Esmerelda Weatherwax is the local witch for the town of Bad Ass, in the kingdom of Lancre, in the Ramtop Mountains. Her formal education is sketchy, but her intelligence and understanding of human nature are formidable.
Witches weren’t really mentioned in the first two books, but Equal Rites presents us with a great deal of detail on just how they operate on the Discworld, and sets the pattern that witches will follow throughout the rest of the series. Witches can do real magic, but are most effective when they know better than to use it; most of their power comes from seeing things as they are, rather than as how they’re assumed to be. Granny Weatherwax is the ultimate expression of this—which is why we eventually learn, in later books, that she’s Discworld’s top witch. In Equal Rites, she’s a highly respected practitioner of her art, but there’s no indication she’s that extraordinary.
The Witches of Lancre: The Series
This series is defined by the presence of Granny Weatherwax in a leading role, and the absence of Tiffany Aching. The witches also appear in the Tiffany Aching “young adult” series, but I consider that a separate series. This one includes:
Equal Rites Chapter 5
Wyrd Sisters Chapter 7a
Witches Abroad Chapter 14
Lords and Ladies Chapter 17
Maskerade Chapter 22
“The Sea and Little Fishes” Chapter 27
Carpe Jugulum Chapter 28
The series as a whole is considered in Chapter 53.
Granny and Esk share the lead in Equal Rites. A third character, Simon, a young wizard of exceptional promise who arrives at the Unseen University at about the same time as Esk, is also of major importance in the story, though he doesn’t appear until some way into the book.
Rincewind and Twoflower don’t appear. Cohen the Barbarian is nowhere to be seen, nor is there any mention of Hrun, Bravd, or the Weasel. This is, in fact, clearly not the same series as the previous two books at all—except that it’s still set on Discworld, and features more or less the same Unseen University we saw before.
A quick summary of the plot: Granny attempts to deal with Esk’s wizardly abilities by training her to be a witch, but alas, Esk’s magic is not witch’s magic, it’s wizardry. Granny recognizes the inevitable and sets out to deliver Esk to Unseen University, so that she can be trained as a wizard and learn to control her magic before she inadvertently does something truly dreadful with it. They have a few adventures along the way—not the swordfight-and-monster sort of adventures that would be there if this were another straightforward fantasy parody, but the sort of adventures a real girl might get into, such as slipping away from her guardian and falling in with bad company. They meet Simon and other wizards, and then arrive at Unseen University, where Granny’s letters asking for Esk’s admission haven’t even been taken seriously enough to be laughed at.
Granny and Esk do not give in easily, though, and when Simon unintentionally manages to stir up the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, Esk employs her wizardly magic and witch’s training to save the day, and thereafter is admitted to the University.
If anything in that is a direct parody of any other fantasy novel, it’s news to me, and I read a lot of fantasy. No, with this book Mr. Pratchett has shifted from parody to something else—satire, perhaps, though it doesn’t really seem to be that yet, or perhaps just plain comic fantasy. He’s begun the transformation of his Discworld from a collection of silly ideas borrowed from all over to an actual world, with its own consistent (if somewhat ridiculous) society.
It’s still about stories, though; it’s merely shifted from being about fantasy fiction to being about the stories people actually believe and use to arrange their lives. The wizards of Unseen University never say that female wizards are against nature, against the law, or against tradition, but that they’re against the lore—that is, that they’re not something that’s in all the stories about how the world works.
Yes, I know that it’s a pun, that in British English “lore” and “law” are far more similar in pronunciation than they are in my own American dialect, but still, why bother with such a pun, and repeat it so often? It’s clearly important, and what’s important about it is that Discworld is a world that’s shaped by stories.
In the first two volumes, there were certainly plenty of stories that affected the characters; Twoflower had become the Disc’s first tourist in response to the stories he had heard, Rincewind had heard all the stories about Bel-Shamharoth, Liessa was living out a story, everyone knew stories about Cohen, and on and on, but no one tried to make reality (thin as it is on the Disc) fit the stories, unless you count Twoflower’s frequent inability to see when it didn’t fit.
In Equal Rites, though, wizards consider it essential to obey the lore, and abide by the story.
Not that these are necessarily the same wizards we encountered before. Although Unseen University is important in all three volumes up to this point, the only characters from the first two books to appear in this one are the Unseen University’s Librarian, whom we saw transformed into an orangutan back in the early pages of The Light Fantastic, and Death himself—oh, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, if those count as characters.
Somewhere between volumes, Unseen University changed management; at the start of The Light Fantastic it was run by Galder Weatherwax, Supreme Grand Conjuror of the Order of the Silver Star, Lord Imperial of the Sacred Staff, Eighth Level Ipsissimus, and 304th Chancellor, while in Equal Rites the title is Archchancellor and Archimage of the Wizards of the Silver Star.68 The incumbent in that office is a man named Cutangle, and there are no mentions of all that unpleasantness that preceded his elevation to the post. Despite that, and despite the change in titles, since the Librarian is still there, and in orangutan form, it can’t have been that long since the messy events described in The Light Fantastic.
