Recent Reading Roundup 14

The pile o'books I brought back with me from the States is getting steadily smaller, and thus far performing quite well. As per recent discussion, this list includes several short story collections.

1. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Warner's slim 1925 feminist fable was a lucky find in the Strand's $1 rack. The novel's first half describes the title character's early life in the late Victorian period. With brisk, efficient prose, Warner takes us through Lolly's remote family history and her relationships with her more immediate family, particularly her doting father, in an enjoyable narrative flow that is never less than wry and often quite funny. Upon her father's death, a compliant Lolly goes to live with her brother's family, where she acts in the capacity of unpaid nurse, companion, and governess. With near-Austenish coolness, Warner describes the mindset that leads an intelligent, strong young woman of independent means to immure herself in a dull, unsatisfying life for nearly two decades. It's not that Lolly doesn't want more from life, or that her relatives are cruel, but all of them have bought into the notion that a woman without a family of her own can want nothing more from life than to take care of the families of others.
   
   In the novel's second half, a middle-aged Lolly has finally had enough of taking care of others and rents a small cottage in the country. When her affectionate but oblivious nephew follows her there and immediately begins to treat her like a caretaker again, Lolly ends up making a deal with the devil to get rid of him. I mean that literally. It's here that the novel makes a rather unfortunate turn into fantasy, which in Warner's hands is nothing more than a rather broad allegory. She's clearly riffing off the maiden/mother/crone division, with Lolly, who doesn't fit into the first two categories, joyfully embracing the latter one and subverting its most negative associations. But whereas in the naturalistic segments of the novel Warner was careful never to overstate her point or to surrender to the rage and bitterness that Lolly's situation naturally elicit, once she starts telling a fantasy story, her tone becomes unbearably earnest, even hectoring. The novel abandons the wryness that had previously kept it afloat, and even ends with Lolly lecturing the devil himself about women's limited choices. The impression is of an author uncomfortable with the fantastic elements in her story, and eager to assure her audience that these are in service of a higher goal. Nevertheless, for its first half, Lolly Willowes is certainly worth a read, and even the second half is very well-written.


2. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke - Like Michel Faber's The Apple, this collection feels like B-sides and deleted scenes from Clarke's gargantuan, sprawling historical novel. The comparison is slightly unfair in that, as I understand it, Faber's collection really is made up of deleted scenes and afterthoughts, whereas Ladies collects stories from over a decade, long before the publication of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Nevertheless, there's an obvious unifying characteristic to these stories. All of them--even the ones like "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse," which takes place in another author's invented universe--are either overtly or implicitly part of the Strange & Norrell universe, concerned with the tension between the rigid morality and unflinching belief in reason that govern her 19th century characters' actions, and the uncontrollable chaos of magic and the fairy world. Another way of looking at it is that these are Strange & Norrell's excised girly bits--women feature far more prominently in these stories than they did in the novel, and in the title story the ladies in question lecture Jonathan Strange, then still under Mr. Norrell's thrall, about the danger inherent in the forces he claims to control. Some of the stories feel like exercises in tone in voice--which ultimately came to fruition with Strange & Norrell's masterful pastiche of the regency novel--and others stand on their own, and are quite fun. My favorite piece was "Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower," in which a vicar arriving at a new living becomes a reluctant hero when a local fairy takes a shine to the village maidens. The main character is a lot of fun, particularly his struggle between the strict moral code he was raised in and his more mischievous inclinations. I wouldn't mind reading more stories about him.


3. The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley - Hartley's most famous novel, about a boy in early 20th century England who is manipulated by his wealthy, upper class best friend's sister into carrying letters between her and a local farmer, is an odd fit for me. I enjoyed it in spite of the fact that it is one of those novels, like Brideshead Revisited, which seem to be lamenting a way of life that I never experienced and which I think, on the whole, we're all better off without. Still, there's no denying that this is as pitch-perfect a recreation of childhood as one is likely to find. I remarked recently that adult novels with pre-adolescent protagonists are rare, and Hartley really captures the dissonance between the narrator and the adults surrounding him. For all of his and their best intentions, they are speaking different languages, have different value systems, and want different things--they are very nearly different species. The tragedy of the novel is driven at least in part by their failure to understand this--by the narrator's unthinking assumption that adults operate by the same rules as schoolboys, and by the adults' belief that children are simply small, easily controlled adults.
   
