Terry Pratchett Page 9
A Hat Full of Sky doesn’t have the same remit as The Wee Free Men. It is a book about relationships, even those within the Nac Mac Feegle. When Jenny tells husband Rob Anybody that she doesn’t want him to fight because of their future children, he gives her his word that he won’t. But then, as the Kelda of the tribe, she orders him to go into battle (she needs to know that he is loyal to her above anything else, and he shows that mettle). Jenny instantly disliked Tiffany Aching because Rob had been briefly ‘engaged’ to her, but when Jenny understands that he will put her first, she calms down. There is none of this character-building in the first book. Like The Colour of Magic, The Wee Free Men was a romp through the imagination and humour conjured by the Discworld, while both sequels (The Light Fantastic and A Hat Full of Sky) dig deeper into the depths of Pratchett’s imagination and allow him to look more objectively at magic and its forgotten secrets. The pages of an ancient book about Hivers are a thought-provoking glimpse into this area of A Hat Full of Sky. The books explains that if you allow a Hiver into your mind it will eat it away and break it down.
Is a Hiver a tangible form of brain disease? Is dementia the imagination unleashed, the inability to keep one’s own powers at bay? An interesting concept in hindsight, and something we see in creative people from the Victorian artist Richard Dadd (mentioned at the end of The Wee Free Men) to Vincent van Gogh; even Wilkie Collins if you want to go back in time in the field of literature.
Pratchett’s ability to mix real-world legends in with his fiction is one of his most endearing traits. He won’t uncover the secrets of magic in his novels, but he can provide ingenious and challenging ideas that tease and tantalise the reader with their possibilities. This ability to make convincing arguments is a major part of his magic and something that has always been present in his work, even in the early days.
Returning to A Hat Full of Sky, there are some interesting things that happen to Tiffany – her life lessons, experiences and learning about her witchcraft – but this pushes the Nac Mac Feegle into the background a little more when they should be the stars of the show. ‘Crivens!’ they cry, assuring everyone that they really aren’t swearing, but one does get suspicious when they’re told that they got thrown out of Fairyland for being ‘pished’ at two in the afternoon – pished meaning ‘tired’. It is lines like this that earn the endorsement ‘for children of all ages’!
Perhaps the great shame about A Hat Full of Sky is the obvious comparison with the Harry Potter series. If we are talking about a witch learning to be a witch and going shopping with like-minded friends to special witch shops, one cannot fail to draw a connection with Harry Potter. One could explore this comparison a little more and say that the Unseen University was around before the Harry Potter stories, but then Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch could claim a similar thing. What matters most isn’t who or what came first, it’s the need to have schools for witches and wizards in modern fantasy novels. Like the vampire novels in the horror genre, the fantastic stories of witches and wizards are dictated by cultural trends. Dracula was really the amalgamation of lots of gothic imagery that came before it, and the vampire progressed from this stake in the ground (sorry, couldn’t resist it) with novels such as Interview with the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight (and one can add many a Hammer Horror film into that influence too).
Perhaps one could start the progress of schools of witchcraft from early metaphorical ‘learning’ by child heroes in books such as E Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, through to The Chronicles of Narnia. As we can see from these books, and others such as Twilight, Harry Potter, The Worst Witch, the Tiffany Aching novels, The Lord of the Rings (Frodo and Sam at least), His Dark Materials, The Scarecrow and his Servant, even Aladdin – I could go on but this is enough for your sanity – children are learning all the time. They are learning the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, fantasy and reality. Essentially, through their adventures they are learning to grow up, to arm themselves with the tools that will make them wise adults. The children who read these books and pick up on the moral undertones will learn alongside their favourite characters. And there lies a very interesting distinction between science fiction and fantasy: science fiction is about the advancement of a race; fantasy can be about the advancement of a child’s imagination, to learn perception and to think outside the box. Think about the great artists throughout history, they have all used imagination – a fundamental part of the fantasy genre – to push back the boundaries and stand out; people as diverse as David Bowie, Spike Milligan, Charles Dickens and Vincent van Gogh. That’s an eclectic bunch, but they all supposedly went too far with their technicolour imaginations. That’s where true innovation lies, and innovation is at the hub of the fantasy genre, and when somebody comes up with something original a classic is made.
‘“The message is this. Don’t go through the door.”
He paused.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“No,” said Coraline.
The old man shrugged.’
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
There are great fantasy creators around today, and it is not surprising that they work in a variety of media to makes their vivid dreams come true. Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker have used comic books, novels, art and films to express their ideas and landscapes. Pratchett has learned to do much the same, allowing his stories to be adapted for theatre too. Clive Barker started out in the theatre with his horror stories, and that is where he learned much about his audience and how to work them. Pratchett’s first audience was children: his peers at school and then the younger readers of the Bucks Free Press. When one looks at the wide body of work Pratchett has produced, one can see clear children’s series, such as the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings) and the Tiffany Aching series (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight), which got too dark to be purely for children. And that is an important area we need to explore within Pratchett’s work.
