Tag Archives: Witches

Book review

Carpe Jugulum (Discworld 23) by Terry Pratchett, 1998

We have, it has to be admitted, been here before. Lancre, to be specific, the mountain home of Terry Pratchett’s wonderful witches, the awesome Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat Garlick, and Agnes Nitt. (And yes, that’s four witches, which is one too many, and a bit of a problem). Magrat, recently married to King Verence, has had a daughter, and people from far and wide have been invited to the christening. Unfortunately for all concerned, in an attempt to be progressive Verence has invited guests from Uberwald, a neighbouring kingdom inhabited by vampires. The vampires, once invited into the castle, begin to take over and snack on the locals. The witches are not standing for this of course, and battle begins.

Carpe Jugulum - Discworld Novels (Paperback)

If you have been paying attention, and why would you, bells will start ringing at this point. Isn’t this pretty much exactly the plot of Lords and Ladies (Discworld 14) published some six years earlier? Superficially charming but sinister and other-worldly villains are accidentally invited into Lancre, take over, and battle with the witches? Pretty much.

The good news is that all this doesn’t matter in the slightest. Shakespeare recycled plots freely and unapologetically, so why couldn’t Sir Terry? Any time spent with the profound moral philosopher that is Granny Weatherwax, Pratchett’s finest creation, is time well spent, even if we have been here before. And this is a very brave book – not many fantasy writers would go to the dark places that Granny visits when she is called out to a difficult home birth, and is faced with the choice of saving the mother’s life or the child’s. When Mrs Patternoster, the local midwife, suggests the choice of who to save should have been offered to the husband/father, Granny replies:

You don’t like him? You think he’s a bad man? ,,,Then what’s he done to me, that I should hurt him so?”

Granny takes the pain of the decision, both literally and psychologically, on her own shoulders, so that others might not have to. This is such a shockingly brave and moving scene, showing how hard and sometimes lonely the lives of the witches are.

Another fresh feature to this story is the character of Mightily Oats. or more specifically the Quite Reverend Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oats, an Omnian missionary priest called in to officiate at Magrat and Verence’s daughter’s naming ceremony in the absence of the local priest who has been injured in a fall from a donkey. Oats is one of the ordinary-man characters Pratchett writes so well. He is devout in his faith in Om, but questions some of the teachings of his schismatic church. He is determined to do the right thing, even confronting vampires, when his every instinct is to run away. This is Mightily’s coming of age story. He starts the novel as a callow, frightened priest amongst the heathen folk of Lancre, particularly (and rightly) scared of the local witches. By the end of the novel he has earned their grudging respect, and slowly come to terms with his religion.

“Even when he was small there’d been a part of him that thought the temple was a silly boring place, and tried to make him laugh when he was supposed to be listening to sermons. It had grown up with him. It was the Oats that read avidly and always remembered those passages which cast doubt on the literal truth of the Book of Om—and nudged him and said, if this isn’t true, what can you believe?

And the other half of him would say: there must be other kinds of truth.

And he’d reply: other kinds than the kind that is actually true, you mean?

And he’d say: define actually!”

Carpe Jugulum also features the first appearance of the wonderful wee free men, the Nac Mac Feegle. The Feegles are a force of nature, and another fantastic addition to the Discworld universe, who of course were to go on and feature in their own series of novels. Scrivens!

Carpe Jugulum also features an Igor. I am not sure if this is the first appearance of Igor’s in Discworld (I think it might be) who is the servant of the invading vampires, and a part-time plastic surgeon of considerable skill. He is a traditionalist who spends his spare time breeding spiders, making sure the doors creak eerily, and generally trying to keep the old ways alive. Igor’s ancestral home is Dontgonearthe Castle, which tells you as much as you need to know about some of Pratchett’s jokes.

By now Discworld is a richly featured landscape full of much-loved characters with extensive backstories. This makes immersing yourself into a novel like Carpe Jugulum a wonderfully comforting and entertaining experience.

