by Craig Cabell
(I Shall Wear Midnight)
If we recognise this deeper magic alongside Pratchett’s ability to see more in his garden, to stop and reflect just that one iota more, then we observe that it is his maturity as a writer that has fuelled the deeper perception of Tiffany Aching and the people of the Discworld. He has made them grow up too. Too quickly? Probably not, but the onset of Alzheimer’s would make him aware of his own mortality and could press him closer to the culmination of certain story arcs, such as the end of the Tiffany Aching series with I Shall Wear Midnight.
There is a clear way forwards at the end of the Tiffany Aching quartet. She is a witch of a large area now. Her time isn’t her own. She muses about marriage and notes that many witches didn’t get married because they didn’t have the time, and the ones who did (with the exception of Nanny Ogg) only dealt with herbs thereafter. One could say that this is a good parallel to many career women in the modern world, but when Pratchett announces that ‘Witches were definitely women’, one can cast a thought back to Esk and wonder where that conformity came from.
Witches are a breed apart. They are different from other people: they hold secrets, they are needed in times of great sorrow and great joy, and that leads us back to the priesthood. The people of the Chalk needed a witch and so Tiffany Aching decided to become one. Was it really her calling, or was it something she just fell into? Ask a thousand civil servants in the real world and work out the answer yourself; people don’t necessarily adopt the Civil Service as their first-choice career, not unless they are destined for great things. But Tiffany flies high in the sky where no one can see her tears. She wakes from a nightmare and we learn of the Darkness of family life: Mr Petty got drunk, Mrs Petty ran from the house screaming because Mr Petty beat his daughter so hard she lost her baby… and Mr Petty’s hands had bunched up because he always thought with his fists not his mind.
So Mr Petty was very bad and very wrong, but his daughter was only 13. Should she have been pregnant in the first place? The response to all this is scary and not for any child to understand: ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was too young for a bit of romance, but young enough to be beaten so hard that she bled from places where no one should bleed?’
In his Author’s Note, Pratchett admits that the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things. I Shall Wear Midnight comes from some of those real things, things that are whispered in corners and not spoken of openly. In the book, Tiffany Aching responds to prejudice, to meddling in things she shouldn’t. She deals with bad people and levels of evil and cruelty. All that is at the very heart of the story. It is a book about facing up to the Darkness and doing something about it, and when people do that they question whether they are wrong or right for making the decisions they make. There is never a clear-cut answer, and ultimately Tiffany Aching feels the same way. She ends up a witch of power, but at what cost?
Is there a purpose to all the heartache? In Eric – an early novel in the series – when Rincewind witnessed the birth of the Discworld, it appeared to have a purpose, somewhere for the great turtle to swim towards. I love this idea, because it gives purpose to the creature, something that justifies its single-minded flight through the heavens. There was a purpose with The Light Fantastic and there should be further purpose. The greater canvas of the Discworld needs tightening, but does it need a purpose and an overall direction for the people who live there? A meaning to life? As if the world and all its people were created for a wonderful purpose? And there we find our way back to God, which doesn’t sit well with the series’ creator. It is the randomness of the Discworld that works, the layers of importance and uselessness, because that echoes reality on its grandest canvas. One shouldn’t think of Discworld in comparison to the fantasies of other writers; one should look upon it as something more free-form and as unfathomable as everyday life. The closest comparison I can give is Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series, where characters drop in and out of each other’s lives over a course of years to small or large extents, but there is a greater synergy to the series because it echoes the free-form day-to-day lives of everyday people, the observations that are nothing but recorded vignettes of custom and desire.
What am I ultimately saying about the Discworld series? That it shouldn’t have been for children. Fantasy should have been the genre and adult themes should have been the backbone to a revealing parallel world of Darkness and the macabre. In a way, Pratchett couldn’t shake Uncle Jim from his Bucks Free Press days, or maybe even before that and the work he presented to his peers at school. Discworld has struggled to offer books ideal for children. Animated versions have been successful, even comic book adaptations, because they water down the detail somewhat and make them more palatable for youngsters. There have been successful books for children such as The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and The Wee Free Men (especially the illustrated edition), but on the whole the core audience starts at the teenage years, the exact age of some of the main characters in the books, who are also making key decisions in their own lives. That’s where the magic of Discworld really begins and the self-teaching starts, a self-teaching that lasts throughout one’s lifetime.
‘Harry kept smiling, and waving, even though it was like a bereavement, watching his son glide away from him…’
JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)
There is a Bruce Springsteen line in the song ‘Two Hearts’ (from the album The River) that says that people grow up to dream again. Perhaps another side to fantasy isn’t just the instruction of moral duties to children, it is the reminder to adults to remember those teachings and pass them on to the younger generation themselves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Writing for Children
‘Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.’