   My edition includes Hartley's introduction to the novel, written after its initial publication and widespread success, as well as an introduction by Colm Tóibín. I was tickled to see both of them note Hartley's surprise at the discvoery that the star-crossed lovers, Marian and Ted, in the novel elicited not the censure he had expected--for stepping out of their respective social roles, for betraying Marian's fiancé, and mostly for manipulating and damaging the narrator, Leo--but sympathy. I find myself somewhere in the middle. I can't help but feel for Marian and Ted's shitty situation, but Marian's actions in particular are so self-centered and destructive that I can't wish good things for her, especially when the epilogue makes it clear that she hasn't changed a bit, and still expects others to do her bidding and put themselves out for her no matter how much pain she's caused them. As Tóibín's introduction notes, however, Hartley himself seems to have had conflicted feelings about Marian, as the novel ends with a grown-up Leo yet again acting on her behalf and justifying her destructive actions. I think the power of the novel derives at least in part from this ambivalence--both Leo's and Hartley's.


4. Making Money by Terry Pratchett - It's getting to the point where I'm not really sure why I'm reading Pratchett anymore. The best I can come up with is that he's familiar and comforting, but those are really not the adjectives I'd like to attach to the novels of a man who used to make me roar with laughter, and who could clearly still do so if he put his mind to it. Instead, Making Money is yet another iteration of what's become Pratchett's standard plot--introduce some modern-day innovation to his fantasy setting, pepper it with a bit of magic or metaphors-made-flesh, and add a couple of side-plots about deranged villains and wacky good guys. Let it all mix together for as long as it takes to make your point, and then have Vetinari show up like the proverbial god from the machine to tie up all loose ends. In this case, Pratchett is aping Neal Stepheson when he discusses paper money, and more generally the notion that monetary value is a societal convention, and that rather than attach it to physical valuables we attach it to something worthless or even nonexistent--pieces of paper, pieces of plastic, even numbers in a computer--in order to sustain our economy and keep it vibrant.
   
   The main character is Moist von Lipwig, previously seen in Going Postal, which is basically Making Money with telecoms. He's a good character--more morally flexible than Sam Vimes, and more of an outsider to Ankh-Morpork. Both qualities give him a unique perspective on the city and on Pratchett's topic du jour. His shtick is that he's a former con man forcibly reformed by Vetinari, who wants him for his intelligence, initiative and organizational skills, and in Making Money he's struggling to stay on the straight and narrow while still craving the excitement of a life of crime. It's an obvious character arc, but skillfully carried out. I'm also fond of Moist's girlfriend, Adora Belle Dearheart, and of their relationship, which is simultaneously romantic and unsentimental, and many of the novel's one-off characters are also quite enjoyable. I do, however, wish Pratchett would shake things up a bit in Ankh Morpork--kill off Vetinari, make Carrot king, or just move his world in a direction that isn't overwhelmingly positive. As things stand there's just no tension to the Discworld novels anymore, and not too many laughs either seeing as after thirty novels most of the jokes are recycled, or obvious, or both. I'm obviously not going to stop buying Pratchett's novels--at this point it's practically a Pavlovian reaction--but I'm more than a little depressed by how diminished my expectations of them have become.


5. Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 by Annie Proulx - I think I like Proulx better as a short story writer than as a novelist. I was underwhelmed by her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, but this follow-up to her 2000 collection, Close Range (about which more here), is a more impressive use of her talents. The shorter format is a better fit for her beautiful, distinctive prose, which in longer stretches can come to seem mannered and overripe. As the title suggests and like Close Range, the stories in Bad Dirt take place in Wyoming, among ranchers, farm hands, and odd jobbers overwhelmed by the landscape they live in and the rigid, unforgiving mindset it engenders. Though Proulx's ability to convey both Wyoming's beauty and bleakness remains undiminished, the stories in this collection aren't as strong as the ones in Close Range (I think Proulx may have peaked with "Brokeback Mountain"--nothing else of hers that I've read has approached that story's precision and directed force). Most of them are either too lean--slices of life with a bit of humor or folk tales thrown in--or too flabby, delving into the character's history onto the tenth generation before getting back to the actual story (the best piece in the collection, "The Indian Wars Refought," is a perfect example. Before it gets to its point--a young native American woman faced with the full magnitude of the atrocities committed against her people--it spends pages upon pages describing three generation in a family only tangentially related to the main character). Proulx is a good enough writer that such digressions are never less than enjoyable, but the cumulative effect of the collection, and the impression of Wyoming that it is so clearly trying to evoke, are diminished.


