A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

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A Hat Full of Sky, Discworld, fantasy books, funny books, magical books, Terry Pratchett, Tiffany Aching, witches

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett is the thirty-second book in the Discworld series, and the second to feature the witch of the chalk, Tiffany Aching. It is also the third book which was published ostensibly as one for children (The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and The Wee Free Men being the first two).  It is also my favourite of the entire Discworld series.

This book follows on from the action in The Wee Free Men. There is a brief recap to set the scene, and then we are thrown into Tiffany’s training as a witch and her run in with a creature called a Hiver, something which strikes fear into the hearts of even the Nac Mac Feegle themselves. Granny Weatherwax has a small, but significant role here, and this book is the one that establishes Tiffany as joining the sub-set of books about the witches.

For me, A Hat Full of Sky is so special because it shows Pratchett’s commitment to his theories of what magic is in a non-magical world. It’s where everything he’s been hinting at gets spelled out for those at the back. It’s him, doubling down on what it means to be a witch and what magic really is, and what that means for those of us stuck on a round world where witches don’t exist any more, except that for Pratchett they very much do. It’s the most humane, passionate and angry of his books and every time I read it, or in this case, have it read to me by my son, it makes me cry.

Oscar loved it too, almost certainly for different reasons. He’s an eleven year old boy. He’s got the joy I had of reading Pratchett the first time at a young age, and loving the story, and the funny bits, and then reading it again and again as he grows and seeing the layers, the cleverness, the wisdom and the complexity of the books that will make them endure long after other more ‘worthy’ tomes have fallen by the wayside.

I wrote about it on my main blog a few weeks ago, so I will finish with what I wrote there.

It’s my favourite of the Discworld books. Possibly one of my favourite books ever. There are many reasons to love it, tough, brilliant women characters for a start. It’s funny, and clever and sad and brilliant and it’s all about what it is to be human. And the magic? Well, the magic is in being human too. Here’s my favourite part. Here’s what Granny Weatherwax has to say about magic, and she is right.

‘She cares about ’em. Even the stupid, mean, dribbling ones, the mothers with the runny babies and no sense, the feckless and the silly and the fools who treat her like some kind of servant. Now that’s what I call magic – seein’ all that, dealin’ with all that, and still goin’ on. It’s sittin’ up all night with some poor old man who’s leavin’ the world, taking away such pain as you can, comfortin’ their terror, seein’ ’em safely on their way…and then cleanin’ ’em up, layin’ ’em out, making ’em neat for the funeral and helpin’ the weeping widow strip the bed and wash the sheets – which is, let me tell you, no job for the faint-hearted – and stayin’ up the next night to watch over the coffin before the funeral, and then going home and sitting down for five minutes before some shouting angry man comes bangin’ on your door ‘cos his wife’s havin’ difficulty givin’ birth to their first child and the midwife’s at her wits’ end and then getting up and fetching your bag and going out again…We all do that, in our own way, and she does it better’n me, if I was to put my hand on my heart. That is the root and heart and soul and centre of witchcraft that is. The soul and centre!’  Mistress Weatherwax smacked her fist into her hand, hammering out her words. ‘The…soul…and…centre!’

Echoes came back from the trees in the sudden silence. Even the grasshoppers by the side of the track had stopped sizzling.

‘And Mrs Earwig,’ said Mistress Weatherwax, her voice sinking to a growl, ‘Mrs Earwig tells her girls it’s about cosmic balances and stars and circles and colours and wands and…toys, nothing but toys!’ She sniffed. ‘Oh, I daresay they’re all very well as decoration, somethin’ nice to look at while you’re workin’, somethin’ for show, but the start and finish, the start and finish, is helpin’ people when life is on the edge. Even people you don’t like. Stars is easy, people is hard.’

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The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, fantasy books for children, Nac Mac Feegle, Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and the second book which was marketed as a children’s novel. Much like the first one, The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents, the only thing that makes it more child friendly than the rest of the series is the lack of innuendo. Otherwise it’s business as usual and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

This book sees the introduction of a new, and key character to the series, the child witch, Tiffany Aching.  It also sees the reintroduction of the rest of the witches, albeit in this book, in a brief cameo. I have a great fondness for this book because Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax are my favourite Discworld characters, and in this subset of books I believe that Pratchett came to the peak of his power as a writer. Nowhere does his love and also criticism of humanity shine as fiercely for me as it does in these novels.

