So, Neil Gaiman has written about his friend, Sir Terry Pratchett.
Apologies in advance, as with all of these posts, this one is truly self-indulgent, and particularly navel-gazing. Neil Gaiman’s piece got me thinking about my long and continuing relationship with, even dependence, on Terry Pratchett’s writing, and I wanted to reflect a bit on it. Unlike Neil Gaiman, I am not a famous writer (nor a close personal friend of He), and so harbour no delusions about the value these musings contribute. However, it is safe to say that Pratchett’s works have been an absolute mainstay in my life. I, quite literally, almost never venture into the world without a Pratchett book (perma-loaded into the Kindle). It is probably not overstating it to say that it forms the bedrock of my relationship with my sister (nary a conversation goes by that doesn’t make a Pratchett reference in some way). I also nearly always reach for a Pratchett book I’ve read countless times as a very effective sleep-soothing routine (I rarely have trouble falling asleep, but often wake up with nameless anxiety. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and all that right?)
I’ve always held the firm belief that Terry Pratchett is one of the greatest writers of our generation, and that the only reason he isn’t more highly decorated vis a vis the various Serious Book Awards is because he’s hilarious. And hilarious about deadly serious things. Which, in my opinion, is one of the hardest things to do, because I think it probably means you’ve been through the wringer, and have developed enough as a human being to be able to make those things funny. It does seem sometimes that there is a perception that enduring literature can’t be funny, or accessible. I happen to disagree, and thought this piece making the case that honest writing is funny writing was spot on. Someone said (probably in the comments section) that Terry Pratchett is the Dickens of our times. Having only read a handful of Dickenses (and does the illustrated children’s version of A Christmas Carol count?) I’m probably not qualified to comment, much less enthusiastically agree with this analysis. Suffice it to say, people are apparently impervious to real and sometimes profound insights about humanity and the human condition if the vehicle for comment happens to include elves, wizards and trolls. But, I also happen to be allergic to earnestness, and happen to think that parody is one of the greatest art forms around – the more absurd the better – so make of that what you will.
Being his friend, Neil Gaiman probably knows more than we do about Sir Pterry’s state of health, and the fact of him even having penned a tribute is somewhat alarming. I can’t begin to contemplate a world post-Pratchett – it makes me panic in a way that would call for an enormous amount of therapeutic (and therefore extremely mediocre) writing/cups of tea/frantic and furious pool laps. (The pool laps would feel furious, but they would still be exceedingly slow.)
So I won’t. Like Gaiman seems to have found, there is much solace in focusing instead on his work, and on the writings he has inspired. What a wonderful tribute Neil Gaiman has written.
This in particular is a spine-tingling passage:
He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.
Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.
These sentiments expressed come as no surprise. The central, and perfectly imperfect characters of Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax always seem close to vibrating off the page in the elemental rage that drives them, and it makes perfect sense that Sir Pterry channels his own world views through these characters for whom, it seems, he has incredible affection.
Part of the sheer joy of reading Pratchett is how identifiable the Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax (and now that I think of it, the Tiffany Aching) characters are, and how much their triumphs end up mattering to you, in the real world. The other parts of said sheer joy include the fact that it is impossible to not learn something about the “real” world, even unconsciously. It is no accident that The Science of Discworld is a feasible accompanying compendium to the series. And there have been almost too many occasions on which I’ve come across something, and then realised, sometimes years later, “Ohhh! That’s that piece of history/language/science that Pratchett was talking about/understood so well already that he had progressed to sending it up.” But I digress.
Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are painfully aware of their shortcomings, of the “beast” that exists in them, but continue to conduct their lives in a way that holds the beast at bay. I think it is in Night Watch that Vimes is described as a man who cuts a straight line through a world where everyone else is moving in (self-serving) curves. They live authentically, in a way that makes sense to them, to their principles and fundamental sense of justice, often at great cost to themselves.This seems to me to be the most worthy of human struggles. And Pratchett, I think, is a humanist.
At a personal level, this resonates with me, thrums and hums at a hind brain level. A lot of what I do is driven by a semi-permanent rage that there are so many things that are basically unfair in this world, mostly dictated by accident of birth. And you can flail at the world, crying about how unfair it is, or you can use that energy (which requires a certain amount of sacrifice) to try and beat the bits of the world accessible to you into a somewhat better, more equitable shape. I generally believe that human beings, if they have capacity, have the agency and therefore responsibility to lead ethical, principled lives. I have wondered whether being such a Pratchett devotee for a large and highly impressionable portion of my life has resulted in this state of being, or whether I was attracted to his work because it made sense to me in that way. Probably a bit of both. But then again, his work is so multi-layered and varied that I’m sure everyone gets something different out of it.
The other thing I’ve thought about my relationship with Pratchett’s work, is a bit of a funny thing. I suppose a lens for analysis I fall back on quite a lot is that of colonialism (refer to aforesaid rage about inequity). However, it has occurred to me that a real part of what I love about Pratchett’s writing is his voice, which is as Gaiman describes, “genial, informed, sensible, drily amused.” This strikes me as a particularly English sensibility, and Pratchett’s work is unapologetically English. But I am almost, indirectly, a professional railer-against-colonialisation! A fair chunk of my work has to do with picking up the pieces of brutal (British) colonial practices in relation to Indigenous peoples, and as a result of that, it is tempting to write off colonialisation, and the settler state, as a Horrible Thing We Would Have Been Better Off Without.
And yet, I am a product of colonialisation. I’ve spent all of my life living in one colony or another, all outposts and remnants of the Great British Empire, and grew up in the shadow of a grandfather and therefore mother, who were, not to put too fine a point on it, Anglophiles. Some of the artefacts of colonialisation I still struggle with. The obvious ones include a systemically racialist society where outcomes for people are indirectly but often shaped by these ancient and continuing exercises of power. The less obvious include the colonisation of my own mind. For instance, I think I will probably spend the rest of my life having to constantly challenge my own biases in relation to “white” superiority, that idea having sneakily crawled into my brain when I was too small and stupid (babies aren’t famous for being cognisant) to do anything about it, where it seems to still lurk. But then, I think about my relationship with Pratchett’s works, with the things I love about them, with the way I write, with the things I find funny, with the characteristics that I value in other people (geniality, informedness, sensibility, dry amusement), the vast canon of literature I am still slowly making my way through, and I am unable to say that there is nothing to gain from the whole bloody enterprise.
I guess that’s the genius of his work. He never lets you forget that life is messy and complicated, and if there seems to be a neat and simple answer to something, well, it probably hasn’t been thought through all that well.
Microwave Minutes 