The hotel suite lies in semi-darkness so it takes a moment for my eyes to find
Terry Pratchett. He is sitting with his back to the door on a distant sofa
dressed top to toe in his trademark black. His wide-brimmed Stetson and
enamelled cane (also black) are propped on a nearby chair and — rather
unfriendly this — he does not even turn around, let alone stand up, to greet
me. Is he puffed up? Is he shy?
I shuffle over and take a seat as he distractedly offers me tea. Surprisingly,
for a man who enjoys all the power and success that come with selling tens
of millions of books, his voice is high and nasal. Although he looks every
one of his 58 years, there is something of the nerdish teen about him. His
eyes are wary, his posture defensive.
Pratchett’s fans — who are legion — would cry foul at this. They would say the
nation’s high priest of fantasy fiction is neither snooty nor remote. They
might even go so far as to pen a PhD thesis on him or commission duplicates
of the skull-shaped ring he wears to exchange on their wedding days. Might
they even engage in a little light stalking? “No, no. I’ve never been scared
by a fan.” He was once propositioned by one. He demurred, then went to the
shops to buy a compost thermometer.
Pratchett fans can’t all be sex-crazed denizens of the sci-fi scene. He points
out that you don’t sell as many books as he has by writing for society’s
fringe. Alongside the “core fans” (teenage Tolkien nuts) he says there are
millions of unlikely readers, some of whom are even — gasp! — women. “I’ve
got fans in convents, working on immigration desks. God help us, they’ve
even got into positions of power.”
Scary as it may seem, quiz five friends and you are bound to uncover at least
one closet Pratchett enthusiast. Until J K Rowling swished in on her
broomstick in the late 1990s, he was Britain’s biggest novelist. According
to the last count his fantasy/sci-fi novels have shifted more than 40m
copies.
An extraordinary 4% of all hardback books purchased on these shores are
written by Pratchett, to say nothing of the honour that was bestowed on him
a decade ago. As of 1996 he is officially the UK’s most shoplifted author.
How does it feel to sell 40m books? “It’s 46m actually,” he says smugly.
Why should he feign diffidence? Pratchett is on a career high. After two
decades’ toil he has recently become huge in the States and tonight Sky One
will screen its excellent £6m adaptation of Hogfather, one of his 30- odd
Discworld novels set on a planet similar to Earth that floats about space
supported by four elephants standing on the back of a turtle. Next year Sam
Raimi, director of the Spider-Man movies, will begin work on his own
adaptation of a Discworld novel.
Yet Pratchett remains more mysterious than his monster success should allow —
certainly much more enigmatic than über-colleagues such as Rowling (former
single mum and Potter creator about whom Pratchett is very touchy).
So, keen to uncover the man behind the sales, I enthusiastically slap my tape
recorder down in front of him. He sniffs, then announces that it won’t work.
“I seem to do something to them,” he says.
It’s true. Eight minutes into the interview it judders to a halt for no
discernible reason. I examine the tape. I tap the batteries. Nothing. He
says it happens with all the journalists who come to meet him. An Australian
once brought three along to escape the Pratchett voodoo. He smiles,
revealing a row of teeth through the silvery beard. I feel a chill.
Is this why Pratchett is such a puzzle? Does he possess dark powers? It turns
out it is the opposite. In the age of mythic celebrity authors, Pratchett is
dead normal. He eschews all showbiz engagements and refuses “any invitation
to the Groucho club on principle”. He prefers to garden and read rare
science books in his at-home library. When he does venture out, he wears
black, not to foster mystique but as camouflage.
“The hat is a Zen disguise,” he explains. “When I take it off no one knows who
I am.” That he is uncomfortable in the public sphere seems odd, given that
swathes of his books are clearly satires of current events. “I have no
social agenda,” he insists. Lots of students disagree.
