Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling

I like Harry Potter. This series quickly established itself as one of the most popular franchises of the century, spawning films, merchandise and, a true sign of success, Lego sets I was never lucky enough to own - but I refuse to bow to cynicism on this one; Harry Potter deserves every ounce of its success. The books are solid and entertaining, even quite dark at times, and while J.K. Rowling may not be one of the most skilled writers around, she is more than able to competently construct a story and put flesh on a bunch of characters. She has proven to be a capable, sincere author who can get the best out of her own ideas, and anyone who denies this can go an eat smug gruel in a cave somewhere - or else stay a while and hear me out, before responding with an essay all of their own.

          A brief run-down of the story is this: Harry Potter begins as a mistreated eleven-year old living under a regime of child abuse from his aunt, uncle and cousin, who are supposedly ‘looking after him’ since his parents died during his infancy. Despite all of his uncle’s efforts to prevent it, Harry discovers that he is a wizard – and that his parents too were wizards and that they had been murdered by a generic bad-guy: ‘Mister Sinister Dark Lord’ Voldemort. Now that Harry is the right age, he is able to leave the cruel hand of his adoptive family and go to Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry^TM, to begin his magical education amongst his own kind. Over the course of seven books Harry Potter matures, learns more about his hidden world, as well as a bunch of snazzy magical abilities, makes numerous friends and enemies, and comes face to face with Voldemort himself.

          Yet this overarching storyline is only of secondary importance. What sells Harry Potter is not just the protagonist’s involvement with his dark adversary, but the almost meaningless frippery that pads out the wider story. It’s the day to day lives of the characters themselves that keeps us reading; whether it is the bizarre lessons in magic that Harry and his friends are taught, or the malevolence of the cruel Professor Snape as he picks on Harry for no good reason, or the latest bloodthirsty monster that Hagrid the Gamekeeper has taken as a pet, that’s the stuff that always sticks in our memory as much as the actual plots themselves. There is one very good reason why this is the case...

It is because the characters are brilliant. Each and every one of them is a distinct entity, from Professor Dumbledore and the various teachers, all the way down through Harry’s classmates (of which there generally seem to be about ten), through to each member of Ron Weasley’s extensive red-haired family, and even touching on the strange incidental characters who populate Rowling’s marvellous mad micro world of wizardry. Part of this is due to the names; they’ve all got wonderful and memorable names, like Ludo Bagman, Rita Skeeter, and Cornelius Fudge, which help cement the identities of the characters in our memories as well as to give some small glimpse into their personalities, but this is just one minor aspect to take into account. The characters are good on their own merits; they have their own traits and quirks, their own place in the wider world, and tend to be three-dimensional creatures who successfully complement (and compliment) the story.

          Harry Potter himself is central to this end. He is always at the core of the story (being its eponymous hero), and undergoes significant character development over the course of his seven books, starting from a shy, modest child in the first book, gaining confidence to become a bit cheeky on occasion, getting quite teenagery and agsty for the bulk of the middle whilst he shouts at people in capital letters, and then having to grow up fast by the end; but it is his introduction that will always make him stand out from the crowd. Book 1, the Philosopher’s Stone (or the Sorcerer’s Stone as it was mistakenly dubbed in America) begins with the rather unpleasant Dursley family and their treatment of Harry as an unwelcome outsider. If there is anything to engage a reader’s sympathies for a character straight away, it is seeing that character’s unhappy childhood as an orphan living in the cupboard under the stairs of their Daily Mail frontline relatives who treat him as part punching-bag, part slave, and part wood-rot-in-the-window-sill; it’s more or less the same story as the first part of Jane Eyre. But whereas Jane Eyre’s escape from home to go to boarding school was tempered by that school being a disease-infested prison camp, Harry Potter’s boarding school turns out to be an education centre for the use of magic, overseen by a wise and benevolent headmaster. 
          At Hogwarts he is allowed to grow and mature in a way that would never have been possible if he had remained with the Dursleys, and the close watch the narrative pays to his every action, thought and feeling gives the reader an almost empathic connection to him. Much of what he does is bumbling through his problems, aware of what needs to be done with no real idea of how to do it, and his various character flaws are on show 24/7; his uncertainty, his lack of experience, and the way his emotions get the better of him. This is so much more interesting than seeing a hero who knows everything, is strikingly good-looking, has shed-loads of confidence, and whose only personal flaw is to have a dramatically brooding persona – (e.g. Alex Rider, the snarky little git of a teenage spy, from Antony Horowitz’s Stormbreaker series, which once pretended to be a competitor to Potter. Oh how I laughed when I heard about him). But no matter what Harry Potter goes through, or what he becomes, it is always remembered how he began his life and in what circumstances he was in before he received his place at Hogwarts, and hence we can’t help but root for him when the going gets tough.  