CHAPTER NINE
Challenging the Cliché
‘They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard… Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round Chapter Three… to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asked them if they wanted to.’
(Dedication, Guards! Guards!)
We’ve witnessed it in every swashbuckling movie ever made, from Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood through Burt Lancaster’s The Crimson Pirate and The Flame and the Arrow to Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean: the hordes of unnamed guards who get killed senselessly. As Pratchett says above, nobody asked them if they wanted to be a guard, but nevertheless as lower, more worthless beings, they are killed off for the thrill of the swashbuckler in the name of adventure. Only once in movies have we seen the loss and trauma caused by these wanton acts: in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. After a wave of violence at Doctor Evil’s establishment, soldiers are killed off in various ways. We then cut to their homes and witness the effect their death has on their families. OK, so it’s a comedy film, but then most swashbuckling movies are light family entertainment, and it’s the not-taking-this-seriously aspect that pulls the action away from poignant real life, and that’s exactly where Pratchett is with the action-packed Guards! Guards!
‘Once you’ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth… There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time…’
(Guards! Guards!)
In Guards! Guards! there is a moment of detection when Captain Vimes has to work out where the dragon is nesting, and at exactly this point we witness Pratchett parodying the greatest detective of them all – Sherlock Holmes (see the quote above). There is no sacred turf for the classics where Pratchett is concerned.
In the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork there is immense danger on the streets, especially late at night. As a result there are laws – for the Ni
ght Watch – such as Not Arresting Thieves, especially ringleaders, but Carrot, a new dwarf recruit (well, a dwarf over six feet tall), is not aware of such unspoken rules and ends up on the receiving end of a very big learning curve that upsets the equilibrium of the city. Very soon there is more trouble than can possibly be imagined, as Carrot tries to do his job by the book and not let his Night Watch mentor show him the ropes. But dwarves – even those over six feet tall – are an ethnic minority and therefore have rights.
Through Captain Sam Vimes and his motley crew, Pratchett pokes fun at the craziness of the law as well as the injustice of the slaughtered trillions in books and movies past. Again, this is the iconoclastic Pratchett at his best, and it is no wonder that Guards! Guards! is the book he most wants to see produced into a movie, which would make a refreshing change, as the guards wouldn’t get mercilessly slaughtered for a change.
‘Ankh-Morpork didn’t rear. Rather it sort of skulked, clinging to the soil as if afraid someone might steal it. There were no flags.’
(Guards! Guards!)
The quote above could be from an Ian Rankin novel, where he describes the Jekyll and Hyde imagery of the city of Edinburgh at night. But no, the author is Terry Pratchett and the city is Ankh-Morpork, with the unpredictability of any great city and the obligatory dangers that lie within. To combat those dangers, Pratchett has to populate it with police officers, especially after dark – the Night Watch – who want to save their own skin and not combat crime in any way. It will never be thwarted, so why bother? Perhaps Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus should have thought the same way. He was never going to conquer crime, so why did he put his head on the block so many times? Why did he hit the bottle? Indeed, why did Sam Vimes do a similar thing, especially if he didn’t care? There is much to appreciate in Pratchett’s crime-busting (sic) novels, because not only do they show crime as endemic, they show the preposterous red tape that officials are up against if they want to make one positive change – so what’s the bloody use?
‘“This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off… Now I know what you’re thinking,” Vimes went on, softly. “You’re wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y’know, I ain’t sure myself.”’
(Guards! Guards!)
I’ve used the word before, but iconoclast describes a person who challenges the widely accepted and brings down accepted institutions. Here is our open door to speak about the Terry Pratchett who has Alzheimer’s disease, and the steps he is taking to stop the disease, or at least make people aware of it and start to combat it.
Pratchett wasn’t going to quietly accept the fact that he had the disease. He wanted to use his position as a respected author to make people take notice of it and understand it as something that is not uncommon but is sadly overlooked (compared with a disease such as cancer). But from there he took things on to another level, talking about assisted death. Is this Pratchett’s obsessiveness coming through again? Possibly, but in fairness it is something that is very close to home on this occasion.
‘Edinburgh slept on, as it had slept for hundreds of years. There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were enlightened ghosts, articulate and deferential.’
Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)
Something Guards! Guards! has, which no Ian Rankin book features, is dragons. Pratchett explains their absence from the real world by stating that they have been lying dormant, waiting to be awoken by a special key.
