In the Discworld, anything is possible, which isn’t always a good thing. The human mind is a wonderful thing, a tool of creation or one’s own worst enemy. Like so many of Pratchett’s novels, Hogfather revolves heavily around the power of imagination. People like Death lived in the human imagination, and got their shape there, too. And he lived in a sombre land because the human imagination would be rather stretched to let him live somewhere nice with flowers. He’d got a scythe because agricultural people could spot a decent metaphor. Why bony? Because bones were associated with death. The shape of Death was the shape people had created for him, over the centuries. More, the chatty – almost confiding – tone is inescapably full of vibrant humanity that makes the reader feel at once complicit and (to an extent) sympathetic with whomever (or whatever) is being described. The colloquialism of Pratchett’s narrative voice is one of many things that makes the story come alive. But it was basically black, under a black sky, because this was the world belonging to Death and that was all there was to it. There were hints of tints, here and there a black you might persuade yourself was a very deep purple or a midnight blue. There was colour, in a sense, but it was the kind of colour you’d get if you could shine a beam of black through a prism. Skeletal fish cruising in the black waters of a pool, under black water lilies. Pratchett tells his tales using an omniscient narrator, and there’s no doubt that this voice belongs to no character but Pratchett himself.Īt the far end of the corridor was one of the very tall, very thin windows. However, one of the more consistent aspects of the books is the narrative voice.
Universally beloved as it may be, the Discworld series is notoriously uneven. Those books of his I’ve read, I’ve re-read again and again, taking the time to savour the deliciousness of the prose, the wryness of tone, the trademark humour that is at once delightful and poignant.
This should tell you much about the quality of the book itself, for rare indeed is an original story ‘adapted’ for the screen with so few alterations.įor me, reading Terry Pratchett’s work is not only a joy but an indulgence, too. Vadim Jean’s TV adaptation is superb: I watch it religiously every Christmas, struck each time by just how much of it – dialogue, stage directions, settings, narration, everything – is lifted directly from the source material. Of the quarter or so of the Discworld I’ve explored, Hogfather is my favourite. sent my true love back,Ī nasty little letter, hah, yes indeed, and a partridge in a pear tree-’
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