by Craig Cabell
One could say that Pratchett pushed the boundaries of the fantasy genre as much as Milligan did the comedy genre, and by using nothing more than imagination without constraint. They (Milligan and Pratchett) didn’t listen to the words of convention; they made the whole thing up as they went along and found a loyal audience following their multicoloured inventions.
‘We played “Highland Laddie”; at once the floor became a mass of leaping twits all yelling “Och! Aye!”
This is where the fight started.’
Spike Milligan (Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall)
At his most inventive, Pratchett has an element of Milligan about him. The Nac Mac Feegle (The Wee Free Men) of the Tiffany Aching novels are a good example, and indeed Pratchett considers these books some of his very best in the Discworld series.
Great artists don’t always get it right, but when they do it’s nothing short of magical. Going back to the rock ‘n’ roll comparison, the same can be said of David Bowie. When he is on form, music such as ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Heroes’ is created; when he is poor, however, all sorts of nonsense like ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and ‘Beat of the Drum’ surfaces. But you learn to take the rough with the smooth: the downside is made up for by the thrill of the upside. The same could be said about one-time snooker genius Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins: one moment a near-impossible shot is achieved, the next complete meltdown.
So has Terry Pratchett released some bad books? Not necessarily, but like most writers he sometimes hasn’t given his best, for whatever reason. Personally I don’t rate The Dark Side of the Sun, but it was important for Pratchett to get science fiction out of his system. I’m also not a fan of The Carpet People – especially the new version (more about that later) – and the Night Watch are not my favourite characters either (although they are for a lot of people), but when somebody has released such a large body of work, different people have their own favourites. Fans rarely come in at the beginning of an author’s career, and often the book that introduces them to a writer becomes their favourite. For Pratchett fans that can be books as diverse as Johnny and the Bomb, The Wee Free Men and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents rather than The Colour of Magic, Mort or Eric (more about those later too).
I believe that Pratchett knew where he would set the next novel after Strata – a discworld, even if he didn’t know what it would be about. The evidence is in the timeline. In 1971 he released his first novel, in 1976 his next, then in 1981 his third – and in 1983 his fourth. The gap between the third and fourth books is very short. Couple that with the introduction of a discworld – not necessarily the discworld in Strata – and we witness a clear way forwards; you can detect the Eureka in the text. Hindsight is a marvellous thing, and being familiar with the Discworld books and then reading Strata provides the thrill of discovery.
One last point about Strata and its discworld: it is a machine, and like any all-powerful machine it is potentially dangerous. ‘It looks like an explosion in a power station,’ one character declares of the interior of the disc. Repairing the chaos is then considered, but it appears to be a forlorn hope as the disc-makers are long since dead. Then we have the most important line: ‘“Memes are – ideas, attitudes, concepts, techniques,” said Kin. “Mental genes. Trouble is, all the memes likely to develop on the disc are host-destructive…”’ We witness the great machine controlling the world and I cannot put out of my mind the thought that Pratchett was effectively working for the nuclear industry at the time. Chernobyl and the Japanese earthquake were still in the future, but Pratchett had seen and heard much he clearly didn’t like in his new job, but he would have to stick with it for a few more years yet.
So writing the books suddenly became a therapy. And after – or rather during – Strata, the Discworld was created and his next book would be The Colour of Magic.
‘Moon Watcher came face to face with the New Rock when he led the tribe down to the river in the first light of morning… It was a rectangular slab, three times his height… it was not easy to see except when the rising sun glinted on its edges.’
Arthur C Clarke (2001 – A Space Odyssey)
Part Two
A Fantasy World
‘There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things.’
Charles Dickens (‘A Child’s Dream of a Star’)
CHAPTER FOUR
The Colour of Magic
‘Being Ymor’s right-hand man was like being gently flogged to death with scented bootlaces.’
(The Colour of Magic)
Scientist Stephen Hawking started his book A Brief History of Time with an anecdote reputedly from the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who in a lecture once described how Earth orbited around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbited around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady got up and argued that what he had just said was a load of rubbish and that the world was really flat and supported on the back of a giant tortoise – in fact the tortoise was supported by many other tortoises all the way down to who knows where.
‘Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going?’ Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
Pratchett’s fourth novel, The Colour of Magic, would set the pace for the next 30 years. It changed the direction of the writer’s work, the prologue shaping a brand new Narnia. The idea that a flat – disc – world could be carried on the backs of four giant elephants, which were in turn on the back of a giant interstellar turtle (not a tortoise), took a different planet out of the comfort zone of science fiction and placed it firmly in the Fantasy genre with a large capital F.
Pratchett mixed the mediaeval western assumption that the world was flat with the ancient Hindu mythology that elephants and great turtles carried the world on their backs. He gave the characters names: the turtle, Great A’Tuin, the elephants, Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen. But Pratchett didn’t dwell on these mystical creatures in his novel. Apart from the two main characters, Rincewind and Twoflower (and Twoflower’s Luggage made of sapient pearwood), he didn’t dwell on anyone or anything too much. This is highlighted by the use of the gods that live above the world and play games with the characters who reside beneath. Although they emulate Zeus and his fellow gods in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the gods have very little place or importance in the novel. They’re just there to add to the madness.