6. Whites by Norman Rush - In sharp contrast to Proulx's underdone stories, this thin collection of only six stories by Rush is polished and near-seamless. I wouldn't have expected Rush--author of the undeniably brilliant but also sprawling and digressive novels Mating and Mortals--to have this much control of the short story form, but he acquits himself beautifully. Like the two novels, the stories in Whites take place in post-colonial Botswana, and as the title suggests their focus is interracial relations in that setting, and the attempts of whites--well-meaning, unthinking, or just plain cruel--to make a place for themselves in a nation that has so many reasons to hate them. The stories are nothing less than jewels. Rush is a beautiful writer, and he hops effortlessly from one narrative voice to another--the wry, detached anthropologist who relates the disastrous events of "Bruns" with obvious relish (the narrator, and the story itself, feel like a test run for Mating), the broken English of a young Batswana boy in "Thieving," the plaintive voice of the harassed, well-meaning wife of a European mining engineer in "Near Pala."
   
   Best of all, Rush is an excellent and concise storyteller (which is truly a surprise given how meandering Mortals and Mating were) whose depictions of life in Botswana are nothing short of devastating, while never falling into the traps of pity or condescension. Though all of the stories in Whites have a definite point to make, they make it through plot, not in spite or instead of it. In "Thieving," for example, the narrator's simple moral code and religious beliefs are a window through which we can examine the hopelessly tangled question of property and wealth in a post-colonial setting--is it right to demand that Africans, from which so much has been taken, accept the holiness with which we view personal property, or is the wholesale appropriation of white property even more damaging in the long term?--but the story is about his struggle to survive on the streets of Gaborone. It's our pity for this vulnerable boy that keeps us reading, and which makes Rush's point for him. The only negative comment I can make about Whites is that, having finished it, I have now exhausted Rush's bibliography, and that given his glacial rate of output (Mortals was twelve years in the writing) this exceptional, masterful collection might have to last me a long time.

And the Narnia Fans Think They Have It Rough

From L-space.org, a pictorial guide to the proper reading order of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, listing novels, graphic novels, short stories, children's books, and science books.

Or you could just do what I did, starting in the middle and picking books up whenever I found them in bookstores.

(Link via.)

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

A mere three books into a fantasy series which by now spans more than thirty, Terry Pratchett laid out the fundamental rule guiding the use of magic in his invented world, the Discworld: don't do it. Magic, in Pratchett's universe, is a toxic substance whose effects are highly reminiscent of radioactive waste (it is probably no coincidence that, at the time that he was writing the early Discworld books, Pratchett was employed as a publicity officer for a board overseeing three nuclear plants), with the added complication that, in concentrated amounts, it can rip through the fabric of the universe.

As the Discworld series progressed, this internal story reason for not using magic gave way to a moral-philosophical argument, a transition which coincided with a shift of focus from one kind of magical practitioner--the wizards of Unseen University--to another--the witches of Lancre and the Ramtops mountains, led, however unofficially, by Granny Weatherwax. According to Granny (who makes her first appearance in the aforementioned third Discworld book, Equal Rites), magic is to be avoided because it rarely solves problems and often creates them. Yes, magic could be used to do away with minor inconveniences and drudgery, but the psychological costs of being able to get whatever one wants at the flick of a wand would be disastrous, and all the while the real problems of the human condition--pettiness, misery, greed, cruelty--can only be magicked away by making people something other than human.

