The Embuggerance of Mortality

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 26^th 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.

Let's Put Our Heads Together, And Start A New Country Up - Nation by Terry Pratchett

I go back a long way with Terry Pratchett, all of 23 years now. Back when Caldicot Library was a portakabin on the school grounds and I was still in the early stages of being allowed to explore the adult section at last. Not that the thrill of having the half of the library on the other side of the issue desk suddenly open stopped me from sampling the wit and imagination of the children's section, with the likes of the Doctor Who novelisations of Nils Olof Franzen's Agaton Sax books. In fact the adult section wasn't that wonderful, Caldicot being a tiny library at that point. And a lot of the adult books I might've contemplated taking out I'd already read - the likes of Douglas Adams or Tolkien. So I'd mainly confined myself to football autobiographies (where the deeds of heroes are so much more epic and grand in scale before you grow up and realise they're only human) and the odd interesting looking book. In 1987 I found a very odd, interesting looking book indeed. It hadn't been taken out that much if the stamps in the front were to be believed, and I was too young to know what horrors 'comic fantasy' usually entailed. Despite the unpromising element of it having a couple of female leads, I still checked it out. And I was glad I did, because Equal Rites introduced me to the wit, wisdom and comic timing of Terry Pratchett.

In retrospect Equal Rites was a fine place to start. It's where the Discworld novels as we knew them really started to form, where Pratchett moved beyond the more simplistic fantasy parodies of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, but before any sort of predictability could set in. It's where Pratchett begins to really underlay his stories with vicious satire, but could still almost be taken for a simple fantasy author. Just ahead of when his popularity exploded, just before he really got into his stride with Mort. And I've largely stayed with him ever since, even when I thought the books were perhaps becoming a little predictable and seemed almost churned out rather than inspired (around the turn of the millennium). I'm sure they weren't, but that was how it felt.

I say largely as I'd taken something of a sabbatical from his books whilst expanding horizons elsewhere - I'd read Thud!, but a copy of Making Money still lies in one of the vast, teetering to read piles. It took the resolution to clear the books I'd got for Christmas or bought second hand to bring me back to him. I'd found a copy of Nation in the local Oxfam shop, and snapped it up along with Colin Wilson's biography of Alister Crowley and Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning. And Nation was first off that particular pile.

It's always a pleasure to return to Pratchett, a writer who's always had the ability to tell a strong story clearly and beautifully whilst layering it with themes and meaning. That warmly exasperated tone is like an old friend, effectively communicating humanity's potential and failure to achieve it, inextricably meshing his main theme into his work. It's a voice that I can always match to writer when I see him interviewed, and one that's clearly still well honed, seemingly ever sharper as the years pass and books pile up. Reading Nation, I could at times almost hear that exasperation tip into anger.

Nation sees Pratchett taking on big themes, religion, science and how they help (of have helped) us deal with the world and, inevitably, religion vs science. It'd be simple for him to simply encapsulate them in his main characters, Mau (tribesman) and Daphne (shipwrecked aristo) but, creditably, he never descends to that level of simplicity, that simply wouldn't fit with what he's trying to say at all. Pratchett comes to definite conclusions about the uses of religion and science in dealing with the world (specifically and fairly obviously that the best way to deal with the world is to think about and understand it in whatever terms), but it never feels force fed and merits of both positions are examined. It's noticeable, as ever, that the characters who end up worst off in a Pratchett book (largely dead in this case) are the ones who can't adapt, and those that do end up triumphant at the story's end. It's Darwinism played for laughs. The tackling of a religious theme, where the existence of gods is left indeterminate, doesn't lend itself to the deity ridden Discworld. Pratchett locked that world into having deities way back in The Colour of Magic, the need to be deliberately vague about the supernatural explains why he's writing outside the confines of a recurring series for the first time in a long time.

Pratchett's experience and natural aptitude for a good story means these themes aren't anywhere near as dull as they'd be in other hands. As much as the topics he's discussing this is a fine adventure story in the classic sense, about two msimatched people rebuilding a society following a natural disaster. While there's jeopardy aplenty, the story's got just enough room to breathe and provide us with character moments and little narrative twists you don't expect. Pratchett's always understood the journey of a good story will take you places you didn't expect, and he's also understood the best stories leave you somewhere you didn't quite expect (but ends up being exactly where you want to be). He refuses to bend the logic he's set up to provide a cosy, conventional happy ending. Because, as he points out, life isn't like that.

It's refreshing to return to an old favourite after so long away, and even better when he's encountered in less familiar surroundings. Nation maintains my love of Pratchett as one of the smartest yet least didactic writers out there, one who's always conscious of never cheating his audience, nor talking down to them. The Radio Times was almost apologetic when previewing Radio 4's current adaptation of Small Gods, with the usual caveat of 'if you thought Pratchett was for 40 year old men still living with their mums'. The thing is, his work is not and never has been. Nation's simultaneously as smart an allegory, and gripping an adventure as what's perceived as more literary fiction. Being outside his other series may mean it comes to be regarded as an oddity, but it shouldn't be, because, in a quieter way, it's as strong as any of his previous work.