I’m not entirely certain what to make of this book. It’s technically not the first Terry Pratchett novel I’ve read. Good Omens, the novel he did with Neil Gaiman, is one of my all-time favourite humour books, and in early high school I picked up one of the Discworld novels that featured Death (I can’t remember which novel), and to be honest it didn’t really strike my fancy, and it wasn’t exactly a memorable experience. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not exactly a dedicated reader of fantasy. One of my professors at UW once told me that her experience reading Tolkien when she was younger is among the reasons she decided to study literature for a living. I didn’t get around to The Lord of the Rings until I was in my early twenties and I disliked it so much that “hate” might actually be the most appropriate descriptor. I did, however, very much enjoy much of David Eddings’ work, second-rate Tolkien knockoff though he is. What really attracted me to Eddings was the sense that even though the characters were often flat and repetitive (so were the plots), the world was a world where people needed to work and eat and shit and so on. If the merry band of heroes needed a vast army to be in a certain place at a certain time it wasn’t just a matter of convincing a king and waiting a few hours while everyone got organized. They had to ask the king, and then figure out how they were going to pay the soldiers, how to feed them, how long it would take to organize them, whether they would be professional soldiers or if they would have to institute a draft, where the weapons and armour would come from, build wagons to carry the food and weapons, arrange treaties so they could take their army across lands they weren’t attacking, and so on, and so on, and so on. Basically, Eddings has his heroes do all the things you would actually have to do in order to raise an army in that sort of society. It would take months, things would go wrong, and then it would certainly take more than a handful of battles—or even a single battle as in some of Tolkien’s more dramatic moments—to decide the outcome of a war. I required these things to suspend my disbelief.
Granted, Pratchett is an entirely different creature. The Discworld novels are intended, so far as I can tell through interviews I’ve listened to, as fairly straightforward funny books. Which is what The Color of Magic is (did I mention that I hate, absolutely hate, with no qualifications, when publishers impose American spelling and punctuation conventions on British books). The first forty pages or so left me rather cold, and I felt pretty strongly that I wasn’t among the target audience. I’ll be the first to admit that in certain contexts I can be a geek, indeed a good case could probably be made to declare me King Geek of Nerd Mountain, but I am not the bad-jokes-about-trolls kind of geek. Once the basic rules of the world and the more or less serial nature of the novel were established, though, I settled in for a mostly enjoyable read. I’ve read that the first few novels are the weakest of the Discworld series (which stands to reason, really), and so, while this is not among my favourite books, I will give more of them a try. (I should probably also mention that I categorically refuse to read a series out of order, so I’ll be dealing with the so-called weaker books first.) I didn’t feel any particular sympathy for any of the characters, and a lot of the jokes were of the Dave-Coulier-on-Full-House variety, but the world itself was actually quite compelling and I’d be interested in seeing it fleshed out. Most of the back catalogue can be had from used book stores on the cheap, so more Discworld novels will certainly be blogged about in the future.
Just to switch things up, I’m now turning to a book of essays, Umberto Eco’s On Literature.