As opposed to the flashy, fireballs-and-dragons brand of magic employed by wizards, witches' magic is practical, often to the point of being entirely mundane and even unmagical--herb-lore, medicine, and plain common sense*. Witches serve as their community's social workers--they tend to the sick, attend births and deaths, sit up with the dead, settle disputes, and generally keep the peace. It's probably no coincidence that the Granny Weatherwax sub-series is second in its endurance only to the Watch novels, whose protagonists are also hard-working, under-appreciated guardians of society. And just as the watchmen must watch themselves for the urge to take justice into their own hands, to declare themselves above the law and become vigilantes, so the witches must guard against the temptation to believe themselves their community's leaders instead of its servants. Pratchett calls this state 'cackling'--the belief that one knows better than anyone how people should live their lives. The central dilemma of the witch novels is the search for a way of using power responsibly--the duty of an intelligent person to respect the right of others to be stupid.

The Tiffany Aching series, which began with 2003's The Wee Free Men, continued in 2004 with A Hat Full of Sky, and to which Wintersmith is the most recent addition (according to Pratchett fan-site L-Space, a fourth book in the series, tentatively titled When I Am Old I Shall Wear Midnight, is in the works, and Pratchett is planning to wrap up the series after four or five volumes. This, however, is the same man who for ten years kept saying the next novel was going to be the last entry in the Discworld series, and finally stopped because no one was taking him seriously anymore, so it might be wise to take these claims with a grain of salt), offers a fresh perspective on this quest for balance and the witchy mentality. First, by broadening the story's scope. Whereas the Granny Weatherwax novels revolved around the same three or four witch characters, the Tiffany novels describe a large, vibrant community, with cliques, rivalries, political squabbles, and a broad spectrum of attitudes and skill sets, from a young witch skilled in the handling of pigs to Miss Tick, the witch finder, who first identifies Tiffany's aptitude. More importantly, the Tiffany novels chart the process by which one becomes a witch, at the heart of which lies the acceptance of a grave responsibility and a lifetime of service. Perhaps not surprisingly, the series finds Tiffany recoiling from her destiny as often as she embraces it, as she gains a greater understanding of what being a witch is and of the sacrifices that the life entails.

[The necklace] lay in Tiffany's hand, on the strange white scar. It was the first thing she had ever been given that wasn't useful, that wasn't supposed to do something.

I don't need this, she thought. My power comes from the Chalk. But is that what life's going to be like? Nothing that you don't need?

The Tiffany novels are ostensibly geared towards young adults**, and Pratchett therefore maps this process of repeated and increasing commitment to a lifetime of service to the landmarks of the journey towards adulthood. In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany's adversary is the queen of fairies, who kidnaps children and keeps them in a state of perpetual childhood. Tiffany rejects this stasis (whose results, as demonstrated by the queen's longtime prisoner Roland, are nothing short of monstrous), and simultaneously recognizes within herself the ability to become a witch. In A Hat Full of Sky, Tiffany is possessed by a hiver, a being of pure selfishness which causes her to behave with typical teenage self-absorption (where did you go? Tiffany is asked after succumbing to the hiver's possession. Nowhere, she replies. What did you do? Nothing). In Wintersmith, Tiffany is confronted with the possibility of romance--with a monster of her own creation.

Acting on impulse, Tiffany interrupts a ritual honoring the change of seasons, and dances with the title character, the spirit of winter. In so doing, she takes the place of summer, and leaves the dance altered and having altered others. A bit of humanity infects the Wintersmith, and he falls in love with Tiffany. Being an elemental spirit, something a little less person-like than a god, even, he lacks the full humanity that would allow him to comprehend and properly express his feelings, and so he courts her with livestock-killing blizzards and icebergs shaped like his beloved. Pratchett very deliberately draws a comparison between the Wintersmith and an adolescent boy trying to impress his first crush--flexing his muscles, pulling stupid pranks in order to get her attention, making grand gestures that never turn out as planned.

Unfortunately, whereas in The Wee Free Men Pratchett's choice of fantastical adversary dovetailed perfectly with his theme of rejecting childhood and embracing responsibility, the later novels in the series evince the same artificiality which had begun to infect the adult witch novels. At some point, all of Granny Weatherwax's antagonists became metaphors for dehumanizing forces robbing people of agency and will--stories that bent reality and altered lives to suit a predetermined path, fairies whose glamour places all who see them in their thrall, vampires whose bite turns their victim into livestock. The witch novels became repetitions of the same idea. A similar thing is happening to the Tiffany novels, which repeat their theme without complicating it. The novels' plots are sublimated to this theme, internal story logic giving way to Pratchett's moral-philosophical agenda.