GK Chesterton
If Terry Pratchett had never created the Discworld series, he would still be a celebrated children’s writer. When adults contemplate Pratchett novels for children, they often say ‘Aren’t they really for older readers?’, referring to the Discworld series. As we’ve discovered, many of the Discworld novels are not for young children, but there are some obviously fine children’s books that don’t get confused by the Discworld, such as the Bromeliad trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell trilogy and Where’s My Cow?
Where’s My Cow? was a children’s picture book released alongside the Discworld title Thud! In Thud! the character of Sam Vimes reads his child a bedtime story about a lost cow and how she is found by her owner. (As this story is mentioned in Thud!, it provides a new story within a story before The Tales of Beedle the Bard from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.) It is a short, beautifully illustrated book and a complete departure from anything Pratchett had done before. It also showcases his passion for fine illustrations, with several illustrators contributing to the work.
The Bromeliad trilogy is made up of Truckers (1990), Diggers (1991) and Wings (1991). The stories tell of a race of Nomes, who find out that they originally came from another planet and decide that they want to return to it.
The Bromeliad trilogy title is built partly from Homer’s The Iliad and partly from Bromeliaceae tropical herbs (history and a love of gardening coming into play again). As with the first Discworld titles (or flat world novels if we include Strata), we witness a set of books written closely together and dealing with the ongoing adventures of a certain group of characters, in this case Nomes. This concentrated effort of writing a short series of books back to back was repeated with the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. There is a connection between the Bromeliad trilogy and the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, as Truckers was set in Johnny’s home town of Blackbury (a town first invented in the Bucks Free Press), so again we can see interlocking themes, characters and locations spread across different series of books and short stories, which allow different themes to be explored with some familiarity.
The
Johnny Maxwell trilogy is one of the most celebrated in Pratchett’s canon. The books instantly appeal to children, especially boys around their teenage years, because the characters are essentially of a similar age. Pratchett has said that the books are very loosely based upon Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, in a 1990s, updated type of way. I don’t necessarily agree with this as Johnny is a highly moral young man with special powers of perception, but his mixed bag of friends do evoke the rough-diamond aspects of the William stories: Bigmac (named for obvious reasons), Yo-less (because he never says ‘Yo’ and is uncool for a black kid) and Wobbler (because of his weight he wobbles when walking) are the main reprobates.
We first meet the characters in Only You Can Save Mankind, a highly moralistic tale from the birth of the computer game era.* In the story, Wobbler is a computer game enthusiast who plays a game once, works it out, occasionally changes its rules and manoeuvres, and then passes it on to friends to completely baffle them. Johnny Maxwell believes he’s been given a Wobbler special when the aliens in a game called Only You Can Save Mankind suddenly surrender and beg him to stop killing them.
The thing I love about this book is its pre-empting of the escalating violence in computer games that dominates teenage children’s lives today. Only You Can Save Mankind was released in 1992 and demonstrates the birth of the violent, gun-obsessed warfare games of the new millennium, although reference is also made to a violent gun movie of the 1970s, Dirty Harry, with the amended catch-phrase: ‘Go ahead… make my stardate.’
The second Johnny Maxwell novel, Johnny and the Dead, was conceived before Only You Can Save Mankind, but Pratchett wanted to write Mankind first because he thought somebody else would do it.
Johnny and his friends are credible characters teetering on the outbreak of their teenage angst. They have endemic childhood problems, such as parents going through a divorce (known as ‘trying times’), older and more reckless siblings, and a love of fast food and talking nonsense, but the nonsense leads somewhere, especially for Johnny. He has an extra layer of perception – he can see into things others can’t – and his friends accept that about him, enjoying the thrill of their adventures with him.
Perhaps the most important part of the book is when Bigmac escapes certain death after Johnny diverts him away from joyriding a stolen car. The fright experienced by the boy is perfectly pitched and really brings home one of life’s harsh lessons, especially when Bigmac sees his dead friends and is violently sick. He knows he would have been killed if Johnny hadn’t arrived to steer him away from their influence, and therein lies an important life lesson for younger readers.
Despite his extra perception, we learn that outwardly Johnny Maxwell is just an average-looking lad. When he meets Kirsty (a highly competitive female), she remembers a chance meeting in a games shop with Johnny’s friends but she doesn’t remember him being with them. This is where Johnny teaches her some vital life lessons, such as you don’t always have to be highly competitive, or shoot first and ask questions later. He teaches Kirsty that there is much to be respected in taking more of a back seat in life.
‘“… I’ve spent a week trying to Save Mankind in my sleep! It’s always people like me that have to do stuff like that! It’s always the people who aren’t clever and who don’t win things that have to get killed all the time! And you just hung around and watched!”’
(Only You Can Save Mankind)
Only You Can Save Mankind is a book about growing up, seeing the truth behind the lie, or the consequences behind the action. Johnny and Kirsty are two extremes – she’s probably too competitive while Johnny isn’t competitive enough – but Johnny’s laid-back style gives him the opportunity to see more deeply into the world around him. That’s where his extra layer of perception comes from – he picks up the stone of life and takes a good look underneath. He doesn’t just walk past it and ignore it, or not see it at all.
