Continuing with the Great Discworld Re-Read, I'm moving along in publication order and starting to get to what I consider the "good stuff." This is where I first started falling in love with Pratchett's writing and the Discworld itself.
First we have Wyrd Sisters (1988), the next book in the Witches subseries. I am an unabashed Shakespeare fangirl, so having Pratchett's take on Macbeth is a joy and a delight all by itself. It manages to hit a lot of the aspects of the Scottish Play that Shakespeare smooths over - like, how do the players handle the play showing the duke murdering the king? How does the duke actually react to being called out like that? (Spoiler: not well!) And what do the witches think of all this?
Watching Granny Weatherwax see a play for the first time is an utter delight. She takes on the aspect of someone who is seeing what is, to be frank, an incredibly weird premise - a bunch of people are pretending to be other people and killing each other in front of a bunch of witnesses, but the people who are being killed aren't dead and sometimes pretend to be someone else entirely. It's a bizarre concept when you think about it, and Granny Weatherwax is the woman on the spot to think about it for us.
Seeing Magrat come into her own is also a joy, because she's not one to stand up for herself at first. She starts realizing her own power, in part because no one else believes in her, and she's not about to put up with that for another moment. I like that she becomes queen in the end, because while she may not be the traditional Lacre witch, she is a formidably powerful woman in her own right, and being on the throne gives her the opportunity to wield that power.
This is probably the first book that has shown me definitively that every time I read a Discworld book, it's like reading a new book. There are so many references in here that I completely missed the first time(s) I read it, simply because I didn't know much about British humor. Now that I've watched The Goes Wrong Show multiple times, I have been exposed to much more of the tropes of British humor that I never saw before, which means there are jokes I get this time. It's marvelous.
The thing that does bug me, especially so soon after reading Equal Rites, is that once again threads that were left dangling at the end of one book are simply dropped as if they never happened. Whatever happened to the idea that Granny Weatherwax would teach at Unseen University, or that the wizards would come to Lancre to study on occasion? That could have been a fun cross-over that we simply never see. However, that's a small niggle in an extremely fun book.
Finally we comes to Pyramids (1989), one of my all-time favorites of the series. As much as I am an unabashed Shakespeare fangirl, I am (and always have been) an even bigger fan of ancient Egypt. Something about the pyramids and the mummies and the pantheon just caught my imagination as a kid and never let go. So, naturally, Pratchett + ancient Egypt = a heartful of love from me. This is also the first of the "stand alone" books that aren't tied to a separate subseries, which makes it a good starting point for people just getting into the Discworld.
Teppic is the son of the king of Djelibeybi, a tiny kingdom along the river Djel. He's sent to good old Ankh-Morpork to train to become an assassin because, frankly, the kingdom is in debt up to the top of their hundreds of pyramids, and someone needs to make some money. On the night of his final exam (which he passes in spite of himself), his father dies, and he becomes god-king in a most embarrassing manner. He goes home and discovers that some patterns are harder to change than he could ever have imagined.
I. Love. This. Book. Watching Teppic go from spoiled child of a king to a trained assassin and learning about parts of the world outside of his tiny kingdom, only to go back home and discover that he no longer fits into the space that he was born into, feels incredibly honest as a way of viewing growing up. Watching him interact with the family's high priest, and fighting against thousands of years of Tradition, it's simultaneously hilarious and frustrating as all hell. And then the gods appear.
It's one thing to believe in the gods when they're far off and not paying attention. When they're actually right there, right in front of you, and doing absolutely nothing that you want them to do, well, that's an entirely different story. An entertaining one, at the very least, and one that we see just enough of to wince at the frustrations of the priests and others.
There's a lot that can be (and has been) said about Pratchett's take on religion, but I'll just note that he certainly takes the idea of gods being created by man and runs with it. The high priest even acknowledges in the end that he came up with the gods to find a way to make certain things Important, and so when they blatantly disregard him and turn out to be completely different from how he originally imagined them, it's a gigantic blow to his ego and his worldview. I have no doubt that there's a lot that can be pulled from this with regards to religious deconstruction and such, but that's not what I'm here for.
Overall, this was a glorious pair of books. I feel like this is where Pratchett starts coming into his own in the Discworld, laying down some of the themes and painting the backdrops that will come up again and again in the series. And next time, we'll look at the first book of the City Watch, Guards! Guards! I can't wait.
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