Will we ever live to see a successful screen adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel? The Amazon television series Good Omens, which ended this month, came closest—but that book, a comedy about an angel and a devil teaming up to avert Armageddon, was co-written with Neil Gaiman, and the source material ran out after the first season in any case.
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Pratchett is the funniest English writer since P. G. Wodehouse, with a sharp, satirical edge disguised by the trappings of the fantasy genre—vampires, dwarfs, witches, and wizards. Many fans thought the original covers of Pratchett’s novels went too heavy on busty maidens and strapping men with big swords, undermining their literary merit, and a similar problem has beset the various screen adaptations from Sky and the BBC. I suspect that casual viewers can’t compute the idea of watching something with the comic tone of a Charles Dickens or Tobias Smollett novel while being distracted by CGI trolls.
To some extent, Good Omens bucked the trend because the chemistry between the lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, was so strong. (The pair enjoyed each other’s company so much that they even made a lockdown drama, Staged, filmed in their own houses with their own real-life partners.) But I worry that the persistent unfilmability of most of Pratchett’s work will mean that he fades out of public consciousness. At his peak, Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling novelist, but he died from early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015, and left clear instructions with his assistant that the hard drive containing his unfinished work should be run over with a steamroller. He therefore cannot be turned into the Tupac Shakur of fantasy literature, with his estate bringing out new novels to satisfy demand. So I’m begging people to try the existing canon.
The literary novelist A. S. Byatt once suggested that all 12-year-olds should be issued a Pratchett book to get them into the habit of reading. Pratchett had, she said, “caused more people to read books than anyone else—because he tells them something they want to know, that they can laugh at, and because he writes really good English.” As it happens, I was around 12 when I picked up my first Pratchett—Mort, the story of Death recruiting an apprentice to lighten his load of harvesting the souls of the departed. I loved it instantly. Pratchett’s gift was to blend deep philosophy and complete silliness. His answer to the question “What happens when we die?” is that everyone chooses their own path, and the wicked are stuck in hells of their own making. At the same time, he gives Death a white horse called Binky.
Mort is the fourth book in a long series set on a disc-shaped planet resting on the back of a sky turtle. I subsequently read the remaining 40 Discworld books—and most of Pratchett’s other work, including his early journalism. I have even read a biography of him, which suffered from the fact that Pratchett was happiest writing novels in his study, rather than, say, having doomed affairs or shooting his wife or having an intense relationship with bullfighting, like some other great male writers I might mention. Whenever someone asks me to recommend an author to read on a long flight, I suggest Pratchett. His books careen along on an unfurling narrative tide, making an eight-hour journey feel short. Some of the jokes will make you wince. Some require a working knowledge of classic films, Shakespearean tragedies, or Norse mythology. Some of them you will only get 20 years later.
[Julie Beck: Terry Pratchett’s joyful, absurd, human fantasy]
Where should you start? Not at the beginning. Pratchett took a while to warm up, and his first few Discworld books feature stock characters and a lot of sword-and-sandals pastiche. (One features a riff on Conan the Barbarian, called Cohen. The joke is that he’s old and wheezy, unlike the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger character.) Mort will take you neatly to the other books that follow the character of Death. Reaper Man, a reworking of the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday, is among the first Discworld novels to incorporate real pathos alongside the gags. That will lead you to a much later book in the series, Hogfather, which deals with Pratchett’s greatest theme, the power of stories to bend reality. In the book, Death learns that if children stop believing in the Hogfather, their version of Father Christmas, then the world will end. So when the Hogfather is kidnapped, Death has to fill in. Being a terrifying skeleton with very little understanding of human nature, he is not very good at it.
If you don’t want to commit to a series, then the best stand-alone novel is Small Gods, set in a theocracy, Omnia, where the state religion is enforced by a brutal inquisition. Despite all the violent bureaucracy devoted to worshipping the god Om, only one simple monk, Brutha, actually believes in him. In the book, Pratchett sketches a compelling account of the development of religion, beginning with “small gods” whispering to shepherds in the desert and competing with thousands of other minor deities for a simple altar made of stones, which they can trade up and up to a full-blown religion. You could meditate on the historical shift to monotheism by reading a weighty biography of Julian, the last non-Christian emperor. Or you could do it by reading Small Gods, which has jokes in it.
