The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett

[Werthead]

Discworld #30: The Wee Free Men

Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is serious and studious for her age, and has little truck with myths and superstition. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil supernatural force from another universe and she is offered an alliance with the Nac Mac Feegle, a species of diminutive-but-psychotic warriors, this offends Tiffany's worldview. But pragmatism wins out, and she has to reluctantly embark on an adventure.

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth Discworld novel, and when you're thirty books into any series you might be forgiven for resting on your laurels a bit, especially when the previous one, Night Watch, is often cited as the best thing you've ever written. For Sir Terry Pratchett, this was not an option. Having experimented with a Discworld book for younger audiences, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, he decided to start a whole new sub-series within the wider Discworld framework that would be aimed primarily at younger readers.

Pratchett being Pratchett, this meant relatively little changes or compromises to his usual vision. Some of the very occasional double entendre gags are gone, the book is somewhat shorter than usual, but beyond that Pratchett didn't really censor himself at all. If anything, this is a more thoughtful, contemplative Discworld book than the norm, with some enjoyable setpieces interrupted by Tiffany's internal musings on life and her ambitions.

Tiffany is smart, curious and sensible, not given to recklessness but also having a strong moral centre. She may be a quintessential Discworld protagonist, being often the only sane person in the room and constantly wondering why selfishness and hatred even exist. She is cut from the same competence cloth as Granny Weatherwax and Samuel Vimes, but lacks their experience and cynicism. She is a well-drawn protagonist who has to overcome problems presented by capable enemies, rather than because she's holding an idiot ball (something many other writers could learn from).

What is impressive about The Wee Free Men is how much of it is told from within Tiffany's head: the Nac Mac Feegle are not given to in-depth dialogue (although they have a few bon mots of wisdom) and many of the other characters are evil, monsters, stupid adults or even less-communicative children. Just about the only person Tiffany can have a decent 1:1 conversation with is a sentient toad. This means we get to lock into Tiffany's thought processes and motivations in a lot of depth, which is refreshing.

Taking part in a hitherto-unexplored part of the Disc with almost no recurring characters (not even Death, making this the first Discworld novel that he skips out on), at least until the last chapter, The Wee Free Men also makes a viable on-roading point for the entire series. Technically the main villain did (briefly) appear in Lords and Ladies, but that is really not alluded to in the book so is not hugely important.

The Wee Free Men (****½) sheds a lot of the extended subplots that had started padding out the Discworld books around this time and is focused and entertaining, with a small but well-drawn cast of characters. It's funny, but intermittently, with musings on growing up and responsibility. For the first in a new, YA (or outright children)-focused series, it's surprisingly contemplative and thoughtful, and all the richer for it.

 

[Werthead]

Discworld #31: Monstrous Regiment

With war raging - or shambolically bumbling around - bar worker Polly Perks decides to go searching for her missing brother. She poses as a man to join the army and is assigned to a new regiment, only to find out almost the entire company has had the same idea. With women doing men's work also deemed an Abomination Unto Nuggan, the regiment has to keep their heads down, infiltrate an enemy keep, and work out how to rescue/escape their assorted family members, and, if possible, end the war before it causes any more damage.

Throughout his prolific career, Sir Terry Pratchett had a knack for using his witty dialogue, sharp prose and keen knowledge of history and culture to explore many different concepts. In most cases, he produced a brilliant Discworld book exploring a certain idea, like the press or the dangers of fundamentalist religion. But, when he turned his attention to the idea of war, he uncharacteristically dropped the ball. Jingo was perfectly okay, but lacked his trademark intelligence and depth.

Ten books later, he decided to give it another go, and this time nailed it. If Jingo was about the superficialities of going to war for absolutely no sane reason, Monstrous Regiment is about war as a much more complex force. Here we have burned-out homesteads, villages standing amidst salted fields and people's homes being invaded for reasons they don't really understand. Borogravia is fighting a defensive war against invaders, but it's also been a bellicose lunatic in the past, and is being flattened under the weight of the abuse heaped upon it by its own rulers. This creates a complex stew of ideas and themes, which is where Pratchett is at his best.

Polly and her fellow soldiers have little interest in the greater geopolitical complexities of the war, instead just trying to rescue individual people from the maelstrom. But, thanks to a chance encounter with newspaper reporter William de Worde (cameoing from The Truth), their mission inadvertently becomes famous across half the continent, and takes on a grander importance. It's also symbolic of the losses Borogravia has suffered, where an entire regiment is made up of women because there's increasingly few men left able to fight.

As in his best, most cutting books, Pratchett remembers to keep the funny: the regiment consists of an assortment of funny characters, the most memorable being Maladict, a suave, reformed vampire who has sworn off blood but developed an equally crippling addiction to coffee. But there's an undercurrent of seriousness here that is powerful: more than a few of the recruits have been victimised, and how they deal with trauma is a subtle but constant theme of the book. Sergeant Jackrum also emerges as one of Pratchett's most fascinating characters, a counterpoint of his more familiar Commander Vimes (who has a few brief appearances in the novel as an Ankh-Morpork liaison) who went down a decidedly more disturbing path (with more than a whiff of Life on Mars' Gene Hunt to them as well, for good and ill).