          Because the going gets really tough. When Harry Potter discovers that his parents were murdered by the evil wizard Voldemort, he is thrown into the troubles of the wider wizarding world; a plot that hinges on the fact that the self-styled ‘Dark Lord’ had tried to kill the infant Harry himself, only to wind up nearly dead while Harry was left with nothing worse than a lightning-shaped scar (although it always looked more ‘N’-shaped to me, like Doctor Neo Cortex from the Crash Bandicoot video game). But Voldemort thereafter lurked in the shadows, looking for a way to revenge himself on Harry and restore himself to power – which on several occasions leaves Harry isolated and under suspicion from his fellow students. The stories in Harry Potter tend to be most interesting when Harry himself is under dreadful pressure, and it is at times like these that the spirit of the series really shows itself, a tale of isolation, misery and terror, which is combated by friendship and integrity – just the sort of things that appeal to readers of young adult* fiction. Yet Rowling is able to put more into her characters than these mere circumstances would dictate – they remain very much human and identifiable at all times, Harry Potter somehow managing to be genuine tragic hero rather than a clichéd knock-off, or some whiney spoilt brat – although book 5 does test our tolerance to the limit. Oh well... teenagers, and all that.

          The lions’ share of the series’ charm, however, remains with the supporting characters, and nowhere is this more evident than with Harry’s two best friends in the whole wide world, Ron and Hermione. Each bring their own unique talents to the table, and help to humanise Harry; Ron Weasley is the stalwart best mate, Harry’s main tie to the wizarding world, and he brings with him the entire Weasley family and their entertaining personalities, while Hermione is the logical, rule-abiding and better side to Ron and Harry’s more rambunctious, devil-may-care friendship. Harry would simply not be able to overcome the various problems he faces without them, a theme that is stressed time and again, and is clearly brought into the open during such times when one or both of them is absent. Both of them are good, well-rounded characters, and help make Harry Potter what it is.

          The overarching story of the series seems to progress quite naturally, despite the number of times that critics have pointed out to me the vast disparity in length between books 1-3 and books 4-7. I will accept that the longer books do feature more needlessly complicated plots and a significantly greater amount of waffle, and book 5, the Order of the Phoenix, is a fairly hard slog to get through no matter how much of a fan you are; but the gradual evolution of Rowling’s world, built up in the first three books, is able to sustain the longer stories of the later volumes, which in turn need to be longer in order to adequately explore such rich material and present a more interesting tale than could be achieved in the length of, say, the Philosopher’s Stone. Rowling’s books can be waffly; they can be clunky; they can be a bit cumbersome and a little tiring to get through, but the overall tale is usually solid, the characters are always engaging, and the prose never fails in being simple and delightful enough to make the whole package accessible to everybody. Let’s put it this way: I would rather spend a whole day reading the Order of the Phoenix all over again than face Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights a second time – or Twilight even once, for that matter.

          So let’s have a look at each of the books briefly in turn. Book 1, the Philosopher’s Stone, sees the young orphan Harry Potter rescued from an abusive foster family and shown Hogwarts, where he learns how to use a wand, meets and befriends a few people, makes enemies with Professor Snape the Potions Master, and encounters the evil wizard who murdered his parents. It is a simple, relatively effective book, showing all the weaknesses and all the strengths of Rowling’s writing skills, whilst providing the bedrock upon which all subsequent books will expand to great effect. The Chamber of Secrets introduces the deep rifts within wizard society, the nasty Slytherin philosophy of pure-blooded wizard over muggle-born wizard, while the Prisoner of Azkaban explores Harry’s lost family connections and brings the dreaded Dementors into the story; the gliding embodiments of all misery and suffering whose very presence is enough to cause people to fall into crippling fits of nightmare depression - most notably our protagonist.