Johnny and the Dead is an extension of Only You Can Save Mankind. Johnny is now living with his mother and grandfather after the divorce of his parents, and it is here that he contemplates one of the biggest decisions of any adolescent’s life: what is he to do when he grows up? He says that what he wants to be ‘is something they haven’t got a name for yet’. This is such a relevant explanation for Pratchett himself nowadays: a man who has changed direction in life because of the diagnosis of an illness and his confrontation of it.
‘You can’t just hang around waiting for great futures…’
(Johnny and the Dead)
So is there an element of the 12-year-old Terry Pratchett in Johnny Maxwell? Quite possibly. It is said that many great writers have a direct channel back to their youth, and by writing such credible teen novels Pratchett has clearly shown that. Only You Can Save Mankind was a good opening to the Maxwell trilogy but the next two novels were a considerable step up and explored important themes relevant to this book.
‘“Never let superstition get in the way of rational thought…”’
(Johnny and the Dead)
With the second Johnny Maxwell novel having dead people as supporting characters, the inevitable question of what happens after death rears its head. Although this is not overplayed, it does provide a gentle pause for thought when one remembers the car-crash scene in Only You Can Save Mankind.
The basic story of Johnny and the Dead is Johnny learning that the local cemetery is being demolished to make way for a new development and the local residents (i.e. the spirits in the cemetery) don’t like the idea and want to do something about it. Johnny can see the dead, his friends can’t, and here the second Johnny Maxwell adventure begins.
Johnny is initially surprised that the dead don’t look like something out of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video – they’re just former human beings with, mostly, not so out-of-date principles.
‘“… it is… very difficult to know that outside the game there’s a room and outside the room there’s a town and outside the town there’s a country and outside the country there’s a world and outside the world there’s a billion trillion stars…”’
(Johnny and the Dead)
Pratchett’s ability to make the young appreciate the size of the universe is brilliantly simple, but this is the same way in which he makes them appreciate that the dead are not grotesque monsters wanting to eat your brains. They are former friends and family members; they are the predecessors of your neighbours, who were well known and not so well known; and they all lived and breathed and led full lives. It is thought-provoking to see how the different people in the cemetery met their fate. Some by accident, some through old age and some… well, that would be telling. There’s a wonderful school project in the making here: researching the ordinary people of your village or town and finding out how they lived and what they did for a living.
Johnny and the Dead breaks down the stigma of death for younger readers and shows that life is a fragile place we all occupy for the blink of an eye. It also seeks an answer to the human desire to progress – indeed, is progress a necessity? Is it always a good thing? When large companies come into a local area, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Good for jobs and attracting people from other towns to your area, but what about the small local businesses that have been in the town for generations? Will they be swallowed up or go out of business as a consequence?
‘“Too much has been taken away… You dug up the High Street. It had a lot of small shops. People lived there. Now it’s all walkways and plastic signs and people are afraid of it at night.”’
(Johnny and the Dead)
There are so many different ideas and moral levels to Johnny and the Dead. It is an underrated book – the best in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy – and it is certainly the one book that should be on any primary school essential reading list.
Another firm school favourite is Johnny and the Bomb, the culmination of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. Mrs Tachyon, a local eccentric encountered in Johnny and the Dead, is found semiconscious in an alley by Joh
nny and his friends. The more time they spend with her, the more they realise she isn’t as eccentric as they had initially thought and that she holds the key to different eras of the town’s past.
One such time is the Blackbury Blitz of 1941. It is here, lost in their own local history, that Johnny and his friends learn some important lessons, because they witness the consequences of their actions when they come forwards in time again. What they thought they were doing for the best really wasn’t. For example, if they try and stop a bomb from blowing up, different people will make different decisions in their lives and people who were due to meet and get married never will. And that’s just a part of the changes caused.
Johnny and the Bomb allows children to look at their local area in a different way. To suddenly see their present-day, cosy surroundings as a dangerous place under attack from fighter planes and falling bombs, and to understand that things were once very different from the peacefulness they now enjoy.
At the same time, Johnny and the Bomb is a fun book. The interaction between the main characters is heart-warming in its strength and commitment.
It is a shame that Johnny and his friends didn’t have any other adventures, because the stories, especially the second and third books, made children aware of local history and the consequences of their actions. Also, one would dearly like to know if Johnny’s powers stayed with him throughout his life, and, indeed, what career path he would eventually follow (as the question was asked within the series). It would have been nice to see him grow up and continue his adventures and see how his friendships with Yo-less, Wobbler and Bigmac matured. And with Kirsty making a return in the third book, after helping Johnny save mankind in the first book, would a relationship blossom?