At the end of Sourcery, despite the titanic magicks tossed about, everything is restored to what it should be, or at any rate what it generally was, and Coin is gone—but so is Rincewind, who we last see trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions, pursued by Things.
Naturally, he’ll be back in Eric (see Chapter 11), but that’s not for three books yet. First it’s back to Lancre. . . .
7A
Wyrd Sisters (1988)
READERS WERE INTRODUCED to Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites; in Wyrd Sisters we are privileged to meet the other two members of her newly formed coven, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick.
And in many ways, this is the novel where everything really comes together. The plot is intricate but entirely sensible, insofar as anything on the Discworld is sensible. The witches are in fine form. The other characters, from King Verence down to our Shawn, are all people, rather than mere parodies. Death and the Librarian put in their customary appearances in grand style. The Patrician, appearing only in a footnote, finally displays the cunning and efficiency that will be his hallmark hereafter. Leonard of Quirm is mentioned for the first time. Nanny Ogg’s fearsome cat Greebo appears, along with the infamous song, “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All.” And there are no obvious inconsistencies with any of what’s gone before.
The effects of the still-unnamed narrativium are at the heart of everything, and a second important phenomenon that I call “reality leakage” 76 is apparent.
The story begins with Lancre’s King Verence being assassinated by Duke Felmet and his vicious wife. A resemblance to Macbeth is obvious and intentional, though the story takes its own direction right from the start. A band of traveling players is involved; when Felmet wants to strengthen his position as king, he hires them to write and perform a play about how a heroic duke supplants a bad king, only to have three evil witches interfere. The troupe’s playwright is a dwarf77 by the name of Hwel.
Narrativium is evident in the way Hwel’s play refuses to behave itself; it wants the story to be told properly, which is to say, more or less as the Macbeth Shakespeare wrote. The story knows what it ought to be.
And reality leakage—well, it seems that in addition to writing plays suspiciously like Shakespeare’s, Hwel has these dreams that are unmistakably familiar material from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin’s Little Tramp, even if he can’t quite capture the humor in a way the other players appreciate. He also uses bits of story that the discerning reader will recognize as originating in Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and the like.
We already knew, from Rincewind’s brief venture into an alien plane78 in The Colour of Magic, that it was possible for things to move between our world and the Disc. We saw in the account of the Seriph of Al Khali in Sourcery that there were some inexplicable similarities in certain stories and poems. Now, in Wyrd Sisters, it’s made explicit that some residents of the Discworld have somehow tuned in to our reality. They see and hear it in their dreams. The similarities are not mere coincidence, but reality leakage between the two worlds.
This will be developed much further in later novels, but this is where it’s solidly established.
There are other hints of things to come, as well. Hwel mentions a human raised among dwarfs—this would presumably be Carrot Ironfoundersson, whom we’ll meet in Guards! Guards! There is discussion of the nature of kings, which will also be reflected in Carrot’s eventual adventures.
Some of Mr. Pratchett’s strengths really begin to emerge here. In previous novels, his attempts at the frightening have mostly taken the form of long falls, sharp blades, wild magic, and tentacular horrors such as the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, none of which are actually scary to the typical reader. Oh, he may have conjured a few chills in Mort, but after all, that was all about Death. In Wyrd Sisters, on the other hand, he manages a couple of genuinely creepy scenes, notably the final fate of the Duchess.
The depth of characterization also takes a quantum leap here. We care about these people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg and company are wonderful creations. We met Granny before, in Equal Rites, but she’s much more strongly realized here.
This jump in quality may be why Wyrd Sisters was the first of the novels to make the transition to the screen, in six animated half-hour episodes that aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in 1996. It was a fairly faithful adaptation, and generally enjoyable, if not brilliant. The cartoon versions of Granny and Nanny don’t quite live up to their ancestral text, but I quite liked the animated Magrat. The series was released on DVD, but is no longer widely available.
