The idea of Death as a person, or at least a conscious entity, is ancient, of course. Death has turned up in stories for centuries, and is still turning up, in everything from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy on the Cartoon Network, from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. The traditional representation has always been a tall, skeletal figure in a dark robe, so of course that’s the form Death takes on the Disc—Discworld is home to every fantasy cliché, after all, and this is just one more. A seven-foot scythe-wielding skeleton in a black robe, bearing an hourglass and riding a great white horse through the sky—this is very much the classic figure of Death as he’s been seen in western civilization at least since the plagues of the fourteenth century.
But this is Discworld, so when we look close, some of the details that aren’t in the traditional tales turn out to be somewhat skewed. For example, the big white horse is named Binky.
Somehow, I doubt that anyone else ever gave Death’s horse a name like Binky; not even Neil Gaiman, who represented Death as a perky goth girl, would have done that.
Death in Discworld is not quite the standard model in other ways; traditionally Death has been depicted as heartless, implacable, a cold and unfeeling monster, but Pratchett’s creation is instead a working man who takes pride in his craft, and rather likes people—though he doesn’t understand them.
That’s one of the more interesting conceits Mr. Pratchett has come up with—Death is not bound by time or space, he exists in a higher reality than that perceived by mere humans, he never has very much contact with people,162 so he doesn’t really grasp how we think. He tries, since after all we’re part of the job, but he just doesn’t quite get it.
In a way, it’s very similar to Arthur Weasley in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, whose job is devoted to dealing with muggles (non-magical people). He handles muggle technology all the time, but because he himself has lived his entire life in the wizarding world, he really doesn’t grasp how muggles think, or how the muggle world works. Even when he thinks he does, he gets the details wrong.
Likewise, Death gets the details wrong. He knows that a home should have a bathroom with towels in it, but he hasn’t entirely grasped why, or what towels are for, so he’s furnished his own home with a bathroom, and towels—but the towels aren’t soft or absorbent, they’re stiff and hard.
This is an amusing concept for a character, but it’s not really an easy one to get a story out of. Death does his job, and it goes on constantly , day in and day out, and where’s the story in that? Generally, Death shows up when a story has just ended, not when it’s about to begin.
The most obvious way to use Death in a story is as the villain, the menace to be defeated, as Bergman did in The Seventh Seal, but that’s been done, and it’s really not very entertaining anymore.
Another approach is to look at what happens if Death doesn’t do his job, day in and day out, as in the classic movie Death Takes a Holiday, or the more recent Meet Joe Black. But that, too, has been done, though Mr. Pratchett does do a sort of variant on it in passing in Reaper Man.
But—well, most of all, Death is someone doing a job. What can happen to a working man other than a normal day, or a day off?
He can train an apprentice, of course, with an eye to eventual retirement—someone to pass the family firm to. That gave us Mort.
He can be laid off by his bosses, replaced with a younger, less-experienced worker; that gave us Reaper Man.
He can have a bad day at the office, when things get a little crazy; that gave us Soul Music.
He can find out about threats to his job, and try to head them off; that gave us Hogfather and Thief of Time.
The thing is, though, that even with the quirky personality Mr. Pratchett has given him, Death is a limited character. He’s not human, after all; he’s an anthropomorphic personification. He’s limited in what he can do, bound by rules that we mere mortals do not have, while at the same time he has powers far beyond ours, such as the ability to traverse time and space at impossible speeds. And just as he has trouble understanding us, we have trouble in getting inside his head and appreciating him as our viewpoint character.
This is why in Mort our viewpoint character isn’t Death, but the title character, his apprentice.
In Reaper Man, we have multiple viewpoint characters, but Death isn’t really one of them most of the time, even though he’s at the heart of the story; Windle Poons has far more “screen time.”
But then in Soul Music, we met Death’s granddaughter Susan, who provides the sensible human viewpoint for the reader to identify with, while still having Death’s concern with more cosmic matters. Susan has gradually taken over the series. She’s the protagonist of Hogfather, and one of the protagonists of Thief of Time, battling her grandfather’s old foes, the Auditors.
