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When I was first recommended Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, I was told that it was a collection of mostly unconnected but highly amusing stories that happen to take place in the same universe. And... I guess that's a fair summary, at least for someone who's never picked one up, but it occurred to me today that it's also a total lie.
I've been skimming over some of the novels on the commute to and from work (that post I made a while ago about being free for the summer? Feel free to commence laughing now) and it seems ever more obvious to me that the Discworld series is just that - a *series* - and in a more meaningful sense than just that they follow one after the other (after all, sometimes they *don't*).
Some of the Discworld books are more or less stand-alone, but more aren't. There are sequels with sequels, following characters that Pratchett (and many of his readers) continue to find interesting. Esme, for instance, or Vimes. Or Death. And there are certain... patterns to the shape of these Stories So Far. They're not just Yet Another Adventure Our Susan Had Last Tuesday, any more than Pratchett's scenes tend to be Just An Excuse For Some Snarky Observation About The World In The Form Of Humourous Dialogue.* They're building into Stories in their own right.
Perhaps this was obvious to anyone who'd read them in order, but for me it was a bit of a revelation. You can even guess where the stories are heading (inasmuch as Pratchett's foreshadowing can be trusted not to send us cheerfully down the wrong path like the traveller who asks for the truthful man's directions). There is a careful balance between Vimes and Vetinari that neither understands quite so well as they imagine. Everyone has their weak point, said an Assassin once, speaking of Death (whose granddaughter once remembered that something worrying will come of his). And if I can see the shape of Esme's story, so, one imagines, can she, and she will not go gentle into that denouement. The Discworld runs on narrativitum like ours runs on physics; which means that lives, on the Discworld, are *expected* to make a kind of narrative sense.
Discworld biographies must be much more satisfying than most of ours, really.
And now I wonder if this seeming inevitability may not be part of why the last few Discworld books - Going Postal, A Hat Made Of Sky, etc. - have only just touched on the more major reoccurring characters. There is, as any high school lit teacher will explain at length, only so much rising action that can fit in a plot until you naturally hit the crisis point, and after that, only so much climax can be sustained before the story rolls back to its side of the bed and falls asleep.
Because that's the problem with a truly satisfying story. No matter how epic or reaching or diverging it may be, it has to, eventually, have an ending.
Of course, there's another hand on which it's pointed out that the whole *point* of the Discworld is that it never runs out of stories, and also that I'm tired and possibly not making much sense. But honestly? As much as I love having new highly amusing novels to read every bunch of months, there's a part of me actively looking forward to the day that Terry Pratchett finds he's ran out of pages to write on that subject. It's the same part of me that's happy Mike Carey's Lucifer is nearing completion and that sat back with a sated smile when I'd made my way through Gaiman's Sandman archives.
There's another story, about a man who painted creatures so real he could never finish them, least they leap alive from the canvas. I've never really understood the moral, because I'm that certain type of fangirl, sometimes. Give me the thing and whole of the thing, that it will spark to life in my mind.
And, once we get on *that* note, I think the next logical step is sleep.
*With Footnotes
I've been skimming over some of the novels on the commute to and from work (that post I made a while ago about being free for the summer? Feel free to commence laughing now) and it seems ever more obvious to me that the Discworld series is just that - a *series* - and in a more meaningful sense than just that they follow one after the other (after all, sometimes they *don't*).
Some of the Discworld books are more or less stand-alone, but more aren't. There are sequels with sequels, following characters that Pratchett (and many of his readers) continue to find interesting. Esme, for instance, or Vimes. Or Death. And there are certain... patterns to the shape of these Stories So Far. They're not just Yet Another Adventure Our Susan Had Last Tuesday, any more than Pratchett's scenes tend to be Just An Excuse For Some Snarky Observation About The World In The Form Of Humourous Dialogue.* They're building into Stories in their own right.
Perhaps this was obvious to anyone who'd read them in order, but for me it was a bit of a revelation. You can even guess where the stories are heading (inasmuch as Pratchett's foreshadowing can be trusted not to send us cheerfully down the wrong path like the traveller who asks for the truthful man's directions). There is a careful balance between Vimes and Vetinari that neither understands quite so well as they imagine. Everyone has their weak point, said an Assassin once, speaking of Death (whose granddaughter once remembered that something worrying will come of his). And if I can see the shape of Esme's story, so, one imagines, can she, and she will not go gentle into that denouement. The Discworld runs on narrativitum like ours runs on physics; which means that lives, on the Discworld, are *expected* to make a kind of narrative sense.
Discworld biographies must be much more satisfying than most of ours, really.
And now I wonder if this seeming inevitability may not be part of why the last few Discworld books - Going Postal, A Hat Made Of Sky, etc. - have only just touched on the more major reoccurring characters. There is, as any high school lit teacher will explain at length, only so much rising action that can fit in a plot until you naturally hit the crisis point, and after that, only so much climax can be sustained before the story rolls back to its side of the bed and falls asleep.
Because that's the problem with a truly satisfying story. No matter how epic or reaching or diverging it may be, it has to, eventually, have an ending.
Of course, there's another hand on which it's pointed out that the whole *point* of the Discworld is that it never runs out of stories, and also that I'm tired and possibly not making much sense. But honestly? As much as I love having new highly amusing novels to read every bunch of months, there's a part of me actively looking forward to the day that Terry Pratchett finds he's ran out of pages to write on that subject. It's the same part of me that's happy Mike Carey's Lucifer is nearing completion and that sat back with a sated smile when I'd made my way through Gaiman's Sandman archives.
There's another story, about a man who painted creatures so real he could never finish them, least they leap alive from the canvas. I've never really understood the moral, because I'm that certain type of fangirl, sometimes. Give me the thing and whole of the thing, that it will spark to life in my mind.
And, once we get on *that* note, I think the next logical step is sleep.
*With Footnotes