The Discworld is an enchanted land. It has gods who play with the beings below them, it has wizards and witches, barbarians and dragons, but it also has the ability to laugh at itself. The fact that Pratchett calls a passing character Blind Hugh (so close to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Blind Pew from Treasure Island) is enough to tell the reader that the author isn’t taking himself too seriously. The book moves at pace through imaginative scenes with a multitude of characters whose blink-and-you-miss-them presence gives the reader a real appetite to know more. There is very little plot, as imagination is the driving force, not unlike Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Indeed, Pratchett calls The Colour of Magic a road movie before roads were invented, which means The Pickwick Papers was a road movie as soon as commercial transport was invented.
Pratchett has said that he didn’t really know what he was doing at the time of conceiving and writing The Colour of Magic but he admits that he wrote it for himself, i.e. for somebody who had been reared on the fantasy genre.* The Discworld novels are multilayered and evocative, and that’s why they have endured over 40 novels in nearly 30 years. Like The Lord of the Rings, Discworld has created its own history, laws and legends, adding colour and light into what was a fading genre, which now, partly to Pratchett’s credit and influence (and partly thanks to JK Rowling), is on the rise again.
Pratchett ha
s said that The Colour of Magic was written in protest against the fantasy boom of the 1970s where people were influenced by a whole host of writers who were inevitably influenced by JRR Tolkien. The Silmarillion was published in the late 1970s and Tolkien’s presence is a heavy one, but I do think this is posthumous analysis, as Pratchett has admitted that he didn’t know what he was doing at the time!
I do challenge Pratchett’s belief that he didn’t know what he was doing. Strata became Discworld and Pratchett must have known what direction he was going to move into.
Pratchett considered the fantasy genre dead in the early 1980s. He thought it lacked imagination – the very thing that should fuel it – and that it was just regurgitating tried and proven scenarios. This was showcased very prominently in the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic. Within that book there is a very old character called Cohen the Barbarian, a send-up of an aged Conan the Barbarian from Robert E Howard’s classic tales. The swordswoman Herrena reflects on the drawbacks of her career: men not taking her seriously until she has killed them and the heartache of the clichéd leather straps she wore that brought her out in a rash. Pratchett says that all the female barbarians are scantily clad in leather in fantasy novels, and of course he’s right, demonstrating much laziness by fellow writers.
This is where we begin to understand more about The Colour of Magic. It was written after many years of avid reading of fantasy novels, of knowing that wizards were more powerful than witches – sexism is prevalent in fantasy – and everyone wearing the clothes of cliché. This is something Pratchett mentions at the end of The Wee Free Men, where the heroine has to allow a boy to take the credit for all the good she does in saving him and her baby brother from the Queen of Fairyland. In The Colour of Magic, Pratchett decided to tear down the clichés of fantasy and have as a hero a wizard who would be surprised if the magic he harboured actually worked. In too many fantasy novels a wizard would stretch out his fingers and somebody would be blown to bits, with the exception of Gandalf, whose powers are largely hidden in The Lord of the Rings.
Also, with the Discworld novels Pratchett decided to take chances with a genre that had gone stale and to mock it from the inside. What other writer, for example, would put a condom factory in his make-believe world? Not Tolkien or Lewis for sure – that would be well outside their comfort zone – but Pratchett hardly bats an eyelid when doing so later in the Discworld series.
It is all well and good to satirise a genre within an adventure, but there has to be something new to offer as well. For Pratchett and The Colour of Magic that was the colour of magic itself. Part of the real innovation of the book was the eighth colour of the Rimbow, octarine, which is caused ‘by the scatter-effect of strong sunlight on an intense magical field’. Pratchett uses the colour to name a book, The Octarine Fairy Book, paying homage to Andrew Lang’s series of coloured Fairy Books (see Further Reading).
So what does Pratchett say of The Colour of Magic? He says it is a fun book and the whole series has grown out of that steady foundation. But what made it a milestone in Pratchett’s canon? What inspired another 40-odd books? Where did it come from? We have seen that the idea was a natural progression from his previous three novels; now let us understand a little about the story.
When we first meet Rincewind, ‘a gutter wizard’ who doesn’t believe in his own magical powers, he is under the influence of a fear-quenching drug. His laid-back attitude when confronted by two robbers is offhand, even though he admits to being terrified. It is this lack of concern about impending danger that reminds the reader of Zaphod Beeblebrox from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who had special glasses that went black when danger approached. Rincewind’s drug has the same useless power, heightening his fear threshold to a useless level.
The absurd/sublime humour of Pratchett is not dissimilar to that of Adams. Indeed, both authors were writing their respective series of books at the same time, and one could justifiably sum up the humour of the day – the early 1980s – with these two different works. That humour was also present in BBC TVs Doctor Who at that time, especially in leading actor Tom Baker, as Adams was the scriptwriter of the show in the early 1980s.
Where The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a tour guide in Ford Prefect, The Colour of Magic has a tourist called Twoflower. Like millions of real-life tourists the world over, Twoflower is always losing his luggage, but unlike real-life tourists, his luggage sprouts legs and follows him wherever he goes.
