We proceed from an explanation of how the only place that the Morris92 is danced properly is a village in the Ramtops to the first appearance of the celestial Auditors of Reality, and the vast, cosmic (and cosmically bored) being Azrael, the ultimate keeper of time and death.
The Auditors will be back; Azrael only appears in this one novel. I sometimes find it disconcerting how Mr. Pratchett will introduce a big chunk of cosmology, or a whole family of characters, and then only reuse the bits he finds amusing, without their original context.
At any rate, the Auditors like the universe to be orderly and bland, and have decided that Death—the being that represents death on the Disc, our old friend from lo these eleven novels to date—has become excessively eccentric and must be retired in favor of a new, less individual anthropomorphic personification.
Death is not happy with this decision, but there is no appeal. He is removed from his role.
Remember Windle Poons, the oldest member of the faculty of Unseen University?
Well, perhaps you don’t, if you’re reading this by following one series at a time and you’re only looking at the books about Death at this point, but if you’ve been reading straight through, you really ought to have noticed the mention of him in the discussion of Moving Pictures. If you want to flip back and read it, you can, though you won’t find it very interesting, as all I said was that he’s the oldest member of the faculty and a part of the permanent cast of characters at the University.
I lied about one part of that, though. He’s not exactly permanent. After all, he’s a hundred and thirty years old, and in Reaper Man, he does exactly what you would expect of someone that age—he dies.
Unfortunately, he does so during the period between the forced retirement of the old Death and the arrival of his replacement. No scythe-wielding being appears to usher his spirit into the next world; instead he finds himself hanging around the University, and so he reinhabits his remains, becoming a zombie.
This turns out in many ways to not be what he expected, and much of the plot follows his adventures among the undead. It seems that Death’s absence does not mean that nothing dies, it only means that the spirits of the dead do not depart, and the Discworld begins to experience a serious excess of life-force. Ghosts start complaining of crowding; poltergeist activity reaches heretofore unheard-of levels.
So far, that all makes a certain amount of sense, and is entirely in keeping with what we know of the Discworld, but midway through the book, the story takes a bizarre left turn with the discovery that this excess life-force has triggered the breeding cycle of something that initially appears to be cities, but then turns out to be instead a parasite that preys on cities.93
While that’s happening, the retired Death has taken up an ordinary life as a farmhand named Bill Door—a good man with a scythe, our Bill Door.
So we have two separate but related plots—the story of undead Windle Poons dealing with his new existence and defending Ankh-Morpork and Unseen University from a ferocious predator, and the story of Bill Door learning about life, death, and humanity.
It’s traditional in such cases for the two plots to eventually merge, but these two don’t, really. They remain distinct, to the point of being set in different typefaces. Ah, well; it happens.
At any rate, Bill Door finds his replacement unsatisfactory and takes his old job back, while Poons and company defeat the predatory hive creature, and the plots do sort of merge, after a fashion, when the restored Death belatedly shows up in Ankh-Morpork, but that’s really after everything’s over.
Along the way we have had a great deal of silly fun, and hints of things to come, though we might not have recognized them as such. There are references to the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, who appeared to be a throwaway gag back in 1991, but reappeared ten years later in a book with the curious title The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
They aren’t a throwaway gag in the latter.
We meet Reg Shoe, the militant undead-rights activist zombie; he’ll be back, more than once. As will his landlady, Mrs. Cake—a medium, verging on small—though generally not in as large a role.
The Death of Rats and the Death of Fleas appear for the first time in Reaper Man.
It’s established here that the Discworld has the full panoply of undead available—the story includes not just zombies, but vampires, werewolves (honorary undead), a bogeyman, a banshee, and although no golem appears in propria persona, Reg Shoe reports having known one at some point. (We’ll see lots of golems in Feet of Clay, as described in Chapter 23, and in various places thereafter.)
The first mention of the University’s High Energy Magic building, the only building on campus less than a thousand years old, is made. It will be back in later stories.
We discover that just as New York is the Big Apple, Ankh-Morpork is the Big Wahooni, a wahooni being a Discworld vegetable we’ve seen mentioned now and again.
There are, by the way, direct contradictions of previous events. We are told flat-out that Death has never killed, that he’s only taken life when its user was finished with it—but in The Colour of Magic we saw Death fatally dispose of a nuisance or two.
Furthermore, it’s stated that until the appointment of Mustrum Ridcully, the average term in office of an Archchancellor of Unseen University was eleven months, and that Unseen University has existed for thousands of years, which would mean thousands of Archchancellors, but we were told back in The Light Fantastic that Galder Weatherwax was only (“only,” he says; ha!) the 304th Chancellor of Unseen University.
It really does seem as if those first two volumes weren’t actually part of the series at all, but a sort of warm-up, a trial period. The inconsistencies keep piling up.
At any rate, by Reaper Man the series very definitely is a series, with cross-references and in-jokes and foreshadowings of stories to come. Not only do perennials like the Librarian and the Patrician have their usual roles, but Sergeant Colon makes a couple of brief appearances. Everything’s becoming consistent.
