What Mickey Mouse clarified about Pratchett
Rereading all the Discworld books in order, I recently finished the eighth in the series, Guards! Guards!, and I’d say this is the book where Pratchett finally found the Discworld soul I remember from my adolescence. I’ve got to admit that after reading the first two, I was a bit sceptical. As a teenager and into my 20s, I read most of them, and I loved them all. That’s at least how I remember it. So I was wondering if I’d simply outgrown them. Or if I just had a Twoflower-coloured nostalgic memory of myself in bed late at night, reading in the dark, just a few more pages, just a few more pages. But no, Guards! Guards! was exactly the Terry Pratchett I remembered. The first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, focused a bit too much on parody of classic fantasy tropes, which, in retrospect, I can see is what “triggered” my younger self to get into the series to begin with. And then they had Rincewind and the Luggage, which are still among my favourite characters. I guess the PC game also helped with that. Anyhow, I’m always up for a good parody, but now, when I reread the first two, they felt slightly “sketchy.” But I pushed through and discovered that octarine soul.
I still have a few more books to go before I get to my favourite one, Soul Music.
If I were to list a top 5:
- Guards! Guards!
- Reaper Man
- Soul Music
- Interesting Times
- Unseen Academicals
While we’re at it, let’s do a top 5 characters list too:
- Death
- Captain Carrot
- The Luggage
- The Librarian
- Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler
Special mentions: Rincewind & Hex
That question of finding a voice, and more specifically of character development, also turns up in the Walt Disney biography by Neal Gabler that I’m currently reading, as part of one of those side quests life hands you, this one via The Chicago Exposition and the Sideshow. Where I am now, around 1933, they’re struggling with Mickey Mouse. He’s a victim of his own success. Initially he was a bit more mischievous, but success turned him into both a role model for children and the corporate mascot, a hero and a do-gooder. Once that happened, they couldn’t really change him back. That also explains a lot, because I’ve always found Mickey Mouse a bit bland, and it’s only now, while reading this biography, that I’ve gone back and watched some of the early rubber-hose animations. Whereas in the Discworld case, I think the characters were more or less on target from the start, and stayed that way. My problem with the first books now is the storytelling, which wasn’t quite there yet.
Lesson learned here: just push through. Maybe by the eighth try, all the pieces of the puzzle finally come together and you hit the sweet spot.