It is with the later books that things get a tad more complicated, and the stories longer and much more intertwined. The Goblet of Fire directs the story onto the course of its inevitable conclusion, starting off really quite slowly, and poorly, but picking up when Harry is forced through a set of serious trials, and letting Voldemort make his big entrance at the end – after all, it was always hinted he would return to full power, and with the events of book 3 having happened there’s no sense in this not happening in book 4. No longer will the Harry Potters be stand-alone stories in which – every school year – some fresh problem emerges which gets sorted out conveniently before Harry has to go back home, like the Chamber of Secrets, but a much larger canvas on which a wider tale will be played out. This is one of the many criticisms I have heard of the series, and I admit that the first part of book 4 being actually quite vague and ponderous, and the overall plot instigated by the villain is way too contrived (I mean, why do they make Harry run through the whole Tri-Wizard Tournament if all they really needed to do was kidnap him, which they could have done with a Portkey anywhere at any time – they could have just zapped him off whenever it was convenient, rather than go through the whole weird and risky plan that Harry could have brought down at any moment by the simple facts of his own inexperience and ignorance). However, in defence of the series at large, the Harry Potter books always had it in them to support the greater framework established by the Goblet of Fire. The wider plot was based on facts established in the previous, leaner novels, and the maturing of the subject matter goes hand in hand with the maturing of the characters who are, after all, going through their teenage years.

The Order of the Phoenix is the mid-point of the story, taking a lot of time to delay the advancement of the plot. The Ministry of Magic is actually unhappy that Harry Potter claims Voldemort has returned and, in order to try and maintain power by blindly ignoring the facts and quashing all dissent, much like a Church, they throw their collective might against Harry, Professor Dumbledore, and Hogwarts itself. The finale of book 5, once actually reached, is hurried and a little anticlimactic, though the book is still strong in regards to Harry’s persecution from the most effective villain of the series - Professor Delores Umbridge. This Primary School Teacher cum right-wing extremist proves to be a much nastier character than Voldemort could ever hope to be – which is a big claim to make, considering that Voldey himself is a psychopathic mass-murderer with a God-complex – and the systematic and brutal tightening of unwanted control at Hogwarts provokes the entire student body into acts of greater and greater rebellion, a theme that gradually unfolds in a rather pleasing manner. If it did not take its sweet time in doing just about everything, then book 5 might have been the strongest of the series. It’s just that eight-hundred pages of anything would wear out even the most avid reader, and the climax at the end really doesn’t live up to hundreds of pages of postponement. Also, I am saddened that Rowling had to resort to ‘overused unrealistic cliché fantasy trope No. 1: Prophecy about a “Chosen One”’, as a plot device. While the less-generic ‘misinterpreted self-fulfilling prophecy’ shtick almost saves that idea, the addition of "destiny" as a character motive only ever weakens a story, and I’m sad that the Harry Potter series had to give into this temptation so late in the game. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot at the penultimate corner.

Book 6, as penultimate as a book can get, exists mainly to set the stage for the final volume by fleshing out what little character Voldemort has, and starting off a tedious fetch-quest before Harry and friends can face the Dark Lord himself. There’s more to the story of course, such as the usual sub-plots and miscellaneous stuff that pad out much of the series, but aside from cramming as much character as possible into what is little more than a cackling, melodramatic power-mad evil wizard who calls himself the ‘Dark Lord’, this all matters very little in the grand scheme of the series. I actually quite liked the Half-Blood Prince, as it felt like it had an overall different angle to the other books, and tried out some relatively new and interesting things to do with the characters. The final book, the Deathly Hallows, brings everything full circle, packs character development arcs alongside quick-paced action scenes, beautifully drawn-out sequences of Harry, Ron and Hermione bumbling clueless around the countryside, and generally wraps everything up in a satisfactory manner.