One of these relies on the reader knowing the difference between three ancient Greek schools of philosophy, so you can see why hard-core fans get annoyed when Pratchett is dismissed as a lightweight. (“His philosophy,” the narrator says of one character, “was a mixture of three famous schools—the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans—and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.’”)
Pratchett’s two greatest characters—his equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Hamlet—are Granny Weatherwax, a witch living in a remote mountainous kingdom called Lancre, and Samuel Vimes, an ex-alcoholic guardsman who unwillingly becomes duke of the Discworld’s biggest city, Ankh-Morpork. Neither of them has been successfully translated to the screen; Weatherwax featured in an obscure animated series in the 1990s, and the less said about BBC America’s The Watch, the better. As I wrote when the series aired, I knew it was a travesty when I saw that “Vimes, that hater of fuss and fanciness, is wearing eyeliner.”
Vimes and Weatherwax are clever, wary loners who can’t stop themselves from doing what is right instead of what is easy. Both are happy to be seen as intimidating, because they understand the value of mythology. In private, though, Vimes dotes on his wife and baby son, and Weatherwax eventually acquires a white kitten that she lets sleep inside her pointy witch’s hat. Pratchett uses both characters to explore the gap between true leadership and mere politicking, suggesting that societies need ideals of justice but frown on the people who step up to enforce them. “Discworld is not about how to be good, but about how to do good, and why even the smallest acts of kindness matter,” the New York Times Book Review columnist Olivia Waite wrote last year, nominating Pratchett as an “essential” author alongside Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin. “Empathy—like humor or creativity or hope—is a muscle. You don’t train for a marathon by running around the world: You start with small distances and work your way up.”
Pratchett’s politics are not easy to pin down. He was strongly opposed to abuses of power, exploitation, and dumb aristocrats who looked down on working people. One of his most famous passages, from Men At Arms, explains why it’s so expensive to be poor:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This “Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness” has since been adopted by anti-poverty campaigners. One created a “Vimes Boot Index” to track price hikes in staple foods. “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work,” Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, told The Guardian. “One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch—a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him.”
At the same time, Pratchett was not an anarchist—Vimes is a policeman, which is depicted as a heroic profession—or an identitarian. He uses the city of Ankh-Morpork to explore the energy and dynamism of cultural mixing, but also the violence and distrust that can accompany it. (The trolls and dwarfs have a particularly fractious relationship.) He also takes shots at obsessive left-wing activists, personified by the zombie Reg Shoe, who is so committed to giving out socialist leaflets that he simply refuses to die.
[Sophie Gilbert: The heaven and hell of Good Omens]
Pratchett’s work is a hectic jumble, rich and rewarding, endlessly varied and surprising. Writing this article has prompted me to revisit Moving Pictures, a book in which the invention of cinema threatens the fabric of reality. It was written in 1990, but its lessons are equally applicable to the modern internet, with its AI deepfakes, Russian-backed propaganda, and paid political influencers. New generations of readers deserve to learn of the book, even if Moving Pictures never becomes a movie.
Imagine how much J. R. R. Tolkien’s reputation would have suffered if we had only Amazon’s tepid The Rings of Power and not the Peter Jackson films. And observe how HBO is remaking Harry Potter as a television series, now that the Millennial viewers of the original films are parents themselves. (A fresh audiobook, with a full cast rather than a single narrator, was also released last year.) And recriminate with me about The Seeker, the ham-fisted movie version of Susan Cooper’s sublime The Dark Is Rising, which killed the idea of adapting the rest of her five-novel fantasy series stone-dead. Pratchett could easily suffer the same fate, and fade from public view. All I can say is: not if I have anything to do with it.