Although dragons are stock-in-trade for the fantasy genre, Pratchett doesn’t just accept their presence because he is writing fantasy. He explains their absence and, by doing so, implies that they may well have lived and breathed – fire – sometime in our own world’s history. This is a trick missed by Tolkien, as the great dragon Smaug was an accepted fact for the Hobbit and his friends. Pratchett is always questioning the world around him, sometimes subtly but at other times with more anger.
‘“No bloody flying newt sets fire to my city,” said Vimes.’
(Guards! Guards!)
CHAPTER TEN
The Dreams and Nightmares of Childhood
‘He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back.’
Neil Gaiman (‘Foreword: What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?’, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
In Dickens’ day, to say that somebody had a genius for something was implying that they were extremely good at it – whatever it was. Neil Gaiman has called Douglas Adams a genius and I’m sure without too much prompting he would call Terry Pratchett a genius for much the same reason. But what I find intriguing about Pratchett is that, like Roald Dahl, he can easily reach into childhood. It is as though there is a clear, brightly lit corridor that takes him straight there. Not necessarily back there – just there. On the one occasion I met Dahl he told me that he didn’t know where his ability to write children’s stories came from. As I was 11 years old at the time, I found that a little puzzling, but I think a similar thing applies to Pratchett. The children’s book is just a macabre sub-genre to the main track of his imagination. For Dahl, it was his brilliantly crafted short stories; for Pratchett it is his darkly set Discworld books. The darkness is clearly seen through the character of Death and, to a degree, the Night Watch. The seedy side of life intrigues some writers, witness Charles Dickens, who had a direct link to the pain of his childhood in the same way that John Lennon did. But you wouldn’t get Dahl, Pratchett – or even Douglas Adams – screaming for his mother as Lennon did. That mental scar was never there.
In his autobiography The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry talks about visiting Adams and the frustrations he could hear emanating from the study upstairs as he pained over a paragraph. Perhaps that was an occasion when he could have called out for his mother, but he probably decided to swear and curse instead. The point I’m making here is that Adams, like Milligan when writing The Goon Show, agonised over every sentence because what he was doing was different and cutting edge. Pratchett, through the sheer volume of his output and apparent lack of screaming or pain, has had an easier time of it overall, but the comparison with Adams is still there. Does that make him a greater genius – that so over-used word – or does it hark back to Dickensian times and suggest that he is simply very good at what he does?
There is a tendency to package things nowadays, to present a ready-made meal to the consumer and get the money in the door. I have spoken about the differences in genre, but at the same time there are people pushing the boundaries and creating something else that can still be set within a genre but is as detached from it as it is attached to it. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a prime example – it has as much humour as science fiction – but the Discworld series did as much in the fantasy genre.
The imagination can take many swerves and sometimes that swerve can go down the corridor of youth. In fantasy this is a much easier thing to do, because the imagery of a magical fairytale land is much closer, as dragons, dwarves and witches beckon with gnarled talons.
I will discuss Pratchett’s children’s novels in a separate chapter, but there is an important aspect to cover first: the influence of childhood in adult books. This has been an important theme in the horror/chiller fiction of James Herbert over the years, especially in the David Ash trilogy, but even though Pratchett doesn’t over-egg the childhood influence omelette too much, there is a very important section at the beginning of a Discworld book that needs some discussion here. It’s a place where the dreams and nightmares of childhood still reverberate: Hogfather.
‘It’s the night before Hogwatch. And it’s too quiet.’
(Hogfather)
The ‘
oh god of hangovers’, someone coming down the chimney with a sack instead of a scythe, and the immortal words ‘ho, ho, ho’ – it can only be Hogwatch! But is Hogwatch nothing more than a satire of Christmas?
I would be disappointed if that were so, because Hogwatch was mentioned as an aside before the Discworld series. When Pratchett eventually came around to writing a book dedicated to Hogwatch – which to this day reminds me of Dr Seuss’s Grinch – a cornucopia of ideas poured out of the opening few pages, opening Pratchett’s previously locked door of children’s dreams and nightmares. And he starts right at the very beginning, when the Discworld was young and the things that create tradition and history come from something as free form as… well, free form: ‘Things just happen. What the hell.’
History moves forwards and tradition takes on a tangible existence through the repetition of life. So there really is a monster in the cellar and the governess has to grab it and throw it out in order for the child to go back to bed, and that’s exactly what happens. It was all in a day’s work – well, night’s – because the monster would evaporate by dawn.
The magic of Christmas, the mysteries of night, the thin line between a child’s dreams and nightmares – and then the plain reality of life that echoes the best and worst hopes and fears of childhood: Hogwatch. The good, the bad, the ugly of life: Hogfather.
Hogfather was a book that needed to be written. It was the macabre place Pratchett had to go in order to illustrate the realities of growing up, and how the irrational fears of childhood are translated into the harsh realities of adulthood.