All in all, I would say the first three books are a good introduction to the series, books 4 and 5 present a slow and cumbersome mid-point, while the last two manage to pull all the various irons-in-the-fire together into a nicely rounded show-stopper. There are some genuine moments of brilliance to be found throughout the series, particularly in the Deathly Hallows, were I permitted my say in this matter. I might almost be inclined to say that this seventh book was my favourite of all of them - while the revisiting of many old locations did get a bit trying, I liked many of the themes explored throughout, I liked the forced growing-up of the characters as they went through some original new trials - ones that couldn't be solved with a simple bit of magic - and I liked the way that these wizards are shown how useless they are without their magic twigs. It is a dark little book, something like a jarring nightmare end to the series, and is by far the most radical a departure from all of the Harry Potters.

So what else is there to say? Well, I would like to be allowed one or two personal insights on ‘Quidditch’ – the so-called ‘wizarding sport’, being the only sport that wizards seem to want to play, and only because it involves broomsticks and magic balls**. While I can admit it seems an interesting entertainment prospect due to the really quite brutal nature of it, and the fact that both genders can play side by side, I have always had a problem with the catching of the Golden Snitch – which not only ends the game but also slaps an instant 150 point bonus on the team who catches it. This in effect negates the work of the majority of the rest of the team, whose efforts to score goals against the opposing team at a measly 10 points apiece pale in comparison to the almost entirely separate game played by the Seeker and their aim to capture the Snitch, who will almost certainly win by doing so unless the opposing team manage to claw a 160 point lead beforehand. It only appears to be at tournament level that the goal-scoring really seems to mean anything, where consistently good playing will give a team a better footing over a series of games – but all in all, Quidditch seems to be nothing else but a combination of two separate sports; the goal-scoring which comprises a majority of the action as well as a disproportionately small part of the overall game, points-wise, while Harry Potter, as the Seeker, plays the virtually independent ‘hunt-the-Snitch’ competition, whose effects are only arbitrarily tagged onto the game played by the rest of the team, but whose results dictate the whole outcome of the match. Harry ought to be completely disinterested in what else is happening in the game, as he just floats around above it, a spectator, until he sees and goes after the Snitch. It almost seems, and I’ll be blunt here, that the ‘catch-the-Snitch’ game, which is only exciting INSIDE HARRY’S HEAD when he actually sees the Snitch, would not make very good viewing to the people in the stands, and so the whole goal-scoring efforts of the rest of the team are just intended to entertain the spectators until the Snitch shows up, and that in effect means the entire game is decided by a few seconds of game-play. What can I say? Panem et circenses... But, much like this whole paragraph I’ve just written, the Quidditch sequences are merely humorous diversions from the main bulk of the writing, and feel like something that J.K. Rowling invented on a whim and then felt obliged to include it in each book thereafter, at least as far as she could think up ways of getting out of writing too many of them.

So yeah, Harry Potter is good. For a series of children’s/YA novels they do have some considerable strengths – excellent characters, a detailed and fascinating setting, an overarching plot that makes sense and, fundamentally important, a clear and accessible writing style. Whatever criticisms you may care to direct at J.K. Rowling’s writing abilities, being difficult or unclear are not amongst them. There are many books out there, and particularly book series’, which due to the writer’s lack of actual writing ability and/or overused unoriginal settings and subjects, are far less deserving of their fame and success – but the Harry Potter books are a cut above the herd. I am honoured to have grown up with them.

         

*Young Adult, often abbreviated to YA: A term sometimes used to describe Teenagers or the genres of entertainment marketed at them. The reason being that marketeers realised they could appeal to Teenagers by calling them Adults without actually calling them Adults, hence the word ‘Young’ being quite noticeably plugged on the front. I myself have no problem with the use of the word Teenager; it quite conveniently sums up the age-range between childhood and adulthood as being distinct, and while some commentators may say that there is negative baggage associated with the term, I am glad that it at least isn’t deliberately patronising to those it labels.