Death has the lead in “Death and What Comes Next,” and continues to make appearances throughout the various other series, but he hasn’t really been the star of a novel since Reaper Man.
So if the wizards’ series is primarily parodies of heroics and academia, and the witches’ series is about the need to stay in control of stories, what’s the central conceit of the Death series?
The need for compassion, I would say. In both Mort and Reaper Man, the real threat is that Death’s role will be taken by someone less suited to it, less compassionate, than the current Death. In Soul Music, the self-destructive nature of Music With Rocks In needs to be kept in check, and a personal tragedy needs to be accepted. In Hogfather and Thief of Time, it’s the Auditors’ schemes to rid the universe of the messy nuisance known as human life. Logically, Death perhaps ought to be a destroyer, a ravager, but in Discworld he’s a necessary part of the system operating in a restrained and rather kindly fashion; he wants life in general to continue, even if he’s responsible for the end of countless individual lives.
And Susan, of course, wants a great many individual lives to continue, including her own; she has rather more at stake than her grandfather, which is why she makes a better protagonist in most cases. She exists between the human world and the world of anthropomorphic personifications and interacts with both of them; she not only can deal with Death, but with the Hogfather, the Tooth Fairy, Old Man Trouble, and all the rest.
Not that she particularly wants to.
To some extent, the wizards deal with magic, the witches deal with stories, and Susan deals with belief.
She’s not the only one, though. Belief is a rather vital concern for the gods, after all. . . .
55
Gods and Philosophers: Belief and Reason
NO ONE SANE ON THE DISC denies the existence of the gods; Mr. Pratchett tells us the gods have a habit of coming round and smashing atheists’ windows. That isn’t to say, however, that everyone exactly believes in them, any more than everyone believes in the current U.S. president. They’re undeniably there, but that doesn’t mean that anyone’s putting any faith in them.
They’re quite a varied lot. The chief god of the Disc, at least at present, is Blind Io, who isn’t actually blind in the sense of being unable to see, he just doesn’t happen to keep any of his eyes in his head. He’s your basic thunder god, reminiscent of Jupiter or Zeus. Other popular deities include Offler the Crocodile-Headed God, the ichor-dripping Lovecraftian monstrosity Bel-Shamharoth, the sea-god Dagon, the wine-god Bibulous, Bast, Nuggan, Anoia, and of course Om, who spent virtually all of Small Gods in the shape of a small tortoise.
None of them created the Disc, though; the being responsible for that is simply called the Creator, and we met him in Eric: a workman doing his job, not some silly creature sitting on a mountaintop expecting to be worshiped.
FourEcks was apparently added later, by a different Creator, who may have appeared as the kangaroo Scrappy in The Last Continent. Again, he’s not one of the gods hanging out on Cori Celesti.
Lots of gods turn up elsewhere; the go
d of evolution has his bizarre island, as seen in The Last Continent, and in Small Gods we learn that some gods are reduced to near-nothings living in the desert, hoping a worshiper will stumble upon them.
Throughout all the various series, gods have popped up occasionally. Bel-Shamharoth got the first major role for a deity in “The Sending of Eight,” all the way back in The Colour of Magic, along with Fate and the Lady, and they’ve turned up here and there ever since.
Only a few stories focus on the gods and their priests, cults, and followers, though. “The Sending of Eight” does, to some extent, but it’s not until Pyramids that we get a story that’s actually about religion.
Even there, it’s not the gods themselves who are meddling with human affairs; it’s the ancient high priest Dios. He’s locked the entire kingdom of Djelibeybi into an endless, pointless round of rituals and ceremonies, where the supposed god-king is permitted to do nothing but play out his assigned role. It’s not the gods who are responsible for the kingdom’s sorry stagnant state; it’s their presumed followers.