Regular readers will know that my eleven year old son is reading these books to me, and he loved this. We have briefly met the Nac Mac Feegle in a previous Discworld novel (Carpe Jugulum), but here they really come into their own. I thought he would struggle with their language, but reading aloud really helped him understand what they were saying, and after an initial bit of difficulty, he really began to enjoy speaking their characters.

Tiffany lives on the chalk downs, and it’s a very different place to the rest of the Discworld. It’s farming country. It’s no nonsense, sheep rearing, cheese making and butter making for Tiffany. There is not supposed to be any magic on the chalk, except, Tiffany finds that there is, and only she can deal with it, from leading the Wee Free Men, to banishing the fairy queen, to understanding what it is to be a witch of the chalk, and to coming to terms with the loss of her beloved granny. This is a job for an Aching, and Tiffany is more than up for it.

This has broad comic moments that made Oscar and I laugh out loud. He particularly loved the character of Tiffany’s brother, Wentworth, and I have always had a soft spot for the Nac Mac Feegle and their lawless ways. I love the message of this book which is basically that it doesn’t stop being magic, just because you’ve figured out how it’s done.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Night Watch is number twenty nine in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and my son, Oscar has just finished reading it to me as part of our self appointed task of him reading the entire series to me. It both saddens and amazes me that we have made it this far in what seems such a short time. How can we be over half way through already?

Night Watch was a book I never particularly enjoyed when I read the series for the first time, but it is one which I have learned to love with new passion on re-reading. Oscar has loved it right from the get go. The Watch books are his favourites in the series and he loves Commander Vimes.

We read ten pages every day, and this is one of the few books in the series where he has begged to read on to me, and on occasion I’ve had to ask him to stop because I’ve had other things that needed doing, and he has moaned at me about it. Maybe that’s what has made me love it even more this time round. His enthusiasm is infectious.

This is a momentous book in many ways. It’s Pratchett’s take on the classic, time slip novel, and he does it flawlessly, and adds a lot to the genre, which is pleasing. In terms of moving things on in Discworld, we have the momentous moment of Vimes becoming a parent, and the equally momentous moment of discovering how Vimes parented his young self as he goes back to the days of the infamous Cable Street riots with a little help from the Monks of Time.

There are so many wonderful cameos here from characters minor, like Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler, and Reg Shoe, to major ones like Vetinari, that you cannot help but be amazed and impressed at Pratchett’s utter mastery of the universe he so lovingly created. I found myself thinking of him as the writer so often during this reading of the novel. It added a certain poignancy to proceedings.

This is one of his darker novels. There’s always humour, but so often here it is black and laced with menace, and a particular vicious cynicism at the corruption of power in both police and government. It really is a novel of our time, and as ever an object lesson in how to be humane.

 

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, funny books, Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Amazing Maurice is the twenty eighth book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and the first one that he deliberately wrote as a children’s book. It won him his most distinguished literary prize, The Carnegie Medal, largely because I like to think that children’s librarians are much smarter than literary critics and have always known genius when they’ve seen it.

The Amazing Maurice is a cat who, like the educated rodents he hangs around with, spent too long eating things that the wizards at Unseen University threw away, and suddenly discovered he could think, and talk. Maurice and the rats have teamed up with a ‘stupid looking kid’, who can play the penny whistle, and are travelling the Disc, simultaneously infesting and ridding the town of a plague of rats, and a hefty sum of money for doing so.

As they arrive in Bad Blintz, the rats tell Maurice that this is their last con. They want to find the nirvana promised in the book Mr Bunnsy Has an Adventure, which has become their bible. Maurice grudgingly agrees, but before things can swing into action they find that sinister forces are afoot in Bad Blintz. Can they save themselves and the townspeople of Bad Blintz?

On first reading I found this a strange choice for a children’s book. The Amazing Maurice may have more than echoes of the Pied Piper fable. It may also be influenced by Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, but it is a very dark tale. It’s about the human in animals, and the animal in humans. It has moments of savagery and genuine fear and tension that many of the previous Discworld novels lack. Just as I assume that children’s librarians are smarter, I found this was the point where I realised that Pratchett knew children were smarter than your average adult, too. There is no pandering to young minds here. There is direct, straight talking, fierceness and no compromise whatsoever and it makes the book worthy of the Carnegie and every other prize you might care to mention.

It’s funny, of course. There’s a lot of mention of widdling in jam, but it’s also funny in an extremely macabre, sharp way that cuts to the bone of what Pratchett is doing, showing humans to humans and talking about what it is to be humane.

