It’s funny, but even if you think you’re braced for someone
dying, it’s no easier than if it comes out of the blue. The difference is only in the initial shock,
the process of adapting to the hole left in our lives remains one of life’s
harsh realities for those left behind.
This applies whether it’s close family or idols we’ve never met. I remember spending much of the afternoon of 26th October 2004
reading the BBC announcement of John Peel’s death, closing it and reloading it
as if to make sure it was true, as if there’d be a big ‘MERKED!’ there instead,
that it’d be a dark joke. Of course it
wasn’t. Of course it was true. And we had to readjust to a world without Peel,
without the man who’d somehow managed to last 37 years on an explicitly youth
focused radio station. Radio One paid
tribute and adjusted, we who’d known him paid tribute and adjusted, perhaps
even noting real life lacked a notion of dramatic subtlety by having him die at
a point when arguably his primary role of introducing new music to a wide
audience was being made redundant by the rise of the internet. Or maybe it robbed us of the ideal curator
for all these opportunities at exactly the wrong time. It was the same when Douglas Adams went, when
(at a younger age) Kurt Cobain died. On a grander scale the same was true of
Princess Diana’s death, the country at large seemingly being dazed and confused
and not knowing quite how to react.
I had the same reaction last Thursday, when I came back from
lunch to find out that Terry Pratchett had died. Pratchett’s death wasn’t as sudden or
unexpected as those already mentioned, his early onset Alzheimers had rendered
him increasingly and ever more noticeably frail. Death is, of course, an
inevitability of the human condition but it’s a very different thing to know of
your own mortality and being confronted with it, knowing that your personal end
is near. For many that’d be an excuse to turn in on yourself, become maudlin
and turn away from the world. It’s a
natural reaction. Pratchett’s reaction
was phenomenal. In keeping with his
books it was a reaction born of a peculiarly British strain of rage, one which
eschews tantrums about the unfairness of life for keeping buggering on. Pratchett dismissed the degenerative brain
disease as an ‘embuggerance’ and went about raising the debate of the profile
about assisted dying, making a memorable BBC documentary about it. Typically
for Pratchett it confronted awkward questions about the subject, about the
general societal belief in life imposing a painful, undignified existence on
some. It’s the sort of question his
novels asked so well, the ones no-one really wants to confront.* Pratchett
confronted it and refused any attempt at comfort or sugar coating. Like the
best of his work it led us to a dark place, the evil witch’s cottage at the
heart of the forest, but unlike the fiction it didn’t see the need to lead us
out again. It was a one-sided argument,
a dark polemic. Unlike his books it didn’t lead us out again, it simply
confronted the arguments about quality of life and the reality of assisted
death head on. As with his books, it
left us wiser for hearing the argument.
Neil Gaiman pointed out, in a Guardian article about a collection of hisnon-fiction, that for all the imagery of Pratchett being a grandfatherly
looking old chap writing fantasy the reality is he’s a tremendously angry
writer. And he quite happily lets us know why he’s angry. The difference with his anger and the venting
that fills much of the internet is that Pratchett could weave this anger and
darkness into beautifully told stories with wit to spare. There was no incoherent ranting, more a
calmly angry facing up to the realities and how they might be dealt with. This ranged from how the most trivial
‘embuggerances’ are the ones we pay most attention to even though, in the long
run, they don’t matter to a practical philosophy of how to cope with what we do
doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s the act that separates the great
storytellers from the merely good ones, the willingness to push a question
beyond logical limits, no matter how absurd.
Of course, with his chosen settings tending toward the fantastic,
Pratchett had plenty of latitude to be absurd and get away with it. The main gift Pratchett gave to literature
was a rediscovery of the principles of Jonathan Swift, of what could be slipped
past the reader’s conscious mind if they’re laughing about daft tales of
witches, wizards and sentient luggage. The reader has already bought into the
inherent absurdity of the world so it’s quite simple to make the apparently
sane seem equally as absurd by introducing it here. It’s a trick that science-fiction had been
using for decades, one prevalent around the time of the early Discworld books
(the best relevant examples of the British strain of this tend to come in the
long running comic 2000AD). Many writers have followed the template of absurd
ideas in an absurd world, the trick most of them missed was grounding the
characters as well as Pratchett did. No
matter what their exterior – male, female, orang-utang, troll, dog, god,
anthropomorphic personality – they were all recognisable to us in their
reactions. Human is simultaneously the
right and the wrong word for it.
Characters we could believe in, whose reactions weren’t illogical in any
way but the very human way we’re all illogical, were what kept the Discworld
spinning. Characters were more than a simple set of reactions – Rincewind more
than a coward, Granny Weatherwax more than the hardened wise woman, Sam Vimes
more than the cynical old cop. They were more complicated than that whilst
actually being that simple.
After a random encounter with Equal Rites in the local
library I eagerly devoured Pratchett for the next twenty years or so, snapping
the books up as they came out. Naturally
I even met him once, popping into the Worcester branch of Waterstones after
watching the 1995 FA Cup final. I’m sure
he’d heard it a million times but I still got to say thank you, which perhaps
matters as much to the fan as to the writer. My wife could go one better,
having run the Concussion convention in Cardiff with Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
and having plenty of anecdotes about it (minor one: that convention apparently
inspired Soul Music, certainly one of my wife’s very good friends is the
inspiration for Death’s daughter Susan).
In the social media age the death of the author** has become a mass
wake, the modern equivalent of sitting round the campfire and retelling our
stories and I spent much of Friday reading through and listening to
tributes. And virtually all of them had
some little nugget of truth in, some insight what made Pratchett so
popular. My favourite was a simple one,
and one in the relatively quiet corner of the internet that’s my Facebook
page. It came from an old schoolmate of
mine, who reminded me that decades ago I’d
pressed a copy of The Colour of Magic on him and insisted he read it. On the Friday he said that this was what had
properly got him into reading, something he hadn’t enjoyed doing before. Obviously this was a grand and glorious
compliment to my good taste, equally obviously it was also a bigger compliment
to the quality of Pratchett’s books. By opening up the vistas of literature, a
gateway to stories, he made my friend a little wiser and more joyful. And ultimately that’s his finest legacy. No-one’s ever been made stupider by reading a
Pratchett book and Pratchett never lied to his readers, even when it might have
been of comfort.
Ultimately he knew that life always went on, even when
individual lives didn’t. And in this
case his books will always be there, sentient missives from Pratchett’s mind,
as alive and dangerous as any in the Unseen University library. They’ll always be there ready to take the
unwary mind through the deep dark forest, but crucially always ready to lead
them out again, to remind us that if you know what it looks like, and you look
hard enough, you can find light.*** Somewhere, in the corner of millions of
mind, there’s a little Pratchett amused at our failing and railing against our
stupidity.
And for that little Pratchett in the corner of my mind, I’m
profoundly grateful.
* This is where he differs from fellow Wodehousian descendant Douglas
Adams. Adams provides the same sort of
absurd angles as Pratchett but, until Last Chance To See converts him to the
cause of conservationism, restricts himself to pointing out humanity’s
foolishness. Pratchett tells you why
foolishness, stupidity and ignorance are bad and dangerous things and why they need stamping out.
** Actual death rather than amusing conceptual corner of
postmodernism
*** Assuming you’re not stuck down a mine without a lamp.
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