Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds

From Giant Turtles to Small Gods

Marion Rana

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319672977
• eBook ISBN: 9783319672984
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book highlights the multi-dimensionality of the work of British fantasy writer and Discworld creator Terry Pratchett. Taking into account content, political commentary, and literary technique, it explores the impact of Pratchett's work on fantasy writing and genre conventions.With chapters on gender, multiculturalism, secularism, education, and relativism, Section One focuses on different characters' situatedness within Pratchett's novels and what this may tell us about the direction of his social, religious and political criticism. Section Two discusses the aesthetic form that this criticism takes, and analyses the post- and meta-modern aspects of Pratchett's writing, his use of humour, and genre adaptations and deconstructions. Thisis the ideal collection for any literary and cultural studies scholar, researcher or student interested in fantasy and popular culture in general, and in Terry Pratchett in particular.

© The Author(s) 2018

Marion Rana (ed.)Terry Pratchett's Narrative WorldsCritical Approaches to Children's Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67298-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction

Marion Rana¹

(1)

Interjuli, Lorch, Germany

Marion Rana

[D]arkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.

It was a rather disappointing purple colour.

(Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic: A Sequel to The Colour of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1989 [1986]), 178–179.)

End Abstract

‘When does it start?’ the reader is asked at the beginning of Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies , only to be told that there are very few beginnings worth their names: most beginnings are merely ‘little window[s] on a ribbon of events that may extend back thousands of years’,¹ when, we may assume, even Great A’Tuin, the giant turtle carrying through space four elephants on whose backs the Discworld is placed, was once a hatchling, and the Discworld itself was still in narrative stasis. The Discworld series did not start Terry Pratchett’s writing career, but his fame as a writer is based on its success: it is where many Pratchett fans first encountered his wit and literary skill and, appropriately, his last novel, The Shepherd’s Crown (2015), is set on Discworld, too.

Writing about Terry Pratchett, it is easy to revel in superlatives. On a social and political level, the frankness and trademark humour with which he made public his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and his subsequent activism for Alzheimer’s Research UK have made a lasting impact on the debate over the stigmatisation of mental health issues and end-of-life decisions. Moreover, with total sales of more than 80 million books and translations into 37 languages, Pratchett is one of Britain’s bestselling novelists, and the assessment that he only needs to be explained to ‘readers who have been living on a different planet altogether’² is maybe only a slight exaggeration. One out of every hundred books sold in England in 2002 was written by Pratchett,³ he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1998 and knighted for services to literature in 2009. Again, Hunt’s oft-quoted quip that ‘no British railway train is allowed to depart unless at least one passenger is reading a Pratchett novel’⁴ only slightly exaggerates Pratchett’s popularity as a writer. As Holcombe states: Pratchett ‘makes hyperbole seem understatement’.⁵

Trained as a journalist, Pratchett started his literary career with the publication of the children’s novel The Carpet People in 1971 (revised and republished in 1992). The first novel of his Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, appeared in 1983, and the quickly spiralling success of the series allowed him to become a full-time writer in 1987. Including the posthumously published The Shepherd’s Crown (2015), the Discworld series consists of 41 novels, six of which are specifically addressed to juvenile readers.⁶ Most of the novels feature a recurring set of characters and are part of specific substories (particularly those of Death, the witches, the City Watch, and the wizards). The stand-alone novels (such as Pyramids [1992], Monstrous Regiment [2003], or Small Gods [2003]) nonetheless tend to allude to and include events and/or characters from the Discworld universe introduced in other novels of the series. Apart from a few exceptions, the Discworld novels are situated within the same timeframe on Discworld, and characters from different substories frequently meet within the pages of other stories.

