Returning to Discworld

Growing up, one of my favourite writers was Terry Pratchett. My brother, who is two years older than me, read the books before I did, and for a while I was intimidated by the extremely weird cover art: surreal, colourful, densely populated with strange-bodied figures, eyes more often than not bulging, bursting from an overcrowded landscape whose inspiration the artist, Josh Kirby, has accredited to Hieronymus Bosch. The books looked, in a word, freaky. But my brother accrued more and more of them, and they were collected on the bookcase that stood on the wall next to both our bedrooms, and eventually my curiosity overcame my fear. I set aside the more palatable Redwall books (nice woodland creatures, living in an abbey, fighting evil woodland creatures) and ventured into Discworld.

Discworld is Pratchett’s fantastical creation, the setting for this vast series of novels, of which there are more than forty and which he wrote and published over the course of three decades. Discworld is a flat, circulate planet that rests on the backs of four elephants, perched on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. Because, in Discworld, reality is stretched thin and is prone to tearing, belief is a governing principle that trumps even physics: gods exist but only if enough people believe in them. They start life as small spirits, borne into existence as a consequence of imagination, and as more people believe in them, they begin to grow, their existence still always contingent on people’s willingness to continue believing in them.

Of Pratchett’s vast array of characters, Death is perhaps the most iconic: a robe-wearing skeleton who speaks only in capitals, and who suffers persistent social rejection because — as he only ever appears to announce a character’s imminent death —nobody is ever pleased to see him. He loves a curry, and has a granddaughter called Susan.

Last year, I reread some of Pratchett’s novels, and I was struck by how insistently Pratchett restores humanity to characters who are defeated in their own attempts to be understood, to identify themselves beyond the multiple and very restrictive categories prescribed by the fantasy genre. In Ankh-Morpork, Captain Carrot, a six-foot-six dwarf (he is raised by dwarfs, and will not conceive of himself as anything other), so-named because he is shaped like a carrot, falls in love with a werewolf who, rebelling against the culturally prescribed violence of her upbringing, has fled her pack and found work with the city’s Night Watch through their latest diversity initiative (the Watch has a reputation for being too homogenous: there are not enough supernatural beings). Magrat Garlick, junior witch and beleaguered apprentice of Granny Weatherwax, determined not to repeat the spelling error on her own birth certificate, inadvertently names her own daughter Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling of Lancre. There is Rincewind the Wizzard, an Unseen University dropout, eschewed by his more magically gifted peers, and who cannot spell wizard.

Misnamed, misidentified, these characters fall outside or short of the narrow categories in which they have been placed. Discworld delights in errors of both identification and communication, even the word “pun” is consistently misspelt and is always accompanied by its formal definition: “a pune, or a play on words.” The endeavour is not to resolve such errors, or to resolve these characters into their given categories, nor even to alleviate the suffering that results from such misidentifications. For the most part, his characters are left striving, and this is what makes them so incredibly delightful.

Revisiting Pratchett many years later, as a full-grown adult with a full-grown brain, I am really very glad that I read him as a child, that his books stayed right there on the shelf outside my room until I was too curious not to read them. I was lucky that my house was filled with books, that it was normal to read, that I was encouraged to read and that I enjoyed it. Access, habit, and encouragement are really the most important variables in developing any passion or skill and I do not take these variables for granted: studying literature, fantasy became a somewhat siloed genre that was less important than, for example, the eighteenth century novel or lyrical poetry. But, as Death reminds us (and Susan), HUMANS NEED FANTASY IN ORDER TO BE HUMAN. We need heroes and monsters, certainly, but we also need weird things — we need humour, we need absurdity, we need things that are unknown and unknowable so that we can recognise the limitations of what we do know.

I was lucky to read Terry Pratchett as a child. But he is one of those particularly special writers whose books you can begin at really any age, and reading him, it is impossible not to emerge with a more humorous and more expansive and imaginative view of the world, in which monsters might not be so frightening as you think and heroes infinitely more flawed, in which everybody and everything is a work in progress, in which what is much more interesting than progressing is being unfinished.