Alas, we won’t see the witches on the page again until Witches Abroad, six(!) novels later. You can skip to Chapter 14 for that. The next one chronologically instead begins what I call the “Gods and Philosophers” series. . . .
9
Pyramids (1989)
THERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY that some Discworld books are one-shots, singletons, stand-alones, not part of any of the several sub-series. They will name Pyramids and Small Gods and The Truth as examples.
Naaah. The Truth as examples.
All of these alleged singletons fall into two categories, so far as I can see—they deal with either religion and philosophy (as in Pyramids and Small Gods) or with the effects of some new technology or other significant sociological change on Ankh-Morpork (as in The Truth). I’ve therefore labeled them as two series: “Gods and Philosophers,” and “Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat.”
The former series is never set primarily in Ankh-Morpork, while the latter is almost entirely in Ankh-Morpork, and on those occasions when the city isn’t the actual setting (as in Moving Pictures), most of the characters are natives of Ankh-Morpork.
That’s reasonable enough; the people of Ankh-Morpork aren’t especially interested in religion and philosophy, but they’re very interested in new technologies that might make them some money.
Pyramids is unrelated to anything that went before, except that it’s set on the Discworld—we’ve seen that happen before, with Equal Rites, when a new series was starting. Being one of the “Gods and Philosophers” series, it’ s mostly set well away from Ankh-Morpork—but not entirely.
One oddity of Pyramids, relative to other Discworld novels, is that it’s divided into four “books”—not chapters as such, but “The Book of Going Forth,” “The Book of the Dead,” “The Book of the New Son,”79 and “The Book of 101 Things a Boy Can Do.”80 These aren’t independent stories making up a larger narrative, like the four sections of The Colour of Magic, but just very long chapters.
Our protagonist, Teppic (or Pteppic, or Teppicymon XXVIII), is the son of the god-king of the ancient river kingdom Djelibeybi.81 When we first meet him, however, Teppic is a student in the Guild of Assassins in Ankh-Morpork, preparing for his final exam.
Gods and Philosophers: The Series
These stories are about the relationships of humans, their gods, and the universe at large, and don’t fit into any of the other series:
Pyramids Chapter 9
Small Gods Chapter 15
The Last Hero Chapter 33
It could be argued that The Thief of Time (Chapter 32) and “Death and What Comes Next” (Chapter 37) should be included as well, but I classified them as part of the Death series instead. Maybe the two series are merging.
For a discussion of the series as a whole, see Chapter 55.
The scenes at the Assassins’ Guild, which take up much of that first book, “The Book of Going Forth,” don’t really have all that terribly much to do with the main plot, but they do give Mr. Pratchett a chance to shamelessly parody Tom Brown’s School Days. Teppic’s chum Arthur is a character swiped directly from Tom Brown, save that where the original was a devout Christian, the Discworld version is a devotee of the Great Orm,82 a rather less kindly deity than the Christian one. It makes the bedtime prayer scene rather more entertaining than the one in Tom Brown.
This
modern education is how Teppic manages to grow up with ideas and attitudes that are rather inappropriate for a pharaoh.
No, I don’t mean a willingness to dispose of political obstacles with blades or poison; that’s perfectly normal for monarchs in most circumstances, though I admit it doesn’t seem the sort of thing one might expect of most current European royalty. I mean an unwillingness to throw himself wholeheartedly into a life of meaningless ritual.
Still, when his father dies, Teppic returns to Djelibeybi to take up the role of god-king, and rather carelessly agrees to entomb his paternal predecessor in the largest pyramid ever built.
The thing is, the Discworld has a very intense magical field, as has been noted many times by now, and that means that pyramids on the Disc really do focus cosmic energy, just as some New Age believers claim they do here. Sharpening razor blades is nothing; they do far more than that.
Most of Djelibeybi’s pyramids harmlessly flare off their excess energy every night, rather like oil refineries flaring off natural gas that’s not worth the trouble of recovering, but the big new one Teppic has inadvertently commissioned—well, things don’t go quite as planned in that regard.