In order to stop the Wintersmith, the real summer must be brought back to take Tiffany's place so that she and winter can resume a relationship that is anthropomorphized, but not human. Pratchett therefore has Granny announce, only a few chapters before the book's end, that summer is being held prisoner in the underworld, and that a hero must be despatched to retrieve her. This task is given to Roland, the fairy queen's prisoner from The Wee Free Men and Tiffany's human love interest, who is by far the most interesting character in Wintersmith, even if Pratchett has to engage in some industrial strength retconning to get him there.

Roland immediately recognizes the role assigned to him as that of a hero in a Discworld myth which commingles the story of Persephone with that of Orpheus's descent into the underworld. "It's supposed to be a love story but it's really a metaphor for the annual return of summer," Roland offers by way of an explanation, and his (and Granny's) reasoning does have a sort of storybook logic. What it lacks, however, is story logic. Tiffany might as well have been told to travel to the scum-pits of Ur, retrieve the scythe of Naftir, and with it shatter the mirror of Epthelimon for all that the story's resolution has any organic connection to its setup, or for that matter to the Discworld's established cosmology***.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that Pratchett seems to lack the courage to take his theme to its logical conclusion. It's become a commonplace of cop and doctor shows to juxtapose the brief moments of excitement with the long stretches of tedium and drudgery that make up the bulk of public service. Pratchett claims to be conveying the realities of this life, but ultimately he centers his stories around the excitement, around those moments in which a witch does need to use magic. To a certain extent, this is an understandable choice--Pratchett is writing a fantasy, not a naturalistic novel (and anyway, when he tries to juxtapose mundane, everyday witchery with the more exciting kind, as he does in both A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith, the result tends to be bitty and episodic)--but as I've said, his choice of antagonists, and recently of the method of defeating them, is predicated on the desire to express the mundane aspects of a witch's life, not the exciting ones. Pratchett ends up using the exciting as a metaphor for the mundane, in which the coherence of the moral is given precedence over that of the fable expressing it. The result is a storyline at war with itself, trying to be two things at the same time and succeeding at neither.

All of which is not to say that Wintersmith isn't worth a Pratchett fan's time. However problematic the whole, the parts are still of a uniform excellence. Tiffany remains engaging and, for all her prickliness, lovable, and Roland emerges as a worthy counterpart to her. Pratchett deals with the boy's difficult family situation with a refreshing lack of sentimentality ("I'd better go see my father ... If I don't see him every day he forgets who I am," Roland at one point explains matter-of-factly). The Tiffany books are remarkable among Discworld novels for a refreshing degree of emotional honesty--Tiffany's recollections of her grandmother in The Wee Free Men were, by far, the closest the series has come to being stirring--and Pratchett does seem to have developed a lighter touch when it comes to romance, which it had previously been his custom to turn away from demurely. There is yet another expansion of our understanding of the witch community, this time encompassing Tiffany's latest mentor, the profoundly creepy Miss Treason, and the younger generation of up-and-coming witches.

Perhaps most importantly, Wintersmith is very, very funny, which is largely the doing of the Nac Mag Feegle, the tiny, foul-mouthed blue pixies who have adopted Tiffany into their clan, and will do anything to protect her, whether she likes it or not. To be perfectly honest, the Feegle don't have a role in the novel's plot, and haven't since The Wee Free Men (in which they acted as Tiffany's access to, and source of information about, fairyland). They exist primarily as comic relief, and perform that task with great success (the same can't be said of Horace the cheese, another one of Pratchett's idioms-made-flesh. This wheel of Lancre blue cheese is so lively it has to be kept in a cage, and at some point becomes an honorary Feegle. The result is not so much funny as Dadaesque). Between the Feegles and Pratchett's trademark sarcasm, there's plenty to laugh at in Wintersmith.

