type. It’s handsomely rugged. It’s destined to take the place of the mud shark in your mythology. But most importantly, it eats crisps. If I had my own Luggage, that would solve the problem of what to do with all the multipack cheese and onions. We could lay siege to the world’s supply of cheese and onion crisps, hold Frito-Lay to ransom, and bargain with them to replace cheese and onion with an infinitely better flavour.

Maybe that’s taking it a bit too far… no, not far enough. Why stop at cheese and onion? The Luggage could eat the rich. Down with Big Crisp, and all that. Nah, that wouldn’t work, either. Too far. It’d get through three dynasties at most and find itself knackered.

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As much as I like Discworld, I’m hoping that next year’s fiction list isn’t all Terry. Then again, I wouldn’t mind if it is. I’ll no doubt end up reading at least one – might as well prioritise going through the City Watch series while I’m ahead.

It’s going to be all Terry again, isn’t it? Deary me…

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The best place to buy any Discworld book that is not Amazon would be straight from the Discworld Emporium:

https://www.discworldemporium.com/product-category/books/discworld-novels/

Terry said it best himself: “They don’t get it right all the time but they get it wrong better than most.”

1. Yes, I KNOW Guards! Guards! comes before Men at Arms. But I wrote about Men at Arms first and couldn’t be arsed to swap the paragraphs around. ↩︎
2. By which I mean me. Just me. I don’t know any other Discworld readers, but you’re definitely out there. If you’re giving an opinion, as long as you say ‘I think,’ a sample size of one is good enough. I think. ↩︎
3. Not unlike the development of Ian Anderson’s maniacal flute mastery. He started playing flute for Jethro Tull because ‘the flute is a heavy metal instrument,’ and he didn’t want to do what many contemporary rock groups were doing (trying to guitar like Eric Clapton). Listen to tracks from This Was or Aqualung, and then anything from the later years, or Anderson’s non-JT albums – Roots to Branches, The Secret Language of Birds, Zealot Gene. His flute’s as wild now as it was back then, but it also doesn’t sound like he’s swallowed it. ↩︎