Djelibeybi, as should have been bloody obvious by now, is a parody of ancient Egypt, complete with sacred crocodiles, animal-headed gods, pyramids, mummification, cat worship, god-kings, and the like. The neighboring land of Ephebe, which Teppic will visit, is a parody of Golden Age Greece, well-stocked with philosophers and replete with references to the Discworld version of the Trojan War—or rather, not so much a parody of the actual ancient Athens as of the popular misconceptions thereof.
Yes, it’s definitely parody, and arguably a parody of fantasy, but it’s not the sort of “fantasy” one finds shelved with the science fiction at your local bookstore; instead it’s the fantasy versions of actual history that’s being mocked, what one might call the Hollywood versions of Egypt and Greece—or perhaps the schoolboy version.
And the story winds its way through commentary on tradition, religion, politics, philosophy, business, family, and camels, among other things, before finally reaching a satisfactory conclusion.
There’s a great deal of entertaining nonsense about time and energy, which are grotesquely distorted by the pyramids; once again, I have a suspicion that Mr. Pratchett’s work in the power industry contributed something to the descriptions.
All in all, though, this really doesn’t do much to change the series as a whole. We don’t see the major characters again hereafter, nor do any of the regular Discworld cast appear (except Death, of course). While Ephebe will turn up again, Djelibeybi will never again get more than a brief mention. Pyramids is a lovely novel, but it doesn’t really connect much of anywhere.
Teppic does not return in any later stories—or at any rate, he hasn’t reappeared yet—but we see more of gods and philosophers six books later, in Small Gods—see Chapter 15. The next to be written, though, launched yet another series, one that’s probably the most successful of the bunch. . . .
10
Guards! Guards! (1989)
MANY PEOPLE (which in this case means, as it so often does, “people I agree with, even if it’s really just me and everyone else thinks I’m a loon”) consider the stories of
Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch to be the best, on average, of the various Discworld series, and Guards! Guards! starts the series off well. Our tale opens (after a brief introductory note about dragons)83 with Captain Samuel Vimes lying drunk in a gutter, a practice he’s clearly well-accustomed to.
Vimes, we learn, is the commanding officer of the Night Watch, which consists of himself, Sergeant Colon, and Corporal Nobby Nobbs, and until very recently included someone named Gaskin, whose death is the excuse for Vimes’s latest round of inebriation. These fine—no, skip the adjective—these men are responsible for keeping the peace in Ankh-Morpork.
The book is dedicated to all those faceless guards and watchmen in countless fantasy novels whose basic function is to die pointlessly; this is apparently exactly the sort of watchmen the people of Ankh-Morpork want. This is not what Vimes and company want to be, however.
I’ll have more to say about that when I discuss the series as a whole in Chapter 56.
At any rate, a new Watchman by the name of Carrot84 arrives fairly quickly after Gaskin’s death. These four—Vimes, Colon, Nobby, and Carrot—will remain at the heart of the cast in all the subsequent Watch stories.One might wonder how a staff of four can hope to patrol a city the size of Ankh-Morpork, which is described in this book as having a population of about a million.
Well, obviously, they can’t. No one expects them to. It’s been well established in previous volumes that law enforcement in Ankh-Morpork is largely the responsibility of the Thieves’ Guild, which has an elaborate system of quotas and receipts, and which vigorously (often fatally) discourages freelancers. Once the Patrician had this system in place, the traditional City Watch was allowed to wither away to almost nothing.
A feeling that this system, however effective it may be, just isn’t right is a major reason Captain Vimes is so familiar with finding himself drunk in the gutter.
The Watch: The Series
Samuel Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch are featured in these stories:
Guards! Guards! Chapter 10
“Theatre of Cruelty” Chapter 18
Men at Arms Chapter 19
Feet of Clay Chapter 23
Jingo Chapter 25
The Fifth Elephant Chapter 30
Night Watch Chapter 36
Monstrous Regiment Chapter 39
Thud! Chapter 44
Where’s My Cow? is a spin-off from Thud!, but isn’t a Watch story so much as a gimmick.
