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According to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, Death is a reassuring figure who rides a winged horse called Binky and says things like: `I don't know about you but I could murder a curry.' Speaking in defense of the Harvester of Mankind, Terry says: `The convention that you cannot introduce gods or natural forces into storytelling is a comparatively recent one. Anyway, Death is good at his job. He'd like to understand human beings. He's doing his best.'
By disregarding the conventions of novel-writing whenever it suits him, Terry Pratchett has developed his own distinctive form of humour and gained a dedicated following. In fact every book he has written over the last five years has reacher number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list - a trend which looks certain to continue with Soul Music, his newly published paperback.
Soul Music again demonstrates Terry's wide comic repotoire, from devious word-play to elaborately constructed slapstick routines. But the finest moments are reserved for his wildly surreal footnotes: `A stand-up comedian has a whole armory of techniques he can use,' Terry explains. `The author has fewer. So I use the footnote as a delayed drop. The reader has to take his eye off the page, then move it down. That's timing.'
Terry describes his Discworld books (set on a flat, circular planet carried through space on the back of four enormous elephants balanced on a giant turtle) as `yarns with a fantastical flavour'. His intention is always that the humour should serve the storyline, rather than the other way around. For example in Soul Music Terry chronicles the birth of rock 'n' roll in Ankh-Morpork, the first city of Discworld, and the impending death of the druidic harpist, Imp y Celyn (`Bud of the Holly'). The result is an oddly touching rites-of-passage novel, in which Death's granddaughter Susan enters the family business and faces up to her deadly responsibilities.
The beauty of Soul Music is that if you miss one humourous reference, there's always another along in a minute. `You'd have to be a very strange person to get all of the jokes,' Terry admits. `But I hope you'll get between 80 and 90 per cent, and the ones you don't get, you won't actually notice are there.'
Discworld novels are often labeled `fantasy', though a a more accurate description might be `parallel reality'. Take the city of Ankh-Morpork. Unlike the traditional fantasy landscapes, this is a working city, complete with slaughterhouses and sewers. Its inhabitants are more likely to weld girders than to make faerie rings. And while their occupations may be witches, wizards, trolls or vampires, their preoccupations are recognisably human.
Terry freely admits to raiding not just folklore but also popular culture for story ideas which have enduring appeal. "For instance, Men At Arms deliberately includes every cliché from every cop movie that anyone's ever seen," he says. "These patterns survive precisely because they capture the imagination."
Semi-seriously, Terry cites the film Robocop as an example of storytelling with a strong "underlying mythology": "There they introduced a character even better than Death -- incapable of relating to human beings, but with the additional sense of loss from having been one once. Then they went and messed it up. Robocop II was nothing more than a lot of special effects!"
More often than not, though, having introduced these timeless story patterns, Terry joyfully sets about undermining them. So in Witches Abroad, we find Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick desperately trying to avert a happy ending, and questioning whether it really is such a good idea for a servant girl to marry a prince she hardly knows.
Although Terry Pratchett's characters feed off the continuing history of the Discworld, each book is complete in itself. Certainly, the author himself never lets facts get in the way of a good story, and even owns up to making minor mistakes: `The way I get around it is to say there are no inconsistencies in the books, although sometimes there are alternate pasts.'
Terry's chronicling of the Discworld is helped by the constant flow of correspondence from enthusiastic fans of all ages, including messages relayed on the Internet. `However it's a misconception to suppose that my readers are all 14-year-old boy's called Kevin,' he warns. `At least 50 percent are female. A very large proportion are old enough to be Kevin's mum. A small, yet significant proportion could even be his grandma or great grandma. And some of the Kevins of ten years ago are now qualified enough to be school teachers. So the whole audience has blurred.'
If there's a secret behind Terry Pratchett's massive appeal it's that he always appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself on the page. But, although his writing gives the impression of being spontaneous, it's deceptively skillful. Fantasy is simply the vehicle he uses to celebrate the absurdities of reality. Frankly, Earth is far more absurd than Discworld -- a fact that was brought home to Terry when he recently found himself in the non-fiction bestseller lists for his map of The Streets of Ankh-Morpork -- a fictional city!
It seems appropriate, then, that we should leave the final word to the librarian of Ankh-Morpork's unseen university -- an Orang-Utan -- who sums up Terry Pratchett's comic genius thus: `Ook'.
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