Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn, Eds. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (Old Earth Books, 2004)

What took me so long to get started on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books? I somehow missed them in my college years, which would have been an eminently suitable time to appreciate Pratchett's sendups of fantasy fiction and contemporary culture. Surely the notion of there being a universe where a flat world really is carried on the back of four giant tortoises, on top of an elephant (“it's elephants all the way down…”); where Death has to lay his sickle down when he gets forced into an early retirement by the bureaucrats on high; where the question “why aren't there ever any female dwarfs?” finally gets answered, is an idea that has come up in countless college pub conversations. But only Pratchett has accomplished that uniquely literary feat of making a world out of such trivia, a world that sometimes seems more real that the one outside our windows -- and that comments on our lives in myriad ways.

I've only read about a dozen of the 40+ volumes (including over 30 Discworld books) in the Pratchett canon, but the authors of this volume of essays are not so haphazard. They cover nearly every novel in some detail, either by grouping them thematically (as in Farah Mendlesohn's thoughtful “Faith and Ethics,” which gets to the heart of the moral issues in seemingly lightweight fiction), or by considering related sequences (as in Nickianne Moody's “Death and Work,” which puts Death's aforementioned retirement in the context both of his development as a character through several books and of the Thatcherite England in which said books were published). This is the second edition of a work originally published five years previously, and it has been brought nearly up to date, through Monstrous Regiment and The Wee Free Men, both published in 2003. It's hard to keep up with an author who lately has been putting out at least two books a year.

There are pieces on Pratchett's first novel and its revision 20 years later -- not an improvement, the author finds; on the Witches, who will forever change your image of the ancient trinity of Mother, Maiden and Crone; on the geography of the fantastic as manifested in Discworld's capital, Ankh-Morpork. If you're a Discworld fan, you'll find something on your favorite bit here, whether it's the absurdities of the wizards' Unseen University or the unorthodox police procedurals of the City Watch. If you're not a fan, then you'll only be mystified. You've got to learn a bit of the language first.

Quite a bit of energy is spent defending Pratchett as an author worth reading seriously, even though he writes fantasy, and not only that, but humorous fantasy that is wildly popular -- a triple blow to academic respectability. The most erudite essays, “Theories of Humour” by Andrew M. Butler, and “Believing is Seeing” by James Brown, invoke Lacan, Bakhtin and Coleridge to put Pratchett on the critical map. I'm not convinced that such extreme measures are really necessary, but I admire their conviction. 

All the essays are respectably written, and do a fine job of sifting through the different elements in a large body of work, “comparing and contrasting,” as the old high school English class mantra went. Allusions are illuminated, name origins revealed, often showing how much thought and erudition went into a seemingly throwaway incident. (There is, however, little biographical information on Pratchett himself, just in case the title led you to expect a biography.)  Informative and clever though they may be, though, these essays are just not anywhere near as much fun as the Discworld books themselves -- not even “The Librarian and His Domain,” which has the loony charm suitable to an essay written by a real-life librarian about his Discworld counterpart, a rather formidable orangutan. My main response to each one was of wanting to read, or re-read, one of the books cited.

No doubt the authors would be happy with this result, as clearly they all write out of genuine appreciation and enjoyment of Pratchett's work, rather than a desire to promote some literary agenda of their own devising. So don't be like the stuffy literary editor cited in the introduction, who couldn't bring himself to read a Terry Pratchett book even though everyone he respected told him he would enjoy them. What is literature, anyway, if not a book that makes you laugh and think?

[Lory Hess ]