Sort of.
We’ve come a long way from parodies of Fritz Leiber and Anne McCaffrey. Instead we have parodies of self-help groups and shopping malls and weekend warriors and spiritualists and any number of other real-world phenomena. How much of this is reality leakage, Discworld as “world and mirror of worlds,”94 and how much is just human nature, 94 is hard to say.
At any rate, Reaper Man is a good one, and we’ll have more about Death five volumes later in Soul Music, as seen in Chapter 20, but first we return to Mistress Esmerelda Weatherwax and her covenmates.
14
Witches Abroad (1991)
THIS IS ANOTHER TALE of the witches of Lancre, but before we get back to Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, we get a little lecture (as we so often do) on the nature of the Discworld, including a mention that “. . . the Discworld exists right on the edge of reality. The least little things can break through to the other side.”
Reality leakage.
And narrativium—except here we’re told, “This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.”
Or, “. . . if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.”
Narrativium is presumably the element these parasitic stories are based on, just as we are based on carbon (well, me and my family and everyone I know; I don’t know who you are, reading this, and for all I know you’re a blob of ionized gas from somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy that found this book in ancient ruins somewhere).
You know, Mr. Pratchett is rather fond of parasitical life forms—previously he’s described ideas as parasites, here it’s stories, in Reaper Man we saw a parasite that preyed on cities, and in later volumes we’ll see parasitic elves and parasitic vampires. It’s clearly an idea that
resonates with him.
At any rate, the story does eventually get started, and Desiderata Hollow dies, leaving her duties as someone’s fairy godmother to Magrat Garlick, who we discover has not yet married King Verence as it appeared she would at the end of Wyrd Sisters.
Desiderata, it seems, opposed the schemes of someone named Lilith, who is using mirror magic to encourage stories. Which we have just been told are parasitic. This is clearly a bad thing.
So Magrat sets out for the distant and wondrous city of Genua, accompanied by Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, and after many amusing adventures they arrive there and deal with Lilith Tempscire.95
Genua, despite its Italianate name and instances in later books where Italian is the language spoken there, is remarkably like New Orleans in a good many ways, and is generously supplied with voodoo women, swamps, alligators, Carnival, and the like. Fittingly, our three witches get there partly by riding a grand paddle-wheel-driven riverboat, complete with crooked gamblers.
Various things appear along the way that we’ll be seeing again in later volumes—dwarf bread, to name one, and Casanunda, the dwarf seducer and the Discworld’s second-greatest lover,96 for another. Something we probably won’t see again is a cameo appearance by what appears very much to be Gollum—it would seem that bits can leak over from lots of different realities, not just our own. There are obvious references to Oz, too, though we are by no means back in the parodic territory mined by The Colour of Magic; these little details are more in the nature of brief and loving tributes than parodies.
We learn a great deal more about Gytha Ogg,97 who comes across here as the absolute quintessence of the crass English matriarch. Esme Weatherwax, previously established as a determined and powerful witch with very strong opinions as to what’s proper, is shown here as downright indomitable and on her way to becoming a force of nature.
Magrat Garlick is depicted as something of a wet hen, and even though she’s nominally the fairy godmother, the other two have far more to do in the course of the story.
Lilith, by the way, is working not with just one story, but several twined together, with Cinderella at the core.
Although it’s hard to explain exactly why, I would point to this novel as the one where the Discworld series really attains its mature form. It developed plots back around Mort, and various elements fell into place thereafter, but this is where it all really begins working together smoothly. The story is complete and consistent and entirely within the Discworld milieu, while still having obvious reference to the real world and offering insights into human nature. Narrativium is not yet named, but the story is built around it. Where The Colour of Magic was about other stories, Witches Abroad is about the concept of story itself. It’s not about the content of stories, but about how stories are used. There are stories within stories, stories about stories, stories played out and stories defeated, from the stories that Lilith uses to control Genua to the stories Nanny Ogg writes home to her son Jason, from the role Granny acts out with the riverboat gamblers to the role Ella rejects. The stories are mirrors, and the mirrors both reflect and shape reality.
Damn, I wish I could construct a story like that!
The Discworld series is all about stories, as I’ve said before, but this novel is where it becomes obvious and explicit.
And we’ll be seeing more of the witches very soon, in Lords and Ladies, as seen in Chapter 17, but first there’s another dose of Gods and Philosophers.
15
Small Gods (1992)
OMNIA IS A THEOCRACY ruled by the priests of the Great God Om, where Brutha is a novice who helps tend the gardens in the Citadel of the ruling priesthood. There are a few odd things about Brutha, though: He has an absolutely perfect memory, he never dreams, and he really, truly believes in Om.
This last, it turns out, is very unusual indeed. Most Omnians believe in the Church, in rules, in order, in Omnia, but not in the god himself; he just isn’t very relevant. His Church has everything so firmly controlled that there’s no call for divine intervention. (Later we’ll see a similar but less extreme situation regarding the god Nuggan in Monstrous Regiment.)