On re-reading it with Oscar, I only have more praise for it. It’s one of those books I think should be compulsory reading in schools. Sod Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm. This is the one.

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero

The Last Hero is the twenty-seventh book in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, and one, which when I started reading it with my son, I realised I had never read before. It was a real pleasure to read something new (to me), and which, unlike The Shepherd’s Crown, did not make me cry.

The Last Hero is more of a novella, and our version is a beautiful, large format, cloth bound book with full colour plates that are beautifully drawn by Paul Kidby. Oscar, my son, particularly enjoyed this format as he had a real chance to examine all the pictures and see the Discworld up close, so to speak. My favourite illustration was the Librarian, his was the turtles swimming through space.

In this book, Cohen the Barbarian and his ageing horde have a bone to pick with the dice playing Gods who gamble with the lives of ordinary Disc dwellers (if there is such a thing) and heroes alike. Cohen decides to go out with a bang not a whimper, and they set off to deliver the gift of fire back to the Gods.

Back in Ankh Morpork, the Patrician enrols the help of the wizards to try and stop the world ending and with the help of Leonard of Quirm and the City Watch, they launch a vessel filled with their brightest and best, and Rincewind to save the day.

Many different strands of Disc lore weave together to make this modern myth come to life. I think it’s best described as a romp, and one we thoroughly enjoyed reading.

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, fantasy fiction, funny books, Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Thief of Time is the twenty sixth novel in the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett, and one of my absolute favourites to read. I was so looking forward to sharing this with Oscar, and the experience did not disappoint. This is one of the series that really has stood the test of both time and quality for me.

The book features Lu Tse, who pops up in earlier novels, (Small Gods for example) who is one of the Monks of History. The Monks of History are a pastiche of all the martial arts/zen buddhist/karate stuff you’ve ever seen or read about. The abbot regenerates into a baby every time he is reborn, but retains all his wisdom along with needing his nappy changing and shouting ‘wanna bikkit’. The monastery has mandalas and mystically tended gardens, and time wheels powered by yak’s butter and Lu Tse shuffles amongst it all, the mysterious sweeper with a penchant for smoking dog ends and quoting his Ankh Morpork land lady’s gnomic wisdom.

Lu Tse has to take his assistant Lob Sang to Ankh Morpork to stop the auditors stopping time altogether because time and people do not mix without making a mess. There are cosmic clocks, more horsemen of the apocalypse than you would normally expect, passing references to Reservoir Dogs and in amongst it, creating order out of chaos, Death’s grand-daughter, Susan.

Full of jokes and wisdom and humanity, it’s hard to see how Pratchett pieces all this together to create a unified narrative, but he does, and it is glorious. It can be read on so many levels, and probably enjoyed on even more.

 

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, fantasy fiction, Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

Apologies for the hiatus in posting. My health has not been of the finest and I have tended to be sprawled asleep at the keyboard rather than alertly typing away.

It is time, now that the summer holidays are here, to get back in the book blogging saddle and tell you about our experiences of reading The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett.  This is the twenty fourth book in the Discworld series, and one which I had very little recollection of when Oscar started reading it to me. As he read on, snippets came back to me, and I wondered why I had so comprehensively forgotten it, as I enjoyed it very much indeed the second time around.

The book focuses on Commander Samuel Vimes of The City Watch, as he takes on a new role as a diplomat, trying to forge relations with the dwarves of Uberwald, and find out what exactly has happened to the Scone of Stone, which is needed for the ceremony to elect the new king of the dwarves. Sub plots involve Captain Carrot and Angua and their complex, dwarf/human/werewolf relationship and just what happens to the Ankh Morpork City Watch when Colon is left in charge.

Oscar loved it because the Watch stories are his favourite, particularly any scenes that involve Nobby Nobs, and I loved it because it really hammers home the point that by this time, Pratchett had gone way beyond the traditional limits of fantasy and is writing in a much more philosophical vein about all the foibles of being human. This is particularly underscored in his handling of the Uberwald class system, and the things about the dwarves that Vimes discovers. It foreshadows his material about goblins in the very last books he wrote.

There are the usual comic touches, but The Fifth Elephant is so much darker than the early works and, to my mind more multi faceted, showing the different layers of understanding and discovery that Pratchett was exploring. Whether a child reader will pick this up or not is largely irrelevant as the stories bear reading over and over again, and as my delight in rediscovering this attests, will last a lifetime of re-examination.