Likewise, in Small Gods, the Omnian church is an oppressive, imperialist, totalitarian force—but Om himself is trapped in the form of a small tortoise, unheard by even his own priests, until Brutha saves him.
In between, Eric showed us the Creator, and the inhabitants of Hell, but just as a sidelight, not as a focus. Afterward, Interesting Times had Fate and the Lady back at their gaming, and The Last Continent had gods involved, but only rather incidentally. Om is not seen again, but his church reappears, represented by Constable Visit in various Watch stories, and by Mightily Oats in Carpe Jugulum. The edicts and followers of Nuggan are a major source of trouble in Monstrous Regiment. In a minor subplot in Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig uses religion as a cover, and Anoia, the goddess he credited with a miracle, appears in person in Wintersmith.
And of course, in The Last Hero, Genghiz Cohen sets out to return fire to the gods at their home, Dunmanifestin,163 atop the impossibly high peak of Cori Celesti.
Throughout all of this, though, the gods are really something of an irrelevancy. They don’t generally shape events; they simply stay up on their mountain, enjoying the worship. Even in Small Gods, it’s not Om, but Brutha, who transforms the Omnian church. Religion is supposedly directed toward the gods, but in practice it’s designed and administered by men, men like Dios and Vorbis and even Constable Visit.
And as with the stories the witches master, what Teppic and Brutha and Cohen do is to make sure that religion serves people, rather than people serving religion—that the priests are not permitted to treat their people as things.
The gods sometimes treat people as playthings, of course—in “The Sending of Eight” and Interesting Times and The Last Hero, the gods use people as game-pieces. They don’t pretend they’re serving any higher cause, though, and they recognize that they’re dependent on people, that without human worshipers they would be reduced to tiny voices crying in the wilderness.
In both Pyramids and Small Gods, the rigidity of the old religions is contrasted with the freewheeling argumentation of the Ephebian philosophers—but that philosophy is mocked, too. While not as smothering and deadly as religion, it’s still absurd and dangerous. The people of the Disc have a tendency to take things very literally, so the Ephebians don’t settle for thought experiments when actual experiments can be performed. All the theoretical musings of the ancient Greeks are considered by the Ephebians, but do not remain mere theorizing; instead, arrows and tortoises and bathtubs are brought out to test each hypothesis, but somehow fail to resolve many of the arguments.
Mr. Pratchett gives us a rather different and haunting take on the whole matter of natural philosophy in Chapter 21 of The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, with the tale of Phocian and his attempts to demonstrate the truth of the teachings of Antigonus.
And then of course there’s the mock-Asian philosophy of Lu-Tze in Thief of Time, where he tries to teach Lobsang Ludd the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite.
In every case, it’s not the source of the belief that matters, or the truth of it; what matters is how it’s used.
In Small Gods, the rebels in Omnia take “The Turtle moves!” as their rallying cry. Now, we know they’re right, Great A’tuin does indeed move, but does it really matter? How does the Turtle’s existence and movement affect anyone?
It doesn’t. All it means is that the Omnian Church is wrong about something, and that’s enough, because the Church claims to be infallible. If it’s wrong about anything, it might be wrong about everything. It’s not important that the Disc is atop a cosmic turtle; what’s important is that the Church says it isn’t. The Omnian Church claims perfect certainty, and uses that as the justification for torture, murder, and war.
In Djelibeybi, Dios and his priests also claim to know everything they need to know. They aren’t as brutal as the Omnians, but they aren’t doing the kingdom any good, either.
In Ephebe, while each philosopher may claim to know the Truth, no one believes them, and they’re constantly arguing with each other. There’s no certainty at all—and they’re freer, happier, and wealthier than Omnia or Djelibeybi, because they’re willing to try anything and see what works.
This isn’t merely a difference between religion and philosophy, because Phocian is not relying on religious dogma in his experiments. He is, however, guilty of excessive certainty—he knows Antigonus must be right about horses, and sets out to prove it, and refuses to accept the results when he instead disproves it.