Gods in Discworld need belief; it’s their source of power. Om is therefore not quite the great and powerful god he used to be.
He is, in fact, a one-eyed tortoise, and his once-mighty lightnings are reduced to sparks that can barely singe a heretic’s hair. He took that shape a few years back, and didn’t have the strength to get out of it again. Finding a true believer in Brutha, though, has given him renewed hope.
And hearing his god talk to him has disturbed Brutha’s placid existence, getting him caught up in the preparations for war between Omnia and Ephebe.
Ephebe, you will recall, is the land of philosophers we saw in Pyramids. It’s basically a parody of ancient Athens. Here we get a much more extensive look at it, largely to contrast its rather easy-going ways and general flexibility with the rigid authoritarianism of Omnia.
Actually, as I said in Chapter 9, it’s not a parody of ancient Athens; it’s a parody of the popular conception of ancient Athens. Discworld is all about stories, not history, and about beliefs, not facts. Ephebe is a collection of all the stories told about ancient Athens, cranked up to the absurd—elected tyrants, labyrinths, philosophers arguing about tortoises, and leaping naked from the bath shouting “Eureka!”
Ancient Athens is often depicted in stories as a bastion of freedom in contrast to the military dictatorship of Sparta, or sometimes in contrast to the Oriental despotism of the Persian Empire, so it would be nice to be able to say that Omnia is standing in for Sparta or Persia, but alas, that doesn’t work. Neither of those states was as theocratic, nor as fond of torture and as abhorrent of heresy, as Omnia; it just doesn’t match either model even loosely enough for a Discworld parody. No, Omnia is more general than that, a depiction of a land where the need for certainty, for clarity, for rules and order, has superceded everything else, including evidence and sanity. The willingness of the Ephebians to say that they don’t know, that they could be wrong, that circumstances might change, disgusts and horrifies the Omnians, who don’t tolerate doubt.
The name “Omnia” obviously means “land of Om,” but it’s surely not a coincidence that it’s also Latin for “everything.” The Omnians want to control everything. They say they act in the name of their god, but it’s clear that they want control for the sake of control, not for the sake of Om.
They want to be gods themselves, in a way—able to control everything around them. While the actual small gods do appear in the story, the title can also be taken to apply to the Omnian priests. They’re determined to make reality conform to their beliefs, rather than adjusting their beliefs to conform to reality.
The Omnian church is a satire on every religion gone wrong, every church that’s become obsessed with its own power and glory rather than the god it allegedly serves. You could draw parallels to the medieval church, the Spanish Inquisition, the Islamic theocrats—it’s a bit depressing, actually, just how many real-world faiths match up.
Small Gods is one of the most focused of all the Discworld novels, with very few of the digressions and side-plots that usually complicate matters and provide much of the amusement. Brutha and Om are only rarely offstage for even a page or two, and when they are it’s because some essential bit of plot is playing out.
Still, the novel manages to bring in the Librarian for a cameo, Death has a few scenes, and it does introduce us to the History Monks, the absurdly long-lived caretakers of the proper course of events. One of them, Lu-Tze, is sent to observe events in Omnia, and intervenes at a crucial point.
We’ll see those fellows again, in time.
There’s also the introduction of Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah. Previously, when discussing Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Mr. Pratchett told us that such people can be found everywhere; well, he’s demonstrating the truth of this assertion by showing us Dhblah, the Omnian equivalent and probable distant relative of
Dibbler.
Small Gods is also the source of my title. One doctrine of the Omnian church is that they live on a globe, and this talk of a disc-shaped world supported by elephants atop a gigantic turtle is nonsense—heretical, blasphemous nonsense that can get you executed.
The Omnians who dare to rebel against the church hierarchy take part of their inspiration from stories about people who have seen the edge of the world that the church says doesn’t exist; they believe that the Disc does rest on Great A’tuin’s back, as described by travelers and in an Ephebian book entitled De Chelonian Mobile—“The Turtle Moves.”
The rebels adopt that as their slogan and rallying cry. After all, if the church is demonstrably wrong about a basic fact like that, how can anything they teach be trusted?
This is clearly based on the famous report that after Galileo had formally renounced his heretical view that the Earth moves around the sun, he muttered, “E pur si muove”—“And yet it moves.” The Omnian church is more drastic than the Catholic church of Galileo’s time, but the similarities are obvious—as I said, lots of real-world religions match up with it.
And the rebels, like Galileo, may pay lip service to the Omnian faith in public, but among themselves they remind one another, “The Turtle moves!” As John Morley said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” The truth will out in time. When the stories people live by become too far distanced from reality, they break down. Regardless of what anyone may teach, regardless of what anyone may want, the Disc does rest atop four elephants, who are standing on Great A’tuin’s back.
And the Turtle moves!
If you think about it, it doesn’t really matter to your ordinary Omnian in the street that the Turtle moves, but it’s a short, catchy phrase that sums up the extent of the church’s lies. It works.
The Turtle Moves! Page 8