** Let’s face it; you’d have to have magic balls to be able to sit on a shaft of wood in the air for any length of time.

H.P. and the Bibliopher’s Stone

Rowling, J.K.  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (1997)

-      Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (1998)

-      Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (1999)

-      Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (2000)

-      Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (2003)

-      Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (2005)

-      Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury: St. Ives. (2007)

Discworld: Books 1 to 4, by Terry Pratchett

I will confess here and now that I am a Discworld fan. In fact, I reckon it's because of Terry Pratchett that I nowadays have such a fervent love of reading. Most youngsters probably start their love of reading with things like Harry Potter or those dreadful Twilight things, but not for me – my formative reading-years were monopolised by these tales from a flat world where magic is a daily inconvenience, the river is polluted enough to walk on, wizards are bumbling academics, and Death shows up in person when life has reached its sudden and unexpected conclusion. 

          It is unnecessary for me to expound on just how popular a writer Pratchett has become – all I need to do is work out why. My new long-term task is to re-read each and every one of the Discworld series in order, put that in my toaster and see what pops up steaming. Because there are about forty of the things, it would be unrealistic of me of to read each of them before writing a review, or to write a separate review for each one, so I shall do it in stages – books 1 to 4 now, and we’ll see how I feel after that.

          For those who are new to Discworld, know nothing about it or who think of it simply as a hackneyed piece of Comic Fantasy that has thus far refused to die, here is a short explanation: the term Comic Fantasy does not do it justice. While it began as such, the setting of the Discworld itself proved to be a whole lot more interesting than that of most Fantasy pieces that take themselves seriously – a world completely flat, held upon the shoulders of four continent-sized elephants who in turn stand on the shell of a gigantic turtle, swimming forever through space. The sun is a small ball of light which orbits the world, thus creating night and day, and at the centre of the Disc is the hub, where a towering mountain rises above the Disc, and upon which live the Disc’s irritable gods. But that’s just the world; in essence it’s a joke about primitive ideas on the structure of the universe, where the world really is flat, where the sun really does go round the planet, and where there really are gods at the top of the tallest mountain playing games with the lives of men. Pratchett uses these simple concepts to poke fun at our own world, by taking ideas and stories from our past and setting them on his creation, then examining them under a magnifying glass as they play out how he would expect real, screwed up cynical people to be. Naturally he starts off with the Fantasy genre, showing what Conan the Barbarian is really made of by aging him over half a century and making him toothless, and showing what wizards are by making one useless at magic and giving him a particularly rational form of cowardice. But it spirals out from there; what would a university of magic be like if it was actually put under the charge of old bumbling academics? And what would a city be like if it actually regulated its own crime levels by legalising them? Let’s go and see what happens when we go, in order, through this impressive body of work and see what’s what.

         

The Colour of Magic

The first novel in the venerable Discworld series, The Colour of Magic is actually one of my least favourite of all of them. An all-round fairly good introduction to the world itself, unfortunately it lacks in the character and even the humour that mark Pratchett’s later instalments, and in terms of a story there is none really to be found. Yet it is not an unpleasant experience to read; after all, this is still a Discworld book, and the germ of many future ideas can be clearly seen throughout the length and breadth of the tale.

          The premise is this: the city of Ankh-Morpork is witness to an unprecedented event – the arrival of the Disc’s first tourist. A jolly and naïve young man named Twoflower, sporting a loud shirt, a book that tells him what to say, a homicidal luggage on legs, and more gold than Ankh-Morpork has ever seen in its long history, is eager to live his dreams by seeing the city, completely oblivious that it is nothing more than the proverbial ‘Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy’. He quickly runs into Rincewind the failed magician, recently thrown out of the Unseen University for his ineptitude, and after taking him on as a guide they wind up on a journey across the Disc, running across Conan-esque heroes, Lovecraftian Horror^TM, a kingdom of imaginary dragons in an upside-down mountain, and the edge of the world itself.

