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Provided by Iwan Lamble (iwan@lamble.demon.co.uk).
Fantasy may be unfashionable, but it has made Terry Pratchett Briatin's most successful writer. Perhaps it's because his favourite character is Death and he's as witty as Wodehouse. Peter Ingham meets the jolly god of Discworld.
[picture of Jingo Cover]
'Dead funny'
From Jingo by Terry Pratchett
Death hovers at Terry Pratchett's shoulder. He leans forward, extends a bony forefinger and taps the computer screen, on which the next Discworld novel is scrolling.
"Sorry, love, but I can't speak that line. It just isn't me."
Pratchett turns and gives him a hard stare.
"You're right," he sighs. "I'll fix it."
Except that he doesn't. Pratchett allows his characters among whom Death is a favourite to "sometimes come up with ways of doing things which you probably wouldn't have thought about." But, he is quick to stress, "this is a metaphor for the fact that you don't actually see the machinery in your brain. You disguise all the cogwheels and levers by clothing them as the characters in the book." On Pratchett's Discworld, then, the author calls the shots and even the Grim Reaper must take directions.
And why not? The 21 novels of the Discworld series represent the most breathtaking display of sustained comic invention since P. G. Wodehouse, and have made Pratchett Britain's most successful writer. He has good reason to be fiercely proud and fiercely jealous of his creation. "My feelings about Discworld make patriotism look like puppy love," he says.
In conversation, Pratchett is every bit as affable and entertaining as his writing would suggest. He laughs a lot, and despite his huge success, is reassuringly modest. He never refers to himself as an artist or even a novelist, but as a writer or, at most, an author. He talks of writing as a craft, and even with 31 books under his belt he writes children's books as well as the Discworld series he says he has become not a better writer, merely a "more experienced one".
Behind his comedy lurks an informed and eclectic intelligence references range from chaos theory to Victorian music hall. However, he was not impressed by his formal education. "I think the fault lay in the education system of the time. You had big classes of kids on a conveyor belt, and it went at a certain speed. If you didn't get on at the right point, you never got on at all. You were constantly trying to keep up. No one ever slowed down enough to explain some basic things, and it wasn't until fairly late in my school career that I began to break the surface."
Born in 1948 and brought up in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, he denies that he was a child of the Sixties "the Sixties happened to about 200 people living in London" although he also admits, "I might just have painted a few flowers on my moped."
After a spell in local journalism, he worked for a while as a spokesman for the Central Electricity Generating Board, apologising for nuclear energy. He wrote in his spare time and his first novel The Carpet People was published in 1971. The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, appeared in 1982. By 1987, he could afford to give up his day job to concentrate on writing, and the books began to appear at the rate of two a year. Addicts got used to their twice-yearly fix, so withdrawal symptoms began to kick in when no new Discworld novel appeared in May this year. What was going on?
The fact is that the success of the novels has spawned its own industry. There are figurines of the characters, two animated videos, audio books, maps of the The Discworld Mapp and its principal city, The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, T-shirts, graphic novels and even a concordance (The Discworld Companion). There are two CD-Rom games of baffling complexity and, for another 14.99, a guide on how to save your sanity by cheating your way through them both.
At the heart of all this activity is Pratchett. Because it is still run as a cottage industry, he finds it eating into his time: "It tends to spin on me an awful lot. If someone buys a Star Wars plastic light sabre and the end falls off, that nice Mr Lucas remains unperturbed. If something associated with the Discworld doesn't work, I've got to know about it. I find myself spending too much time as the ringmaster and not enough time as the clown."
His readership, supposed by the thoughtless to consist exclusively of 14-year-olds called Kevin, has expanded exponentially. His books regularly top both the hardback and paperback charts, and sales of his backlist are growing year by year. "I don't know what the start age is but let's say ten. A 10-year-old in 1982 could well have a 10-year-old child now," he reckons.
They're simply breeding?
Pratchett laughs. "There are all kinds of factors and I don't really know how to decide which are the important ones. I don't know what the typical reader is any more."
However, he adds that, to judge from his mail, at least half his readers are female, or rather "appear to be female. I don't require a doctor's certificate" and they span all ages.
And this is for a series in the genre of fantasy, traditionally treated with contempt by the literary establishment. The Discworld floats on the back of a giant turtle "somewhere in the multiverse". Its inhabitants include wizards, witches, trolls, demons, dragons, werewolves, vampires and zombies, "a multi-vital society", as he puts it. Its principal city, Ankh-Morpork is a Dickensian stew stripped of all sentimentality and the surrounding lands are feudal fiefdoms.
There has been so much bad fantasy writing that many would-be readers might be put off by this description, but initiates know that Discworld is really about us. And it contains some very sharp satire. Indeed, Small Gods embodies a critique of religion that would earn Pratchett his own fatwa if anyone should choose to take it personally. The books are also screamingly funny.
Pratchett says, "My humour is in an incredibly British tradition, which can probably be traced back to Jerome K. Jerome." That has not prevented the books from being translated into 26 languages. (It used to be 23, but the collapse of the Soviet Union upped the score.)
