These are re-reads, these are beloved, these are–I suggest–suitable for the fanfic square because they are riotous and revelrous games with Shakespeare plays and fairy stories and Dracula and witch traditions, even while they question the logics behind them. For example, as Pratchett points out, witches would probably not be dancing around nude during their eldritch rites because it would get quite chilly.
Wyrd Sisters (1988)
Autocorrect keeps trying to make wyrd into ‘word’, which is fitting, because this is a book partly about the power of words, and partly about the power of voice. The king of Lancre, a tiny kingdom hanging off a mountain range, has been murdered, and is now a ghost; his replacement is his cousin, a Duke who is now trying to consolidate power, appease his strong-willed wife, and, for some reason, scrub invisible blood off his hands. There’s also a baby and a crown that have gone missing, a company of strolling players with a playwright called Hwel who is visited by inspiration from everywhere in the multiverse, and three witches–young Magrat, who believes in crystals and occult knives, Nanny Ogg, a cheerful and unscrupulous matriarch who adores her evil cat Greebo, and Granny Weatherwax, a granny in name only, who wields her self like a weapon and takes three sugars in her tea.
Despite its title and its storm of allusions (indeed, the novel features an actual storm practicing its craft), I think Wyrd Sisters, the sixth in Pratchett’s Discworld series, is the first that begins to take on its own particular and peculiar life and idiom beyond the parody and pastiche of fantasy and folklore tropes that comprise the earlier books–Lancre and the witches begin to carve their own place within the world of story:
This wasn’t right. Once a play was written it was, well, written. It shouldn’t come alive and start twisting itself around.
No wonder everyone needed prompting all the time. The play was writhing under their hands, trying to change itself. (p. 287)
Wyrd Sisters also signposts a shift towards the more complex themes and interrogations of the lability of choice and morality that underpin the later books. Pratchett knows what it means to be evil–to treat people like things, to make people complicit in their own destruction and make them be cheerful about it–but what it means to be good is a much bigger and more complicated question. I enjoy Wyrd Sisters a lot, and it’s a good introduction to the witches, but it is a little rushed in places, and the barrage of references does get a little overwhelming at times. 3.5 stars.
Witches Abroad (1991)
In Witches Abroad, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax head, well, abroad, heading to a place that bears a marked resemblance to New Orleans. But they’re not just witches on a mission, they’re also stereotypical English people on holiday in foreign parts–they think volume trumps correct pronunciation, they’re suspicious of the food, and they have a tendency to thoroughly investigate the local alcohols. Their mission is to stop a fairy-tale coming true–this is, I suggest, the first Discworld novel where shit starts to get really quite dark, and in this case Lilith, fairy godmother to Ella, is a properly uncanny foe–she wants her subjects to live happily ever after (on pain of death) and the prince she wants Ella to marry is the logical extension of a fairy-tale prince in the worst possible sense.
“I found you in the gutter. Would you like me to send you back?”
His face became a mask of panic.
“I didn’t mean that! I just meant…well, then, everything will be real. Just one kiss, you said. I can’t see why that’s so hard to arrange.”
“The right kiss at the right time,” said Lilith. “It has to be at the right time, otherwise it won’t work.” She smiled. He was trembling, partly out of lust, mainly out of terror, and slightly out of heredity.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It can’t not happen.”
“And these witches you showed me?”
“They’re just…part of the story. Don’t worry about them. The story will just absorb them. And you’ll get her because of stories. Won’t that be nice? […] (p. 83)
There are a lot of stories in Witches Abroad; there are magic mirrors upon mirrors, yellow brick roads, wolves dressed up like grandmothers and riverboat gamblers who don’t realise that smiley little old women aren’t always quite as naive as they seem. It’s a lot of fun, sometimes chilling, and the chaotic messy presence of the witches is delightfully life-affirming. Four stars.
Lords and Ladies (1992)
It’s nearly midsummer, the witches are back in Lancre, and the camaraderie they built up during their trip abroad frays considerably in the face of a threat from within, or under, or perhaps around and in-between, their own land. Magrat is about to get married, to the King of Lancre, no less–and decides she has no more time for witchcraft, and worse, no time for Granny Weatherwax’s domineering ways. A bunch of rustics are rehearsing a play written by Hwel (of Wyrd Sisters) for the wedding night, and someone has been dancing around the stones on the hill, attracting the attention of a hostile presence. But you can’t talk about the threat directly, because to do so invites it in.
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meanings. (p. 69-170)
This is where Pratchett veers towards the sublime, the terrible beauty, the re-examination and reconfiguration of all that makes you human in the face of something vast and mysterious. It looks at the rituals we have to appease the dark, and makes us wonder what they cost. Also, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first play I was in, and I love the nods to that. Five stars.
Carpe Jugulum (1998)
If Lords and Ladies is about the terrors at the heart of the endless light of midsummer, Carpe Jugulum is about the shadows around fireplaces, the sudden creaks on the stairs, the tapping outside the window at midnight. The new King of Lancre has rather unwisely invited denizens of Uberwald, the Gothicky place, to the naming ceremony of his new daughter, as well as an Omnian priest going through something of a crisis of faith. The witches, are joined by new teenaged witch Agnes Nitt whose uninhibited id has taken on the name and persona of Perdita, the kind of teenager who wears a lot of black and makes a lot of snarky comments. Incidentally, there are a bunch of fat jokes made at Agnes’ expense, but there is also a lot of sympathy, perhaps empathy, towards her and her perception of herself, I think (from my own plus-sized perspective anyway). Indeed, Perdita is more malicious towards Agnes than anyone else (except perhaps the two-hundred year old teenage vampire brat Lacrimosa Magpyr), and fashioning a self in spite of Perdita is part of Agnes’s journey.
Caught between vampires and a priest whose religion has traditionally burned them, the witches need to figure out where they stand–especially Granny Weatherwax, who is getting older, and more tired, and whose darkness is just a blue mood, an impetuous choice, a second’s lapse in attention away…
What had she ever earned? The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches they gave you a bigger shovel.
And you got these bare walls, this bare floor, this cold cottage.
The darkness in the corners grew out into the room and began to tangle in her hair. (p. 74-75)
Carpe Jugulum has a lot of fun with vampire motifs in the Magpyr family, but draws a lot of darkness from it as well–and not just the seductive glamorous bitey darkness, but the grey banal evil of a town where the vampires visit every so often to feast upon citizens who line up in the town square when the bell rings. It’s brilliant and dark and very funny. Five stars.
Title quote is a comment made by Scott Thompson in the Kids in the Hall d0cumentary.