Admittedly, not all the wizards who were characters in The Light Fantastic survived the book, but it still seems a bit odd that we don’t see any familiar faces among the faculty. It’s almost as if Mr. Pratchett were not thinking of this as the next volume in a coherent series at all.
Perverse of him.
At any rate, at the end of Equal Rites we have Simon and Esk established at Unseen University, ready to continue their adventures. . . .
And we never see them again. Granny Weatherwax, on the other hand, does return, fairly often.
But not right away. The next book was Mort, and the series forked again—or a new series was launched, if you prefer.
For the next news on Granny Weatherwax, skip ahead to Chapter 7a. For Mort, and the launch of that third sub-series, read on.
6
Mort (1987)
AT THIS POINT IN THE SERIES, four volumes in, things are settling down to more or less their final form. The geography is fairly consistent, and the underlying attitude is not only firmly established, but stated outright a few pages in:
“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one.”
That’s reminiscent of Rincewind’s attitude in the first two books, but stated more directly and up front here. With this novel, we are definitely no longer in fantasy-parodying mode, but in the far more interesting realm of commenting on human beings—or, as Douglas Adams called it, life, the universe, and everything.
The storyline this time is both fairly simple and completely unlike any fantasy cliché: Death, the anthropomorphic personification we’ve met in all three previous books, takes a human boy named Mort as an apprentice.69 After a bit of a rough start, Mort starts to get the hang of the job, though he does screw up one assignment with potentially nasty results, and discovers that his master took an apprentice for much the usual reason any master takes an apprentice—to hand off the business and retire. Which is not what anyone else, including Mort, wants; there are, in fact, good reasons for ordinary people to not want Mort to take over.
Death’s adopted
daughter Ysabell, first encountered in The Light Fantastic, is a major character in Mort. Death’s home was also seen in The Light Fantastic, and is much the same here, though we get much more detail. We also meet Death’s servant, Albert, and Death’s horse, Binky, both of whom will be regular cast members hereafter.
Most of Mort’s problems revolve around Queen Keli of Sto Lat; for once, Ankh-Morpork isn’t a central location.
Death in the Family: The Series
Death appears in almost every story, but he and his family are central to these:
Mort Chapter 6
Reaper Man Chapter 13
Soul Music Chapter 20
Hogfather Chapter 24
Thief of Time Chapter 32
“Death and What Comes Next” Chapter 37
His granddaughter Susan appears to have gradually taken over the series, much as Snuffy Smith gradually took over the comic strip Barney Google, or the Fonz took over Happy Days from Richie Cunningham. For a discussion of the series as a whole, see Chapter 54.
Despite Mort’s bungling, matters get put to rights, of course—one thing the reader can rely on in a Discworld novel is that, while various characters may come to unfortunate ends, the story will conclude with Discworld as a whole carrying on much as it always has. The threatened catastrophe, whatever it may be, will be averted or survived or undone. In this case, Death takes his job back and finds Mort a new position.
Along the way, though, we learn a great deal about the metaphysics of the Discworld. In The Colour of Magic, we got to see Fate and the Lady playing games with the characters; here we see that the entire Discworld actually has a pre-ordained history, and that Bad Things Happen if it gets disturbed. This might be considered the first significant appearance of the effects of narrativium, one of the basic elements of the Discworld, the element that pushes events along the paths that make a good story.
Narrativium is why those threatened catastrophes are always averted, survived, or undone.
It’s not mentioned by name here, and won’t be for many volumes yet, but its effects are obvious. History—which is simply the story of everything—has a course laid out, and pushing it off-course, pushing against the narrativium, damages reality.
It could be argued that the first hints of the existence of narrativium were earlier, such as Granny Weatherwax pointing out in Equal Rites that million-to-one chances come in nine times out of ten, but it’s only in Mort that it first becomes a major force.
It could also be argued that this idea of preordained history has something to do with the History Monks, who won’t be introduced until Small Gods (see Chapter 15) and don’t really come into their own until Thief of Time (see Chapter 32), but that doesn’t seem to fit. No monks show up to help undo the damage Mort causes, so I think we need to put this down to narrativium—the need for a story to play out properly.
Story has been important all along, of course, but here it’s made explicit that story is the single most powerful force in the Discworld, that it influences everything that happens. To some extent, everything is predetermined—but not really, because stories allow for twist endings, alternate plots, and so on. It’s sometimes possible to derail a train of events, switching it from one story to another.
We also get further into questions about the nature of reality. These were mentioned in passing in the first two books, with such incidents as Rincewind finding himself briefly on a different plane70 in order to escape death, and in Equal Rites, where Simon’s studies endangered Discworld’s reality, but here we find Death (and sometimes Mort) becoming realer than the ordinary inhabitants of the Disc, with interesting consequences. It’s obvious that “real” isn’t an absolute in the Discworld, but something measured on a sliding scale—not only is reality thin on the Disc, it’s not distributed evenly.71
And where Equal Rites seemed almost to be deliberately avoiding links to the first two books, staffing Unseen University with unfamiliar faces except for the Librarian, Mort ties itself back in. When the action moves to Unseen University this time, Rincewind appears in exactly the role he had at the end of The Light Fantastic, and is clearly that same familiar character. He plays a small but significant part in the story. The Mended Drum, the tavern we’d seen in The Colour of Magic, is mentioned. The Patrician is mentioned, and the “One Man, One Vote” system explained, though this Patrician doesn’t quite match the description in The Colour of Magic.