The Discworld series originally started out as a loving parody of high fantasy and, while turning into an increasingly sophisticated vehicle of social and political commentary, has retained and elaborated its interest in narrative traditions and motives of fantasy, fairy tales, and folklore. The Discworld universe is run on magic, but the magic follows very specific rules and, as Pratchett and his co-authors point out in The Science of Discworld, can thus be bent and analysed in a scientific manner. As Pratchett himself suggests, there is a profound contemporary and realistic level to his merely ‘largely imaginary’ world, and the relationship between Discworld and our own ‘Roundworld’ is a highly complex one, with the former both mirroring and distorting the latter: ‘[I]t has that slight air of solidity that mythology brings to an image.’⁷

Apart from the Discworld novels, Pratchett has published various other works, such as science fiction novels—the earliest ones, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), independently, the later ones, such as the Long Earth series (2012–2015, with Stephen Baxter), in collaboration with other writers. Non-Discworld children’s books include The Carpet People (1971), the Truckers trilogy (1989–1990) and the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, as well as the freestanding Nation (2008) and The Dodger (2012). His publications also include several non-fiction books (such as A Slip of the Keyboard, 2014) and Discworld-related material, such as Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook (1999), The Folklore of Discworld (with Jacqueline Simpson, 2008) and Science of Discworld series (with Ian Steward and Jack Cohen, 1999–2013). Several of his novels have spawned adaptations, such as Mort: The Big Comic (1994), the play Nation (2009) and the film Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008). The Discworld series in particular has secured Pratchett a huge fan base, and one dedicated enough to organise various conventions, which the author sometimes joined as guest of honour.⁸

Popularity and commercial success alone, however, do not necessarily warrant scholarly attention, at least not of the kind that this book is offering. So what is it that makes Terry Pratchett worth our attention as literary scholars? What is it that makes of Pratchett’s work the literary gems his millions of fans see in them? This collection outlines and analyses some of the central characteristics of Pratchett’s literary style, his central motives and themes, and by the end of this book even the Pratchett novice should have a fairly good grasp of what distinguishes the author from other writers. For now, a short introduction will have to suffice: Pratchett’s writing is deep and insightful, but it is also accessible, imaginative and truly and deeply funny. As Neil Gaiman, who collaborated with Pratchett on their joint novel Good Omens (1990), comments: ‘He never writes ugly sentences, or wastes a word, and at his best he says something in a way which means you can never again see it in the way you saw it before.’⁹

This simultaneity of literary merit and popularity is not something that is traditionally associated with high literature , a fact Pratchett continuously plays with intra- and extratextually: ‘It’s all stuff,’ he says of his work in an interview with Linda Richards.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Pratchett is not just popular, but also critically highly acclaimed: Alton and Spruiell’s conviction that ‘Pratchett marries entertaining prose with a kind of edgy humorous insight into the human condition that, in an area other than fantasy, would be regarded as high art’¹¹ is mirrored by exclamations of writers such as A.S. Byatt, who argued that the Discworld novel Thief of Time should have earned its author the Booker Prize. In that sense, his continuous self-description as a literary outsider, of himself as a writer only ‘accused of literature’,¹² a fantasy geek writing for other geeks, can be read as joyful coquetry: implied in this play with expectations is a criticism of the stuffy literary circles that will only consider worthy of scholarly and critical attention ‘serious’ writing, writing you may need a dictionary for, plus a quiet and undisturbed reading time in your office. What we may detect here is both whimsical self-mockery and a sense of genuine wonder about his own success: fantasy is, of course, still thought of as inferior by many literary critics and scholars and, to a degree, this is even more true for humorous fantasy. A quote in the narrative voice of one of his earlier characters, Death’s granddaughter Susan, may illustrate Pratchett’s relish in proclaiming his writing as non-literature: ‘Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.’¹³ High Literature, capital L-literature, is stuffy and pretentious; in contrast, Pratchett saw his writing as the ‘good stuff’—popular, entertaining and against the grain of the literary establishment.

Pratchett’s widespread popularity to an extent explains why he has been called a democratic author (though James’s description of him as ‘the most democratic writer of fantasy’ writes into existence a democracy scale of fantasy authors that is difficult and a little nonsensical to set up): Pratchett’s work addresses readers of all backgrounds, and though some of the puns are much easier to understand if the reade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction
• Part I. Populating Discworld and Beyond: Characters, Criticism and Social Commentary
• Part II. Crafting Narratives: Literary Techniques and Genre Adaptations
• Back Matter