The book unfolds with a very deliberate pace: at just under 500 pages this is one of the longest Discworld novels but it earns its length by dividing the narrative into several distinct sections as the mission unfolds, as well as the larger-than-normal cast giving Pratchett a lot of characters to develop. But this also gives the book the feel of holding a stick of dynamite that's about to go off. Pratchett is known for being funny but he is absolutely at his best when he is angry, and I get the distinct impression as he wrote the book and continued researching things like the treatment of people in war, especially women and "non-conformists," he got progressively angrier. By the time the book concludes, the humour is so laced with white-hot rage that it is positively acidic. But Pratchett also never loses control. He doesn't go into some lecturing rant (a weakness some of his other books suffer from) and he never dissipates the focus on the story or characters.

Monstrous Regiment (*****) is Pratchett's take on war - actual, messy, horribly murky war - and gender and politics. It's a long book, by his standards, but he maintains the pacing and tension to deliver one of his finest and most thought-provoking novels.

 

[Judderman]

A long time since I read this one but I didn’t enjoy it much and barely read Terry’s novels after this (though Going Postal was good). I just don’t recall it being either particularly enthralling or funny. But wasn’t terrible.

 

[paranoid marvin]

A long time since I read this one but I didn’t enjoy it much and barely read Terry’s novels after this (though Going Postal was good). I just don’t recall it being either particularly enthralling or funny. But wasn’t terrible.

I'm almost exactly the same as you. Going Postal was good, but for me Terry peaked with Night Watch.

Monstrous Regiment I found to be cliched, predictable and nowhere near as good as Night Watch written the previous year.

 

[Pyan]

Going Postal was good, but for me Terry peaked with Night Watch.

Agreed.
Thud wasn't too bad, and neither was Wintersmith, but after that it was, sadly, a steady decline. I've read most of the series multiple times, but Making Money only twice, Unseen Academicals only once, stopped half way through Snuff, and have never read more than the first couple of pages of Raising Steam.
None of these later books have the sheer fizz and inventiveness of, say, Small Gods or Pyramids - even after literally one, two, many, lots of reading that one, I still laugh aloud at Pteppic at the Assassins Guild, and the fight between the gods of Djelibeybi....

 

[paranoid marvin]

Agreed.
Thud wasn't too bad, and neither was Wintersmith, but after that it was, sadly, a steady decline. I've read most of the series multiple times, but Making Money only twice, Unseen Academicals only once, stopped half way through Snuff, and have never read more than the first couple of pages of Raising Steam.
None of these later books have the sheer fizz and inventiveness of, say, Small Gods or Pyramids - even after literally one, two, many, lots of reading that one, I still laugh aloud at Pteppic at the Assassins Guild, and the fight between the gods of Djelibeybi....

One I really didn't like was Unseen Academicals. I don't think Terry understood or liked football, and it definitely shoeed in this book.

I think that like a lot of authors that write brilliant early novels (eg Stephen King) it's hard for both the author and the readers to keep the impetus and the enthusiasm going years/decades down the sign.

 

[Karapace]

I think that like a lot of authors that write brilliant early novels (eg Stephen King) it's hard for both the author and the readers to keep the impetus and the enthusiasm going years/decades down the sign.

True. After a while it becomes just a job. I got this with a certoon series. After the initial impetus had worn off it was what the hell am I going to do this month. Also I think Terry was begining to suffer from Altzeimers at that point

 

[Overread]

I think in a way for Terry it was less that they became a job and more that time started working against him and he still had so much to develop. He clearly loved the series to keep going even well into when his Alzheimer's was affecting him. I feel like the latter books were aiming to develop certain ground elements in Discworld for him to take forward in its evolution; they just started to lack some of the spark as I think he himself started to lose it to disease.

It might also just be that he needed a bunch of books that were a bit more worldbuilding and establishing before powering into a fresh wave. Similar in how many 3 book series can often have the middle book be a touch slower feeling than the first and the last.

 

[Werthead]

True. After a while it becomes just a job. I got this with a certoon series. After the initial impetus had worn off it was what the hell am I going to do this month. Also I think Terry was begining to suffer from Altzeimers at that point

Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimers in late 2007, which was more than four years after Monstrous Regiment was published. It was caught very early and because of visual information disorder (he kept seeing "shadows" appear on pages of text which made it impossible to read them) and very mild memory misfires, though he noted not particularly outrageous for someone approaching 60 anyway.

There seems to be a widespread agreement that any sign of the difficulties in his writing did not appear really until Unseen Academicals in 2009, and even that may have been exacerbated by Pratchett's poor take on football and the sloppy editing on the book (it's the longest Discworld novel but arguably has the least to say).

 

[paranoid marvin]

Football is a great game to watch and play, but not to write a fictional account of. Which is only exacerbated by making a whole story about it. It was a very odd decision to write about something he showed little interest and understanding of (and it certainly shows) and commercially you turn off a percentage of your audience. Like I said, an odd decision.

It's conceivable that his later stories were affected by the illness that was to take his life, but it could just be that the Discworld series had run its course. There's a significant difference in substance from his earlier Discworld novels that were sharper, wittier and more imaginative. The later books seemed to lack those qualities. As I've said before, Night Watch feels like the culmination of his stories, and it is also his finest work. Everything after this just couldn't compare.