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Book review

Maskerade (Discworld 18) by Terry Pratchett, 1995

Regular readers of this blog (should there are any) will notice a pattern emerging in which I alternate between a classic/serious novel and the next book in the Discworld series. Today is a Discworld day, more specifically the wonderful Maskerade. And the good news is that this is one of the best, featuring the extraordinary witches of Lancre.Mask

The plot is a simple parody of the Phantom of the Opera. Agnes Nitt, destined to become a country witch leaves sleepy Lancre to seek fame and fortune at the Ankh-Morpork opera house. (It is perhaps surprising that a city as violent and lawless as Ankh-Morpork has its own opera house, but Discworld is anything but predictable). At the same time the wonderful Granny Weatherwax finds out that the equally wonderful Nanny Ogg has written a popular cookbook – but has not received any royalties from the publisher. They set out for Ankh-Morpork on a mission to collect what Nanny is owed, with an understanding that they will probably pop in and visit Agnes along the way, and if she agrees to join their coven in a firmly junior position that would all work out fine as well (“You needed at least three witches for a coven. Two witches was just an argument.”). There is nothing as definite as a plan here. 

The stage is set for what is a surprisingly tightly written mystery story – although I had read the book before I couldn’t easily work out whodunnit – as well as a wonderfully comic novel. While Pratchett always has a serious point in the back of his mind, here the seriousness never gets in the way of the fun – for example the scene where the senior witches stay in Madame Palm’s house for ladies of negotiable affection, and manage somehow to make it even more disreputable, is glorious!

Maskerade is fantastic. It features two of my favourite characters in the whole of fiction, Nanny Ogg here finally stepping out from the shadow of Esme Weatherwax with her own special brand of magic (in essence, being nice and talking to people), and of course Esme herself. The witches have been on a road trip before, (Witches Abroad) but here they can play uninhibitedly in Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett clearly had a huge amount of affection for these characters – they are immensely endearing and believable. (Re-reading what I have written there I can’t help notice the abundance of superlatives, but it’s a fair reflection of how I feel about the novel.)

Nanny Ogg is a complete nihilist –  her philosophy of life is summarised as “do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible.” She gets some great lines, such as:

“Can you identify yourself?
-Certainly. I’d know me anywhere.”
Is it me or is there a hint of the Marx brothers in that joke? This is after all a night at the opera?
There is no reverence whatsoever for the seriousness of the setting:
Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,”
said Nanny, who also had the true witch’s ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever.
“There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh I am dyin’, oh oh oh, that’s what I’m doin'”, and there’s your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!”, although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That’s basically all of opera, reely.”
The quality of the jokes, is as ever, both terrible and wonderful at the same time – such as here when describing Nanny Ogg’s cookbook
“What about this one? Maids of honour?”
“Weeelll, they starts out as maids of honour…but they ends up tarts.”

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Book review

Lords and Ladies (Discworld 14) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 1992

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded”. I suspect most readers would identify this as something Douglas Adams wrote, rather than his successor in genius, Sir Terry Pratchett.  It sets the tone for this wonderful novel. But perhaps I shouldn’t use this term, because as Lords and Ladies points out

“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.” 

This is just one aspect of the genius of Sir Terry – his ability to use language creatively to make us think deeply about language and beyond, to a very serious discussion about power and responsibility within society.

Of course there is a lighter side to this novel. It includes one line much loved by Discworld fans:

“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.”

I first read Lords and Ladies a long time ago. I have a vague memory of being slightly disappointed. But one of the many wonderful things about STP as a writer is his re-readability; I honestly can’t think of another writer whose novels retain their freshness and originality on multiple re-readings in the way Sir Terry’s do. In a word, I was wrong, Lords and Ladies is magnificent.

It follows chronologically immediately following the events of Witches Abroad. I could easily be wrong about this but I think this is one of the few times in the series that STP does this (The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic being the other example that springs to mind.) This gives the reader the impression that they are enjoying a continuing narrative, an adventure in real time. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick return from their adventure in Genua to find that while they have been away the people of Lancre have neglected their defence against the dark arts lessons. In particular the witches’s warnings about the Dancers, a mysterious stone circle outside the village have been ignored. With Lancre’s magical protections weakened and unguarded, a portal to the world of the elves is opened.

But as you will have seen above, these elves are not the noble creatures of MiddleEarth- they are amoral monsters that use “glamour” to alter human’s perceptions of them. The elves break into the Discworld and cause carnage at Magrat’s wedding, to be confronted (and OK, yes, spoilers, ultimately defeated) by a feat of magic that only Granny W could pull off. There is a sub-plot featuring a visit by the Arch-Chancellor and the Librarian to the wedding, but otherwise that is pretty much it – a fairly unsubstantial piece in terms of the plot. But reading STP for this plotting would be very much missing the point – you need to read him for his characterisation and his ideas.

STP really hit his stride at this point in the Discworld history, and never really took a misstep thereafter. So many great novels to come.

 

 

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