“A great many people are doing doctorates on me. It’s flattering, but I get
very edgy about deconstruction. I worry if they’ll be able to get jobs
afterwards. Of course I also worry that someone might give them a job.” ()
It soon emerges that the most shocking aspect of Pratchett is that despite his
books being wildly witty and his bank account bursting with millions, he is
very tea and biscuits. Born in Buckinghamshire in 1948, he grew up in a
cottage with no running water, electricity, bath — or bathroom in which to
put one. He is quite cheery about it all: “We didn’t think we were poor
[because] everyone we knew lived pretty much the same way. If you had a
house with a roof on it you were ahead of the game.”
His mother was a gifted storyteller and his father a motor mechanic. This
combination of fastidious logic and jaunty vernacular have become hallmarks
of his novels. His patented brand of “stealth philosophy” was down to him.
Hogfather, Discworld’s equivalent of Father Christmas, is essentially the
story of civil servants who put out a hit on Santa on Christmas Eve. Aside
from being very funny, it is a spirited philosophical defence of the right
of children (and adults) to believe. “Believing in Father Christmas is
important,” says Pratchett. “It trains our imaginations on the little lies
so we can believe the big lies like justice [and] truth.”
It is a theme gleaned from the years he spent expanding his own imagination in
Beaconsfield public library. From the age of nine he was reading fiction,
science and the big thinkers. At one point he had 156 library tickets — The
Wind in the Willows, The Lord of the Rings, The Origin of Species: “I think
I must have read every book in there.”
Despite such swotting and getting his first short story published when he was
13, he did not excel at school and left before his A-levels to work on the
Bucks Free Press, later moving to The Bath Chronicle. Fancying a change of
pace in the 1980s he got a job spin-doctoring for the Central Electricity
Generating Board (“It was more like spin dentistry,” he quips), particularly
about its nuclear power plants. Thanks to Chernobyl, Pratchett arrived at an
apex of the public’s nuclear terror. “Things were always exploding,” he
laughs, “usually on a Friday.”
After a killer day reassuring the nation that a radiation leak at Hinkley
Point was nothing to worry about, he went home and spent 24 hours at his
typewriter bashing out a third of a book. Soon he was writing page after
page a day to relax, quitting work when he secured a six-book deal. As his
sales multiplied, Pratchett began to occupy a strange position in the
literary world: grumpy old success story. Reporters were forever calling to
get his take on the latest Booker winner, assuming he would be miffed that
writers who sold so little were always getting patted on the back.
“I cannot imagine the circumstances in which an avowed genre writer would win
the Booker,” he says, seemingly unbothered. “We’re not designed to.” Of the
OBE that he was awarded in 1998 for services to British literature, he says,
“It was funny. The only service I had performed for literature was to deny
writing it on every possible occasion.”
Nevertheless, he must be delighted with the vogue for giving him honorary
degrees — partly, one suspects, because he always returns the favour by
making a faculty member of, say, Warwick University an honorary wizard of
Discworld’s Unseen University. It all sounds suspiciously Potter to me.
Wizards, werewolves, Hogfather, Hogwarts school . . . did Rowling copy the
lot off you?
“If my lawyer was here he’d say, ‘Do not open your mouth’,” laughs Pratchett,
before making a visible effort to be conciliatory.
“Look, if Tolkien hadn’t written The Lord of the Rings I couldn’t
have written the Discworld series. It’s how a genre works. Everyone makes
their cake from the same ingredients.”
Is Rowling’s cake too similar to yours? “I’m not answering that,” he squeaks.
I’ll take that as a yes. He is not that bothered, though. Not while the
cheques keep rolling in, the fans keep yacking on the internet and the
movies get made. The only blot on his horizon is his health.
Last year Pratchett suffered chest pains while on a book tour in Dublin. As a
committed non-believer he was surprised, as he flatlined on the operating
table, to have a near-death experience. Everything went quiet, “as a large
nose appeared above me and a voice boomed, ‘There are no sandwiches’”.
We laugh at this as he explains that he was hungry and had sprung up in mid-op
demanding food. The booming voice was his surgeon’s.
Suddenly it strikes me that Pratchett’s cane, his defensive posture and the
fact he is now rushing off to the bathroom offering no more in the way of
farewell than he did in greeting, could have more to do with illness than
grandeur. Of course, the shy man might just be desperate to get back to his
typewriter. At £1m a book, who could blame him?