The Reformed Omnian Church gives up its claim to utter certainty, and Omnia becomes a healthier, happier place—but it’s not all sweetness and light, as we see in Carpe Jugulum, where Mightily Oats struggles with his faith. Certainty can be comforting, even when it’s wrong, even when it’s oppressive; most people don’t like not knowing.
So while in general Mr. Pratchett seems to be arguing that utter certainty is a dangerous thing, he acknowledges that doubt isn’t especially enjoyable.
And having made that point, well, we haven’t seen much more on the subject.
56
Sir Samuel Vimes and the City Watch: Who Watches the Watchmen?
HE DEDICATION TO GUARDS! GUARDS! reads:
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the T Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No-one ever asks them if they wanted to.
This book is dedicated to those fine men.
That is to say that while Discworld had already moved beyond simple parody into rather deeper satire by the time this series was launched, it hadn’t yet moved too far from its roots. Guards! Guards! has a very standard fantasy-novel plot in many regards—the long-lost heir has come incognito to the city his ancestors ruled, where he is to fight a dragon to establish his claim to the throne. The Night Watch’s intended role in all this is to be useless. In any normal fantasy novel, they would either flee, or die, or stand helplessly on the sidelines. Their job is to rush in and die, or to run away. It’s a long-standing tradition, dating back a couple of centuries—at least as far as Alexandre Dumas pére, probably to Sir Thomas Malory. These are the Saracens whose corpses Roland stacked like cordwood, the Cardinal’s Guards who d’Artagnan dispatched so easily, the night watchmen young Conan kayoed or gutted or garotted in the City of Thieves. They don’t usually even get names, let alone faces, families, or personalities.
And the entire premise of the Watch series is that there’s one of these men who takes his job seriously, who’s smart enough not to get killed, and who’s stubborn enough not to run away. He refuses to fulfill his traditional role as nothing more than a minor impediment to be brushed aside by his betters; he has a job to do, and by the gods he’s going to do it, whether anyone wants him to or not.
That man is Samuel Vimes.
There are several interesting twis
ts on this. It’s traditional that the feckless guardsmen are working for a tyrant, and Sam Vimes is indeed in the service of a tyrant—but Lord Vetinari isn’t an evil tyrant. He’s not particularly corrupt, he’s not sadistic, and most of all, he’s not stupid. He keeps Ankh-Morpork running more smoothly than it has in centuries. We’ve seen the Patrician now and then ever since the series began, but it’s in the Watch stories that he really comes into his own. It was necessary for the plot of Guards! Guards! to work that the tyrant had to be preferable to the lost royal heir/hero; he had to be someone who deserved to have Sam Vimes defending him—but he still had to be a tyrant.
That’s a tough role to fill, but Mr. Pratchett was up to the job, and the result makes Havelock Vetinari one of the great characters of the series, and really, one of the most entertaining characters in all of fantasy. He’s a ruler so Machiavellian that he makes Niccolò Machiavelli himself look like a hot-headed fool.
Of course, Vimes himself is an even better character.
He, too, presented a challenge. He had to be someone who would wind up in the despised City Watch, and who would stay there; he couldn’t be a Hero With A Destiny himself, as that would ruin the whole point of the exercise.
But he couldn’t just be the standard cannon fodder, either. He couldn’t be the guy who rushes into the room in Chapter Three, only to be taken out by a slash of the hero’s sword. He couldn’t be the guy who flings down his sword and runs when the monster appears.
There are actually several ways this could be accomplished, but the one Mr. Pratchett chose was to give us a man for whom protecting the city from itself is a vocation, a calling, not just a job—that’s why he’s in the Watch.
But the Watch is generally considered worthless, so he’s a man sunk in despair, anger, and self-hatred, and when we first see him, he’s lying in the gutter, drunk. The conspirators who want to supplant Lord Vetinari could not possibly see Vimes as a threat at that point.
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