There is also something endearing about Twoflower. He is oblivious to the danger around him because he believes that, as a tourist, nothing can really hurt him. This is always the catalyst for chaos. Rincewind, who finds himself stuck with the irritating fellow, is exasperated by him but fails to see that he is as much to blame. In this respect Rincewind and Twoflower are not unlike Laurel and Hardy, trapped in the chaos of their own innocence. Indeed, Pratchett pays tribute to the comic geniuses when Rincewind coins one of Oliver Hardy’s most famous lines: ‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got me into.’
Pratchett says of his characters: ‘Twoflower was a joke. The archetypal tourist… And Rincewind is there to protect him. Rincewind’s tragedy is he thinks magic shouldn’t work.’
‘Rincewind… was expecting to boldly go where no man – other than the occasional luckless sailor, who didn’t really count – had boldly gone before…’
(The Colour of Magic)
Pratchett plays with cult one-liners. Some the audience will pick up on, others they won’t. At the end of The Wee Free Men, a witch says ‘Come sisters, we must away,’ whereupon she is chastised for coming out with such ‘theatre talk’. As there are three witches, one instantly thinks of the Scottish play in Shakespeare’s canon. The point is: all of these comparisons and one-liners are there if you want them. If you simply wish to have a technicolour fantasy adventure story, you’ve got that too, but parody is never far from Pratchett’s heart.
Let us now move on a little and look at the geography of Discworld. Early in The Colour of Magic we see the Ankh River that transports ships to the city of Ankh-Morpork. The river is known to burst its banks on occasion, so there we have a comparison with, or rather a suggestion of, Egypt and the Nile River, without any additional reason than a visual image and perhaps the Ankh symbol so often associated with Egypt and the pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Discworld is an intriguing blend of various scenes from times past. There is the Egyptian theme with its multitude of gods. There is the first description of Ankh-Morpork, which is akin to a Chicago-style gangsters’ den straight out of the 1930s. And then there is the brawl Rincewind witnesses when first visiting a bar (Wild West maybe?), where he is nearly hit by a flying axe resembling a partridge (suddenly ancient Viking battles seem to be the order of the day). Ankh-Morpork is a blend of different histories that shape-shift from house to house. Perhaps it is this never-ending line of images that has fed Pratchett’s imagination and constantly beckoned him to return to the series, but that is the kind of thing great fantasies are made of. The Discworld is whatever its creator wants it to be. It can be highly moral, judgemental and socially aware, or just plain fantasy, and it is this unpredictability – along with its humour – that has kept the series fresh and engaging.
Readers all over the world identify with Ankh-Morpork. ‘It’s probably my greatest success in The Colour of Magic,’ Pratchett says, and he’s probably right. Readers believe that it is based on Venice, Prague, New York, London… the list goes on – wherever they live, Ankh-Morpork is their home. It’s vibrant from the off, original in its ability to be unoriginal. It vindicates Pratchett’s whimsical aside that The Colour of Magic was intended to do as much for the fantasy genre as Blazing Saddles did for the Western: it pokes fun at its genre and teases the reader too, moving too quickly to make any bold or lasting statement.
The Colour of Magic is similarly a fast-paced novel, and because of that one could say that it is a chase novel or high adventure n
ovel. Throughout the book Death rears his head, talking in CAPITAL LETTERS without speech marks. ‘I introduced Death for a gag,’ Pratchett says, ‘where people flee to escape death. But of course no one can and he expected to meet you there [wherever you are] anyway.’The latter part of the quote is quite right, but I do disagree with the former part, because Death had already been introduced with a very short cameo role in Strata. But the point is that life and death are two intriguing concepts in Pratchett’s novels, and thus a strong part of the force that makes him want to keep writing.
At the beginning of the Discworld series, Rincewind was the perfect character through which Pratchett could explore some of the antics of Death. Because Rincewind is a wizard, he is entitled to have Death present at his own death; Death keeps turning up but Rincewind still keeps escaping the great inevitable. In fact, as Rincewind declares, he’s seen his life flash in front of his eyes so often he now falls asleep during the boring bits. But as with everyone, death – or Death – catches up with him eventually, but not in The Colour of Magic.
‘… the Discworld has only one possible saviour. Unfortunately, this happens to be the singularly inept and cowardly wizard called Rincewind, who was last seen falling off the edge of the world…’
(Jacket blurb, The Light Fantastic)
There are books about the science of Discworld but what is interesting is the correlation between science and magic. Back in the 1970s there was a popular TV programme for children entitled Catweazle. The show was based around a magician from the Middle Ages who is propelled into the 1970s and is amazed by the magic all around him. The telephone is ‘the telling-bone’, electricity is ‘elec-trickery’, and this sums up Pratchett’s views on science and magic. In conversation he recalls GK Chesterton, who said in one of his essays that a streetlight is more interesting than magic. By this he meant that the process that went into making the light bulb – monkeys into humans, tungsten inside a glass bulb – or the chain of events that made it is ‘more wildly magical than the concept of magic’ and he’s probably right.