The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett

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Discworld, funny books, Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

The Last Continent is the twenty second book in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and my son Oscar and I have just finished reading it. Well, he’s been reading it to me.

I confess that having been a Pratchett fan right from the beginning, when this was first published I had a falling out of love with Pratchett. I really didn’t like this book, and didn’t read another one for a few years after this. This is the first time I’ve revisited it, and I still believe it is a low point in the series. It seems too much of a joke, and almost like a return to the Colour of Magic in some ways. Everything is a bit obvious, a bit too funny and the finesse that starts with Small Gods seems lacking in development here.

I confess that it was lovely to see the Librarian get such a juicy role in this book and his shape shifting scenes were the thing that saved this for me.

Having said that, Oscar really enjoyed it. He always loves anything with Rincewind and the Luggage in, and he was delighted to see them return here, roaming through the continent of XXXX, a thinly veiled Australia, which heaves with jokes about kangaroos and sheep and Mad Max type figures and which he found rip roaringly funny.

He was sad that it finished. I wasn’t.

As ever. It’s a book for teens at best, unless you’re broad minded and willing to explain a lot of stuff to an enquiring mind.

Jingo by Terry Pratchett – A Review

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Discworld, fantasy fiction, funny books, Jingo, teenage books, Terry Pratchett

Jingo is the twenty first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that my son, Oscar and I have shared together. It isn’t my favourite. We’re now into the middle years for Pratchett, where I lost enthusiasm for him and we parted ways for a few years. It’s interesting to read them again after such a long break (twenty odd years).

Jingo deals with the emergence of a new island between Ankh Morpork and Klatch that both cities decide belong to them. A small squabble over fishing rights and who gets to occupy the land, turns into the threat of all out war, and the mobilisation of ancestral armies on the streets of Ankh Morpork.

Samuel Vimes, commander of the Watch, smells a rat and investigates, or he would do if he wasn’t hampered by the political machinations of his aristocratic haters, in particular, Lord Rust, a man who wants to shut Vimes down for many reasons.

Oscar loved this because it is a book about the Watch. He brings to his reading, a wealth of knowledge amassed from the previous books and it suddenly makes him realise how valuable things like back stories are. He is beginning to predict how characters will behave in certain circumstances, and it gives him enormous joy when he is right.

I disliked this less, this time around, but then it seems to echo a lot of the political landscape in which we are forced to live at the moment, jingoism, xenophobia, racism and casual intolerance are all lampooned on Pratchett’s sharpest pen and I was moved to laugh more than once by parallels with current events. Despite the fact that they aren’t really funny. Current events that is.

It holds up better than I expected and there are some wonderful moments between Nobby Knobbs, Sergeant Colon and Lord Vetinari that I had totally forgotten about and which really made this a winner this time around.

Wonderful for teens who love fantasy, humour and satire. Not suitable for primary aged children unless you don’t mind doing lots of explaining of adult humour, double entendres, and in this case, politics and science.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett – A Book Review

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books for teenagers, Discworld, fantasy books, funny books, Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

Hogfather is the twentieth book in the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett. We loved it for many reasons, and in particular because it means that my son has now read nearly half the  series, which is an immense achievement for a ten year old boy who a few years ago announced he wasn’t going to bother to learn to read.

Hogfather is one of the stories with Death in, who I increasingly grow to love as the series goes on. Death becomes more complex, more thoughtful, more critical of humanity and indeed more human as the books progress. Death, in lots of ways, reminds me of Dr. Who in the way that he regards the human race. Always saving them, always baffled by them, can’t help loving them.

In this book we meet Mr. Tea Time, an assassin, who even by the Assassin’s Guild’s standards has gone a bit wrong. Mr. Tea Time is a sociopath, and has been hired by the auditors, the miserable, soulless overseers of the universe, to tidy up the Disc by removing its more frivolous creatures. The half mythic, half godlike, strange creatures like Hogfather for example, a creature best described here as the Discworld’s version of Father Christmas.

Death will not put up with the auditors’ meddling when he can meddle back, and this time he enlists his most excellent granddaughter, Susan to help him in his bid to make sure that the sun rises on another day on the Disc.

Many fine  and beloved characters make their appearance in this book, which is one of the reasons we love it so. Bloody Stupid Johnson and his almost perfect bathroom in the Unseen University, Ridcully the arch chancellor and the bursar with his dried frog pills, Hex and his growing complexities, and even Corporal Nobby Nobs all get a look in on this seasonal and brilliant volume in the series.

As ever, recommended for teens mostly, but precocious children everywhere.