          It is not one whole story, but four quite distinct novelettes strung together. The only thing that actually ties it together is that Rincewind and Twoflower are on this journey together; but as to why they’re on the journey I can’t really work out. Yes, Ankh-Morpork gets burned down – which prompts them to leave it I suppose – and Rincewind was dragooned into keeping Twoflower alive, but all it seems to be is that they get lost, wind up in a temple of Lovecraftian Horror^TM in the company of an obvious Conan the Barbarian parody, with whom they accompany as far as an area of unstable magical energy that allows dragons to pop into existence only if you believe in them strongly enough, and then they get washed up at the island nation of Krull that literally overlooks the edge of the world. As a tour of the Disc, it is relatively good, and Twoflower certainly enjoys it despite the number of times his life is put in jeopardy, but as a story it is somewhat lacking. It is enjoyable to see how Twoflower’s mere arrival sets off a chain of events that leads to Ankh Morpork’s conflagration at the end of the following day, but one can’t help but feel that the book has used up most of its energy for this initial third of its total length.

          But whereas the story is virtually non-existent, the two main characters are good enough to keep the reader hooked for the rest of it. Rincewind is the very opposite of a Fantasy genre hero; cowardly, bitter, sceptical, packed with disdain, and he doesn’t even have any great respect for Twoflower, the man who’s life he’s ended up trying to protect. His one real talent in life is running away, but also knowing when to run away which is perhaps even more important than the act itself. Rincewind has a genuine fear of heights, and for some reason, an irony which is not lost on him, he spends the second of half of the book dangling for his life over some sheer drop or other.  Twoflower on the other hand is virtually the opposite of his cowardly guide; curious about the world, full of wonder about everything he encounters (even if the things he encounters are obviously about to kill him), and able to see his surroundings through rose-tinted spectacles – even if those surroundings are the squalid, crime-ridden streets of Ankh-Morpork. He seems completely oblivious to the chaos that’s happening around him, the chaos that he has unintentionally caused, and the prospect of being involved in a bar-brawl is not, as Rincewind imagines, a reason to run for your life screaming, but is in fact something to write home about with barely-contained excitement, and to take a snapshot of with your grinning face in the middle of the picture.

The other characters are fairly disposable, the various thieves, heroes, villains and whatnots, but two supporting characters are worthy of note. The Luggage is a truly wonderful thing, a chest on many walking feet that will follow its owner to the ends of the earth, has storage room for everything you could ever want to take with you, and will occasionally eat people if they get too nosy. Aside from being a rather clever joke about a traveller’s luggage, which seems to move about on its own, gets lost yet somehow inexplicably finding its way back to you in the end, it brings an edge of weirdness to the story that makes it genuinely worth reading. The character of Death meanwhile is one of the most iconic things about the whole Discworld series; the literal personification of the end of life, skeletal, dressed in black robe, carrying a scythe, and whose dialogue is ALWAYS WRITTEN IN CAPTIALS, Death is a character who makes a token appearance in nearly every subsequent book whenever somebody is about to die (or has just died). Alas the first appearance of this beloved character is lacking in the refinement of later Discworld novels, seeming hungry and mildly villainous rather than, as he should rightfully be, possessed of a dry, gallows humour, and even a little poignancy, while he experiences the world of humanity through the eyes of an immortal outsider.

So all in all, The Colour of Magic is a fairly disposable piece of unashamed Comic Fantasy, showing a few neat ideas while taking easy shots at the Sword & Sorcery works of Robert E. Howard and the horror works of H.P. Lovecraft. It will be fascinating to see the upwards evolution of the series from this, admittedly, rather flimsy base line.

The Light Fantastic

One of the things that Discworld can be credited on is the way that they are never left on a cliff-hanger ending. Pratchett has the ability to tell a whole story in the space of one novel, and does not need to delay the conclusion in a weak-fisted attempt to make people come back for more; okay, so just about every one of them is a sequel of one sort or another, but that’s more a case of reusing characters in different stories rather than, as I hate, dragging out a story over two or more books. The only point where this rule does not come into play is with the first two Discworld novels.

