PRATCHETT’S NEW NOVEL IS about rage and hatred. It is about inter-species
hatred between the trolls and the dwarves of the Discworld, who have for 30
books and many centuries accused each other of having made an ambush at the
legendary battle of Koom Valley. Deep-down dwarves, dressed in heavy black
leather robes to avoid the sin of seeing the light, led on by a firebrand
preacher called Grag Hamcrusher, are literally undermining Ankh-Morpork in
search of some secret. There is also an ancient entity, the Summoning Dark,
split off from matter at the beginning of the Universe, that is helpless
without a creature to work through. It finds Captain Vimes of the Watch — a
“cauldron of rage” because of the irrational disorder in his city, and tries
to manipulate his determination to keep order.
“Thud” is the sound made by the club that crushes Hamcrusher’s skull. “Thud”
is the name of an ancient game, like chess, played with pieces in the form
of a troll army and a dwarf army by “thudmeisters” of both species. In order
to win, you have to play both sides and understand their tactics. Vimes is
shown this game by the mysterious “Mr Shine”, a new character in the
stories. A game, like a good tale, is an antidote to rage and hatred. In Jingo,
a tale of war between empires, where Vimes arrests two armies for disturbing
the peace, Captain Carrot keeps the soldiers busy with desert football
(which used to be played with something nastier than a leather sphere).
One of Pratchett’s great virtues as a taleteller is his incapacity to hate, or
even to dislike. He invents despicable or loathsome people and creatures,
and gets curious about them, and ends up making his readers imagine and
understand them. When we first meet the Ankh-Morpork Watchmen (in Guards!
Guards!), they are cowardly and farcical drunks and dregs. Carrot
(so-called because he has the huge-shouldered narrow-hipped shape of a
cartoon hero) is the rightful king of Ankh-Morpork, brought up as a dwarf.
He shames them into heroism. But as the stories wind on, Pratchett
differentiates ever more subtly between Carrot’s natural authority and
courage and Vimes’s sense of responsibility for his patch — and the
Patrician Vetinari’s chess-playing ordering of imperfect social beings.
I used to think that Pratchett had managed to retain a revulsion for vampires
— he has created some truly nasty ones — but now we have Otto Chriek, the Ankh-Morpork
Times iconographer and a vampire recruit to the Watch, Salacia
Delorisista Amanita Trigestrata Zeldana Malifee von Humpeding, Sally for
short, who gets into a spat of sniffing and distaste with Angua the
werewolf. The Disorganisers, inhabited by imps, which Vimes hated, were a
running joke and usually ended badly — but now we have a Gooseberry
inhabited by an imp that turns out to have a character and to be useful. At
the end he even summons up a moment of empathy with the Summoning Dark.
Anything in a Pratchett story is capable of being transformed into something
else — from a joke to a profound observation, from a fact of our social
world to pure and lively fantasy. There is a good example of this in Thud!
Seven books back, Vimes, on an ambassadorial visit to Uberwald, country of
the vampires and dwarves, gets irritated by protocol and includes Blackboard
Monitor among his list of titles when visiting the realm of the Low King of
the dwarves. In Thud! he meets a grag (renowned master of dwarfish
lore) called Ardent who repeats the term “with the venom one would use for
‘child murderer’ ”. Vimes, it turns out, is a “destroyer of written words”,
a “proud word-killer”, the ultimate criminal in the grags’ religion.
Pratchett gives an intriguing picture of this “religion” in which humans are
unreal beings, “bad dreams” and trolls are pointless natural accidents, made
of broken stones. But Vimes meets a different grag (one Pratchett likes)
called Bashfull Bashfullsson, who explains that the dwarf creator, Tak,
“wrote the World and the Laws, and then He left us. He does not require that
we think of Him, only that we think”.
Pratchett too requires us to think. Whenever I read his stories, I find myself
thinking that he is “grown up”. He may write benign comedy but he knows how
horribly complicated and exciting the Universe is. I like to read Tolkien,
but both he and Philip Pullman appeal to the nostalgic lost child in me, who
read stories in which good and evil were clearly distinguishable, and love
made things better.
Pratchett writes farcically, and knows blackly. You might think that a world
in which you can call a “serious” character Bashfull Bashfullsson can only
be ludicrous, just as you may laugh at the silliness of trolls and men
insulting dwarves by calling them garden ornaments. But the truth seems to
be that the sheer force of Pratchett’s world-building and word-building
energies can accommodate farce and local jokes as it can accommodate parody
of Tolkien, Bulgakov, Shakespeare, Lawrence of Arabia or St Augustine.
I haven’t said what every reader must be thinking, that Thud! is
related to the world we live in, where “quasi-demonic pure vengeance” is
killing people and stirring hatred in the mind. This is because Pratchett
doesn’t write parodies or parables or allegories. The nearer he gets to
those, the worse he writes — Moving Pictures is one of his few
failures, because it stays too close to Hollywood, just as the story in
which Vimes revisits his past gets out of control precisely because of too
much moral indignation. Pratchett is a storyteller who writes a parallel
world, which we read badly if we don’t suspend disbelief, but also if we
stop thinking.
I was recently called by a journalist who wanted a comment on the proposed
ending of the teaching of English, in favour of drama and media studies. I
said reading taught you to think privately and was irreplaceable. What book
would I tell all children to read, she asked (an impossible question).
Pratchett, I said, after thought. Any Pratchett. But, I added hastily, I
don’t think anyone should ever teach Pratchett. People, from 12-year-old
nerds to professional philosophers, can and do and should work him out in
his own terms for themselves.
Thud!
By Terry Pratchett
Doubleday, £17.99; 368pp
£16.19 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Terry Pratchett talks about his books at The Times Cheltenham Literature
Festival on October 15. Tickets: 01242 227979 by Terry Pratchett