If you ask me, this must be where the author realized that yes, he was writing a series, and that consistency can be a virtue in such an enterprise. Readers appreciate the little connections; it makes them feel smart, a part of the in-crowd, when they recognize a reference to previous volumes. It gives the whole thing an added touch of reality by demonstrating that these elements exist even when they aren’t part of whatever story’s being told at the moment.
You know, after four volumes, most series are starting to run out of ideas and momentum. Four books in, Discworld was just getting up to speed.
As Mr. Pratchett said in an interview, “By about book four, I discovered the joy of plot.”
At any rate, at this point Discworld has pretty much taken on its standard form, though it’s still well short of its eventual mature state, and we have three sub-series going, starring Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, and . . . no, not Mort, nor Ysabell, but Death himself. He’ll appear briefly in almost every book, but won’t play the lead again until Reaper Man, discussed in Chapter 13.
First, it’s back to Rincewind and the wizards.
7
Sourcery (1988)
AH, RINCEWIND IS BACK, ALONG with all the rest of Unseen University, as we return to a pre-existing series for the first time.
JL . It was already established that the eighth son of an eighth son is a wizard. Generally it ends there, since wizards are supposed to be celibate, but what would the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son be?
The answer is a sourcerer. The spelling is deliberate; where wizards use the Disc’s existing magical field, sourcerers generate their own magic, and lots of it.
Ipslore the Red, a wizard with ambitions unsuited to his position, deliberately sires eight sons in order to create a sourcerer, one who will do his bidding. He has the misfortune of dying while the boy, Coin, is still an infant, but doesn’t let that stop him.
In due time, Coin arrives at Unseen University, whereupon a great many university inhabitants—not including most of the wizards—flee for their lives, Rincewind among them. Rincewind falls in with Conina, a daughter of Cohen the Barbarian, and later with Nijel the Destroyer, a book-taught barbarian hero, and Creosote the Younger, Seriph of Al Khali. The Archchancellor’s hat, oddly reminiscent of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat,72 is also involved.
Frankly, at least to me,73 this book feels like a step backward. The humanity of Equal Rites and Mort has been cast aside in favor of pyrotechnics and parody. Several of the characters are surprisingly one-note. Al Khali is a parody of King Shahriyar’s capital in the Thousand Nights and a Night, combined with Xanadu from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and bits of a few other “Oriental” settings. Conina and Nijel are parodies of various sword-and-sorcery heroes. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear, to little purpose beyond some cheap humor.
Of course, lots of things appear in Discworld books solely for cheap humor, all the way through the series, so I suppose I shouldn’t cavil at that, but there doesn’t seem much more than that here.
In fact, the author himself agreed: “I went back a bit with Sourcery, because I knew the fans wanted more of Rincewind. I didn’t particularly enjoy writing Sourcery, but it stayed on the bestseller list for three months. And then I said, ‘Sod the fans, I’ll do what I like.’”74
At any rate, it’s not one of the highlights of the series, despite all the magic being thrown around. Once again, we have no continuity in the population of Unseen University other than Rincewind and the Librarian, though at least details such as the title of Archchancellor and
the description of the Tower of Art are now consistent. Whereas Equal Rites ended with the Archchancellor deciding to admit Esk and perhaps other promising females to the University, here Rincewind tells Conina that women are not permitted inside the gates—we’ve reverted to the earlier model. There’s no sign of Esk or Simon.
The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork appears again, albeit briefly, and this is where we first learn that he is the head of the Vetinari family. The name is a pun on Medici—the founders of the Medici family really were physicians, so I suppose one must assume that the Patrician’s ancestors really were veterinarians. Much later we’ll learn that as a boy Vetinari was called “Dog-Botherer,” so the name’s resemblance to “veterinarian” is obvious to the people of Ankh-Morpork; it’s not just a coincidence of pronunciation.75
Lord Vetinari’s description is starting to read more like the character as we’ll come to know him as in later books; his first appearance, in The Colour of Magic, was so unlike the later version that many readers have suggested that it was Vetinari’s predecessor, Lord Snapcase. However, Mr. Pratchett has explicitly denied this in interviews, instead attributing the dissimilarity to his own inexperience as a writer when he produced The Colour of Magic.
One thing about the high levels of magic thrown around in Sourcery is that it gives Mr. Pratchett a chance to write lots of descriptions of what amount to special effects—lights and sparks and colors splashing about, things melting, and so on. There’s quite a bit of this in the earlier books, and it occurs to me to wonder whether it might have something to do with his old job with the Central Electricity Generating Board; he probably spent some time imagining what could go wrong with power plants, and adapted it into his accounts of magic running loose. Once he left that job to write fiction full-time the descriptions became less common, though of course that might simply have been because he’d been there, done that, and felt no need to further repeat himself.
The Turtle Moves! Page 5