          Although this is not quite the case. The Colour of Magic did not have a cliff-hanger ending any more than it had an actual plot – Rincewind and Twoflower simply go over the edge of the Disc, and that’s that. They could quite easily die, and no more Discworld stories would have been necessary. What The Light Fantastic does is to rescue these characters from certain death and to use what was just a senselessly hanging character thread – Rincewind’s Eighth Spell – and turn it not only into a coherent plot that not only stays at the centre of the novel but actually makes it a good 'un. It’s like its predecessor, but it actually has a story to tell, and a fairly decent one at that. Great A ‘Tuin, the star turtle on whose back the Disc rests, appears to be on a collision course with a gigantic red sun. The wizards of the Unseen University are aware that the only way to prevent this is to reclaim the Eighth Spell of the Octavo, last seen in the head of the failed student Rincewind, whom they expelled for that very reason, and so they must try everything in their power to track him down and bring him back to the University before the Disc hits the star. Rincewind meanwhile, still in the company of the Disc’s first tourist Twoflower, has mysteriously wound up back on the surface of the world and must survive the various perils they attract long enough to work out what the hell’s going on.

          The Light Fantastic not only manages to sort out the various problems left over from the first book, but it also has a great deal more fun doing so. Pratchett’s comedic talents emerge from underneath the rock they were skulking under, and the result is, in my opinion, the first proper Discworld book – The Colour of Magic becoming merely a prequel, and not a particularly good one at that. Death is a decent character now, Rincewind and Twoflower’s misbegotten friendship is well on form, the Luggage is magnificent as always, and we get our first glimpse of the wizards of the Unseen University. Also, rather than simply being a Comic-Fantasy novel, one of the many weapons in The Light Fantastic’s arsenal is its ability to actually criticize the Fantasy genre – particularly in the Sword-and-Sorcery vein – rather than merely parody it. Cohen the Barbarian is a welcome addition to the character roster – unlike Hrun the Barbarian in the previous instalment, who was little more than a ‘point-and-laugh’ at the well-known Conan archetype, Cohen actually turns the very concept of a barbarian super-hero on its head by showing what happens when one of them reaches the ripe old age of eighty-seven. Of the other excellent additions is the new-found sense of humour in the character of Death, who is seen struggling to get to grips with a complicated new card game, and who impatiently overturns the pretentious mysticism of the wizards by berating them for having dragged him out of a party.

          This is a much better book than its predecessor. Taken together, the first two books are an adequate introduction to the Discworld series; The Colour of Magic gives us the world itself and a couple of good characters, but The Light Fantastic is what welds it into the unique comic formula that will sustain the rest of the series. The humour is excellent, and the story keeps it all ticking over nicely; and we see the introduction of another of Pratchett’s recurring characters, the Librarian - an Unseen University wizard who is accidentally turned into an orangutan, but finds he prefers that state a lot more than being turned back into a human. It is impossible not to love an orangutan Librarian.

Equal Rites

The little known third book in the series, and small wonder; it seems to be one of Pratchett’s weaker works, light on the humour, heavy on the pseudo-mechanics, and of a much more serious cast. It also stars a completely new set of characters from the first two books – Granny Weatherwax, a witch of the Ramtop mountains, and the young girl Esk, who by inheritance has ended up as the Disc’s first female wizard. After attempting to tutor Esk in witchcraft, a more practical style of magic that is deeply grounded in what she calls Headology (like psychology, but with fewer bells attached), and is in every way the opposite of the word-based and power-obsessed magic of wizardry, Granny Weatherwax decides to take her to Ankh-Morpork to enrol in the Unseen University, in spite of the prejudices of the wizards themselves.

          The humour in this book is sparse, and for the first sixty pages there’s very little to make one laugh or smile. Nevertheless, Pratchett’s clear and engrossing style of writing draws us in to the story of Esk’s childhood and her apprenticeship to Granny, and Granny’s Headology and her ability to ‘borrow’ the minds of living creatures makes an interesting set-up for the rest of the book. It then improves a bit once we’ve actually left the cottage behind for the journey to the city of Ankh-Morpork, though the scenes in the Unseen University itself and the resurfacing of the ‘Dungeon Dimension’ creatures, seen before in The Light Fantastic, are a bit wishy-washy and difficult to follow, leading to a bit of a hurried anticlimax. It must be said that the rapport that springs up between Granny and the Arch-chancellor towards the end is definitely worthwhile, giving the book just about enough life to get to the end, and Pratchett does have the ability to turn his comedic creation to talk about pertinent and serious issues, unlike Douglas Adams whose similar attempts ended in complete failure. Altogether though this is not one of the strongest  Discworlds, but Granny Weatherwax’s time will come again, when she gets her own supporting cast and setting in book 6: Wyrd Sisters, a much better book if my memory serves me right.