For some reason, he says, they seem to work best in Czech and Polish. The German translators have the most problems. "I get faxes asking me why this is funny and I say, 'God, I don't know'. Ultimately you say, 'Well, it's written by a bloke on this island. We had the Battle of Hastings and various other things happened and from this we developed a certain approach to the world and this is a mildly amusing sentence, but I can't really explain why.' English is designed to conceal meaning. German is designed for building precision-engineered motor cars."
The new novel, already top of the bestseller charts, wears its heart on its dust jacket. Jingo, as the title suggests, is about nationalism, xenophobia and their bloody consequences. War is brewing between Ankh-Morpork and the desert kingdom of Klatch, and only Commander Samuel Vimes and the City Watch can prevent it. This gives Vimes, a sort of Inspector Morse, only grumpier, opportunities to muse on human stupidity and the folly of war: "Thousands of men who might have quite liked one another if they had met socially would thunder towards one another and start killing..."
So is Vimes Pratchett's conscience? Pratchett is reluctant to be pinned down. "Vimes is a kind of exasperated liberal, a socialist of the kind that says, 'We gave the people a Utopia, and now all they're doing is watching television'." But he concedes, "Vimes often thinks for me but so does Granny Weatherwax, and for a witch, Granny Weatherwax has a remarkably Old Testament view of the universe."
Nevertheless, in all the books there is the sense that a kind of justice, however rough, will be served and justice can get very rough indeed on the Discworld. For its citizens, surviving means taking some hard knocks. Is this Tony Blair's "compassion with a hard edge"? "Tough on dragons, tough on the causes of dragons?" he laughs, then adds, "Experience tells me that people who are really out to do good often don't react too well if the people for whom they perceive they are doing the good don't respond in the way they feel they should. So it will be interesting to see how Mr Blair fares in the years to come. In any case, people liking politicians doesn't seem to me to be a natural state of affairs."
He takes issue with the critical sniffiness towards fantasy writing and makes a robust case for the genre. Citing legend, myth and folk tales, he calls it "the Ur-literature, from which, manifestly, all other literatures have evolved". He is happy to be called a fantasy writer "Tolkien had no problems defining himself as a fantasy writer" and rejects the alternative of "comic writer". "There is always this terrible devil's bargain held out to you, 'If only you'd say you're not really a fantasy writer, we'll allow you to play in the big street'. I think it is an honourable profession. But it is also true that I have a lot of readers who don't read other fantasy works."
Surely the Discworld novels are parodying fantasy? He disagrees. "People believe they are parodies, but they are not exactly parodies of anything. They are, as it were, platonic parodies."
What about, for instance, the 87-year-old barbarian hero, Cohen? "It is not so much a parody of Conan as the logical result of Conan. What actually happens to barbarians when they get old? I think it's a lot more fun if he has to go to the lavatory every quarter of an hour."
So, once their prejudices are set aside, where do new readers start? Pratchett's experience suggests several suitable "entry books", Mort, Wyrd Sisters, Soul Music and Guards! Guards!.
He says he would like to slow down a bit on Discworld. "I know where there are three more Discworld books," he says. "There'll be another in May. But I am actually planning a little holiday from Discworld after the next two to keep it fresh. I'll probably go back to children's books, because I particularly enjoy writing those."
Won't Discworld followers go ape? Pratchett thinks not. He says that most of the dyed-in-the-wool fans seem remarkably well balanced. He draws a lesson from this: "If you are prepared to allow a little craziness to enter your life on a regular basis, you'll never become truly insane. It's the people that sit staring at the television for 17 years that pick up a shotgun and go down the high street."
Happily, in a world teetering on the edge of insanity, Pratchett's novels are available, without prescription, from all good bookshops.
Jingo by Terry Pratchett, is published by Gollancz at 16.99 (ISBN 0 575 06540 0). To order ANY book, including those featured or reviewed in metro, call 0345 660916.
From Jingo by Terry Pratchett:
"VENI, VIDI, VICI." That was what the man was supposed to have said when he'd conquered . . . where? Pseudopolis, wasn't it? Or Al-Khali? Or Quirm? Maybe Sto Lat? That was in the old days when you attacked anyone else's city on principle, and went back and did them over again if they looked like getting up. And in those days you didn't care if the world watched. You wanted them to watch, and learn. "Veni, vidi, vici." I came, I saw, I conquered.
As a comment it always struck Vimes as a bit too pat. It wasn't the sort of thing you came up with on the spur of the moment, was it? It sounded as if he had worked it out. He'd probably spent long evenings in his tent, looking up in the dictionary short words beginning with V and trying them out . . .Veni, vermini, vomui, I came, I got ratted, I threw up? Visi, veneri, vamoosi, I visited, I caught an embarrassing disease, I ran away? It must have been a big relief to come up with three short acceptable words. He probably made them up first, and then went off to see somewhere and conquer it.
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