It's probably unfair to complain that a twenty year old fantasy franchise spanning some thirty novels has lost some of its freshness, and the fact is that even second- and third-rate Discworld is never as bad as other series that have gone off the boil. Still, it's hard, especially in light of the exuberance and, yes, the freshness that made The Wee Free Men one of my favorite reads in 2004, not to be disappointed when Pratchett produces another piece that almost makes it to greatness and then doesn't. Wintersmith is worth reading for the strength of its parts, but here's hoping that Pratchett still has it in him to surprise us another strong whole.

---

* It's tempting to read this juxtaposition as a commentary about gender roles, especially given that Equal Rites, which first articulates the difference between wizards' and witches' magic, revolves around the first female wizard. To my mind, however, the distinction has a great deal more to do with issues of class. Granny Weatherwax, her fellow witches, and the communities they serve are peasants--farmers, blacksmiths, innkeepers--whereas the Unseen University wizards resemble nothing so much as Oxbridge dons. When Pratchett introduces the concept of witches trying to incorporate wizard magic into their repertoire, they are invariably presented as social climbers, disdainful of their rural surroundings and its inhabitants.

** Which, in practice, means only that the font is bigger, there are chapters and illustrations, and the protagonist is juvenile. After all, most bright thirteen year olds can tackle Pratchett's so-called adult novels.

*** There is, obviously, a connection to our mythology, which is why I say that the resolution has storybook logic. I do wonder, however, whether juvenile readers can truly be counted on to make that connection, or whether Pratchett's ending will seem as arbitrary to them as my scum-pits of Ur, etc. scenario. It's possible that I'm not giving kids enough credit, and equally possible that Wintersmith is one of those YA books actually meant for adults.

And the Scary Thing Is, Still Less Disturbing Than the Sam-Raimi-Directs-The Wee Free Men Business

[David Jason,] the star of Only Fools and Horses, A Touch of Frost, and one-off dramas such as The Quest will play Death's servant, Albert, in the fantasy drama Hogfather, part of Pratchett's long-running Discworld series. The two-part film, which will run for a total of four hours, is part of Sky One's 2006 Christmas schedule. It is the first Discworld film to be turned into an action movie.

I assume that's supposed to be 'live action' at the end (since Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music have already been made into animated films).

On the other hand, I find the notion of a Discworld action film strangely appealing...

Link via Emerald City.

Now That All Other Fantasy Franchises Have Been Tapped...

Via Dark Horizons:

Sam Raimi will direct "The Wee Free Men," an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's bestselling young-adult novel, as his likely first post "Spider-Man" franchise project reports Variety.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has acquired the book and set Pamela Pettler ("Corpse Bride", "Monster House") to write the script. The studio aims to develop an event-sized live-action family film, and if all goes well could adapt further novels in Pratchett's "Disc World" series.

I don't know what scares me more: the thought of Tiffany Aching in your standard Hollywood 'follow your heart and protect your family' fantasy mold, or the phrase 'event-sized film' directed at Discworld.

Not With a Bang But With a Thud! or, Whither Discworld

Last year, while reading Terry Pratchett's then most recent novel, Going Postal, I remarked to my mother how strange it was that when I had started reading Discworld, the books had been about magic and eldritch creatures from the beyond, whereas now they were about telecommunications cartels. And eldritch creatures from the beyond.

It is quite fascinating to chart the evolution of Pratchett's invented universe, currently spanning some thirty adult novels, three YA novels, a picture book, an illustrated novel and any number of companion volumes. The series started out as a parody of fantasy conventions, with Pratchett reaching into a giant box marked 'fantasy clichés' and digging out something new to lambast every three pages, whether it was the novels of Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, H.P. Lovecraft, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or just the hoary conventions of the genre. As the Discworld began taking shape, Pratchett shaved away a great many invented species and locations, and started telling his own stories. Strongly dependent on magic (quite often it seemed that the stories revolved around the menace of the Dungeon Dimensions breaking into Discworld), these were traditional fantasy stories--the deposed prince in disguise, the magician's apprentice, the dragon who terrorizes a city--with a decidedly Pratchett twist and a healthy dollop of his humanist philosophy. Most recently, Discworld books have switched over to the 'Discworld Does X' model--communism, Christmas, war, newspaper journalism, feminism, telecommunication booms, and, with the most recent novel, Thud!, race wars--with magic taking a back seat to a satire of contemporary popular culture and a more strident form of Pratchett's political commentary.

