Tag Archives: Rincewind

Book review

The Last Hero (Discworld 27), by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2001

I haven’t yet worked out why this matters to me, but for some reason it does. If you look up a list of Discworld novels on the internet today it will tell you there are 41, starting with The Colour of Magic and ending with The Shepherd’s Crown. There are many other Discworld books, from guides to the streets of Ankh-Morpork to Nanny Ogg’s recipe book.

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But it was not always thus. The list of Discworld novels used to run Thief of Time (26); Night Watch (27 – now 29), omitting The Last Hero (now 27) and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (now 28), both of which at the time were firmly non-canonical “other” Discworld stories. By ‘the list of Discworld novels’ I am mainly referring to the list as published in each new instalment of the series. I have a first edition of Night Watch for example, which shows this order, and categorised The Amazing Maurice as a Discworld story. I can perfectly understand why, for marketing purposes, Pratchett’s publisher would want to differentiate the novels written for younger readers – essentially the Tiffany Aching books – although I am not convinced that the differences between the younger reader novels and the mainstream Discworld novels are all that significant. Over time this distinction might fade, and they will just be considered part of the golden thread of the series. The Sir Terry website maintained by his publishers lists the Tiffany Aching books both in the main series of novels and in the younger reader section (along with the carpet People, Truckers, Dodger etc) in classic having their cake and eat it fashion.

The only real difference between the Last Hero and (say) Thief of Time i.e. a conventional Discworld novel is that The Last Hero is illustrated. It’s not a comic book – there are no speech bubbles – but there are illustrations on every page, and it was always conceived as such. It could be published without the illustrations as a Discworld novella, but that would be ripping the heart out of the novel (or whatever it is) because the illustrations, by Paul Kidby add significantly to the text. Kidby was at this point (2001) just taking over as the principal Discworld illustrator from Josh Kirby who was to die the year The Last Hero was published.

The plot is a very conventional Discworld adventure. Cohen the Barbarian sets off with his Silver Horde to return fire to the home of the Gods, Cori Celesti. A message is received by Lord Vetenari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, warning him that if their quest succeeds, the world will end. He assembles an unlikely team to stop them –  Leonard of Quirm, Captain Carrot, and the world’s worst wizard, the irrepressible Rincewind, backed up by the wizards of the Unseen University. They travel into space and round/under the world in a contraption invented by Leonard, in scenes that combine multiple references to the Apollo missions with echoes of Jules Verne and Dan Dare thrown in, arriving just in time to save the day, inevitably. It’s great fun, and a wonderfully fresh addition to the series. I thought I had read all the Discworld novels already, but because of the issues I mentioned in the opening of this post (at far too great a length!) I had missed this one. It was a wonderful to discover another chapter in the Discworld story.

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Book review, Discworld, humour, Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

The Colour of Magic (Discworld 1) by Terry Pratchett, 1983

Colour of magic

So this is where it all began. I returned to the original Discworld novel as a change of pace from Dickens and with one question at the front of my mind – would it stand the test of time? How well would it have aged, and how fully formed was Pratchett’s early vision of Discworld? Would the detail and complexity all be there, or would, as I assumed, the detail have developed and accrued over time, book by book? Which is a lot more than one question of course.

Remarkably the Discworld universe is almost completely fully developed in this first portrait. The cosmology or Astrozoology – with the Great A’tuin and his accompanying elephants – is all there, and Pratchett had obviously given a lot of thought to the practicalities of a flat world with its hub and the Rim. Ankh-Morpork is complete in virtually every detail (quote) with the pre-Sam Vimes Watch, the Patrician (not yet identified as Vetenari) and the Thieves and Assassins’ Guilds. The Unseen University with its complex hierarchy of wizards and ArchWizards is there, as is magic as a practical working concept. I really enjoyed the way Pratchett plays with the idea of science being a modern equivalent of magic – not a new idea of course, but one he has fun with, for example when Rincewind is trying to work out how Twoflower’s camera works.

“This is all wrong. When Twoflower said they’d got a better kind of magic in the Empire I thought – I thought…

The imp looked at him expectantly. Rincewind cursed to himself. “Well if you must know, I thought he didn’t mean magic. Not as such”

“What else is there, then?”

Rincewind began to feel really wretched. “I don’t know” he said. “A better way of doing things, I suppose. Something with a bit of sense in it. Harnessing – harnessing the lightening, or something”.

‘The Colour of Magic’ also features two of Pratchett’s most-loved ‘characters’ – Twoflower’s sapient pearwood Luggage, and Death. The Luggage is an indefatigable multi-legged terminator, while Death already speaks in his distinctive capitalised tone, and already has his habit of appearing when least expected, such as here when the landlord of the Broken Drum is trying to set fire to his cellar to claim on his recently agreed inn-sewer-ants polly sea:

“At the top of the cellar steps Broadman knelt down and fumbled in his tinderbox. It turned out to be damp.
‘I’ll kill that bloody cat,’ he muttered, and groped for the spare box that was normally on the ledge by the door. It was missing. Broadman said a bad word. A lighted taper appeared in mid-air, right beside him.
HERE, TAKE THIS.
‘Thanks,’ said Broadman.
DON’T MENTION IT.”

The other thing that struck me, and which may be controversial, is that over time Pratchett became a much better and funnier writer. That’s not to say ‘The Colour of Magic’ isn’t funny – it is – but I think his comic style matured and improved. His love of groanworthy puns is already evident here, but some of the jokes go beyond being bad dad jokes, and are just plain bad, for example:

“My name is immaterial,’ she said.
That’s a pretty name,’ said Rincewind”

There is a thin dividing line between using clever references to other writers and genres, and just being derivative. Pratchett tiptoes close to the line sometimes in this novel, and in particular I have always thought that his debt to Fritz Lieber, author of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series has been acknowledged but never fully appreciated. In later novels there is a lot more Pratchett and far fewer borrowings – references of course, but done in a way in which the original source is acknowledged without being simply reproduced.

Almost lastly, a bit of a moan about this edition. It is the Corgi edition shown above, with the original Josh Kirby illustration (which I always felt were a bit over the top tbh), published this year with a mention of Pratchett’s death in the frontispiece. The blurb includes a quote from the independent calling Pratchett “one of the funniest English authors alive”. Was this just a case of laziness by the publishers not bothering to update their copy, or just a bad joke?

Finally, a quiz question for you, which should be easy given the subject of this blog entry – who are Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen?

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