Mort
This could probably be described as one of the most well known of the Discworld books, and it is also one of my favourites. The main character, a young lad called Mort, finds himself apprenticed to none other than Death himself and must learn the trade of someone who presides over the passing of souls from the world of the living to whatever may or may not lie beyond (the technical term for this sort of person is ‘psychopomp’. Now you know something you may not have known before). In the course of the story we learn how Death actually does his job; about his fascination for the human world he can never truly be a part of; about his love of cats, who aside from wizards and witches are the only creatures who can see him as he really is; and about the strange household he maintains for himself. Mort, after joining the rest of Death’s entourage of Albert, the ancient and grease-loving servant, Ysabell, Death’s adopted daughter, and Binky, his horse, accidentally ends up messing with the fabric of reality; only a boy, he finds himself unable to carry out the demise of the young princess Keli. It’s a bid to outmanoeuvre fate, and there’s still the underlying question of it all: why does Death, of all people, suddenly need an apprentice?

The story is a lot better held-together than in Equal Rites, perhaps even better than The Light Fantastic; the humour is in service of this, and the progression and climax of the plot are much more skilfully handled. The comedic aspects of the book are amongst Pratchett’s best, his inventive and playful use of metaphor and his ability to tell a story with a wicked grin keep it romping along well into the main meat of the story, and at some point in the second half it takes on a more finite role while the story, adopting a more serious stance, takes centre-stage in order to resolve itself, featuring some moments of genuine tension. The characters, as always, are a lot more detailed and engrossing than you would expect for a comedy – Mort himself goes through a strange and disturbing character arc, Albert and Ysabell have impressive hidden layers under their initial comedic input, and the wizard Cutwell is a later addition who brings a great deal of fun to the later parts of the book. But the real star of the show is Death himself, who gives to the book much of the life (ahem... unintentional pun) for which it is popular. The juxtaposition of seeing this traditionally terrifying figure mixing with ordinary people – hiring an apprentice, eating curry, going to a party, trying to find a new job – is wonderful, but at the same time quite sad. Death, despite interacting with souls for an eternity, still struggles to fully understand people or why they do the things they do, while his sense of cold morality illuminates a character of considerable depth and compassion – something highlighted all the more when Mort has to do the job himself, and discovers how difficult and odd it really is.

I believe that Mort is one of the most popular Discworld books for good reason. It is an impressive stand-alone tale that displays the some of the best uses of Pratchett’s comedic talents so far, its characters are rich and memorable, and the world of the Disc is arrayed in all its magnificence through the eyes of Death himself. It goes beyond the mere parody and tour-guide feel of the first book, combining the humour of the second with the serious character-driven ideas of the third, to create a genuinely funny book that carries within it a critique of our own attitudes to mortality, morality, and fate.

And as such, I fully recommend the Discworld series. Even the poorer books are worthwhile in their own way, and the rest are pearls, delightful and full of life. Pratchett's sense of satire, mixed with his inventive metaphors and energetic writing treat the reader as an equal, his characters are each and every one of them vibrant and great fun to accompany through this mad, flat world, with its 'rimfall', its Counterweight Continent, its heavy light, its Mended Drum, its orangutan Librarian, its Unseen University, and the largest turtle in all the multiverse. There can be no doubt that this is something great, a cultural icon of our age, hardly like the disposable rubbish that clogs up our book shops; I will very much enjoy re-reading the rest of the series, and hope that you will follow me in this endeavour - or perhaps even beat me to it!

Biblioworld

Pratchett, Terry. The Colour of Magic. Corgi: Reading. (1985 [First Published 1983])

                   The Light Fantastic. Corgi: Reading. (1986)

                   Equal Rites. Corgi: Reading. (1987)

                   Mort. Corgi: Reading. (1988 [First Published 1987])