At any rate, someone has devised a scheme to take over the city government by conjuring up a dragon, having a handsome young man with a shiny sword dispatch it, and then declaring this fellow to be the rightful heir to the ancient kings of Ankh-Morpork. The mastermind would then become the power behind the throne, guiding the malleable youth.
The plot hits a few snags, however. One is that the Night Watch, under the direction of Vimes, insists on actually investigating what’s going on and treating it as a crime. Another is that the dragon, once conjured, turns out to have some ideas of its own.
This idea of acting out a classic story everyone knows, and turning it to one’s own ends, is the Discworld’s excess of narrativium at work again. The story of the rightful heir returning to save the city from a dragon is so very obviously how things should play out that it takes someone exceptional like Vimes to resist its appeal. The story wants to happen. Everyone expects it to, and knows how it should go.
And then there’s the power of cliché. At one point in the plot, some of our heroes know they’re attempting something very unlikely, and they make a concerted effort to make it even less likely, because as everyone knows, if it’s a million-to-one chance, then it’s just got to work, because it always does in the stories.
If it’s only 999,943 to one, though, it just isn’t gonna happen.
Because this is the Discworld, some of this works. Million-to-one shots do come in. There really is a rightful heir to the ancient kings.
But because Mr. Pratchett is a very clever man, things never work out in the obvious fashion. The heir does not slay the dragon; in fact, the dragon isn’t slain at all, really. It’s dealt with, but not in any of the traditional ways.
What really makes the whole story work, though, is the character of Vimes. This is a man full of rage and despair who sees all too well the sordid realities of his situation, but who refuses to give up. He knows he’s attempting the impossible, that nobody really wants him to succeed, that even if he does succeed it won’t really help, but he refuses to quit, because to do so would be untrue to who and what he is.
He is, as we are told, someone who had the misfortune of being born knurd.
“Knurd” is drunk spelled backward, and it’s the opposite of drunk. Sobrie
ty is merely the absence of drunkenness; knurd is its opposite. Where alcohol can provide a warm glow and pleasant haze that obscures life’s little difficulties, being knurd throws them into sharp focus.
Samuel Vimes was born knurd, and needs two drinks just to get to sober.
This has not made for a pleasant life. Commanding the Watch in a city that doesn’t want a Watch and only has one because no one has gotten around to eliminating it yet doesn’t help. And really caring about his job and his city makes it all even worse.
Everyone knows that a hero needs problems to overcome, but Vimes has more than his share.
Fortunately he has the brains and the sheer tenacity to handle most of them. Mere dragons and Patricians do not intimidate him.
Lady Sybil Ramkin does, but that’s rather different.
There are some things that crop up in this story that aren’t entirely consistent with what’s gone before or what’s to come. For example, Vimes initially doesn’t even remember that Ankh-Morpork ever had a king, while in later books he’s well aware that one of his own ancestors killed the last of those kings.
Just how long ago the last king reigned also seems to be a variable.
It is established in Guards! Guards!, though, that there was a king, and there is a rightful heir, and that that heir is a handsome and upright young man who was raised as a dwarf, but who has a crown-shaped birthmark, an ancient sword, and the other appropriate indicators of his status.
Even his name is a tremendously obscure indication. After all, why would a couple of respectable dwarfs name their child “Carrot”? Why did Mr. Pratchett name his character Carrot? Apparently even he found it unlikely, as it emerges many years later, in Thud!, that Carrot’s dwarfish name actually translates not as Carrot, but as “Head Banger.”
So why is he called Carrot?
Yes, fine, he’s ginger-haired, narrow-hipped, and broad-shouldered, and therefore vaguely carrot-shaped, but is that all?
The Turtle Moves! Page 6