It's a common complaint in recent years to say that Pratchett is recycling ideas, settings and jokes, but in many ways, that repetition is the source of Discworld's strength, and the reason that this invented universe has remained strong and compelling (not to mention a tantalizing mix of bestselling and critically beloved) for over twenty years. Despite taking place in many different locations on Discworld, centering on different characters, and having widely divergent themes and tones, the Discworld novels are clearly of a piece. They are tied together with a shared mythology and history which Pratchett extemporizes with the skill of a great jazz musician. A throwaway joke becomes a recurring joke, the recurring joke becomes a plot point and the plot point becomes the lynchpin of an entire novel. This is essentially what Pratchett has done with Thud!, in which the battle of Koom Valley (first mentioned in a footnote in, I believe, Men at Arms) goes from humorous to gravely serious as Ankh-Morpork's dwarf and troll populations start raring for a reenactment. The murder of a rabble-rousing dwarf, who had been preaching the death of all trolls, is likely to ignite the city, and it falls to its Watch, led by the inimitable Commander Sam Vimes, to solve the murder and defuse the situation.

Over the last few years, Vimes has started to become synonymous with Discworld. Of the last seven Discworld novels for adults, three were Watch novels (The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud!) with Vimes as the main (and sometimes only) protagonist, and a further two featured him prominently as an antagonist (The Truth, Monstrous Regiment). At the same time, other Discworld sub-series seem to be grinding to a halt. The Lancre witches' coven is making guest appearances in the YA Tiffany Aching novels. Rincewinds seems, by popular demand, to be staying put in his cushy Unseen University position. It's been a while since we've visited with Death and his extended family. Pratchett has been writing a lot of standalone novels with new characters, whom he might in the future spin off into new sub-series, but thus far they've been largely along the lines of the Watch novels--mysteries taking place in Ankh-Morpork.

The Watch series, and Sam Vimes himself, are a fan favorite, and for quite some time I had no problem with the notion of spending most of my time with these characters. What I've noticed recently, however, is that even within the Watch books there's been a thinning out of the characters. Whereas the early Watch novels were told from several points of view, each investigating the crime from a different angle and contributing vital information, in the most recent Watch novels the onus of the investigation falls almost entirely on Vimes' shoulders, with the other familiar characters acting as comic relief or simply showing up because it's expected of them.

It's plain that Pratchett no longer has any idea what to do with Captain Carrot, who can no longer play the innocent abroad and whose psychological idiosyncrasies (personal isn't the same as important) have long since been wrung dry of story ideas. Pratchett has taking to sidelining the character--Night Watch took place years before he arrived in the city, and in Thud! he doesn't even get a point of view and appears in only a few scenes--and will probably continue to do so until he finally decides to bring the issue of Carrot's kingship to a head (what a pity it is that Pratchett has made the very idea of Carrot claiming the throne thoroughly out of character for him--it would have been fascinating to watch Carrot square off against Vimes). Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs show up to desultorily repeat their tired old shtick, which even Pratchett seems to find tedious. The less said about Angua's storyline, in which her by-now painfully familiar whining over being a werewolf is coupled with an extended and ultimately pointless bar-crawl with Cheery, new vampire recruit Sally, and Nobby's new girlfriend, the better. Both Cheery and Detritus, who might have been expected to take a more prominent role in a novel dealing with dwarf-troll tensions, are given little to do--at no point have I so thoroughly regretted the death of Cuddy in Men at Arms, when his friendship with Detritus might have been the focal point of a interesting sub-plot.

The only real character left in Thud! is Sam Vimes himself, who for several books now has acted as Pratchett's mouthpiece about matters personal and political. It's interesting to note that while the early Watch novels dealt with political matters in an oblique fashion, through murder investigations of private citizens whose deaths shed light on a potential social problem (Feet of Clay raises the issue of slavery, Men at Arms brings up the danger of guns), later novels have had Vimes deal with blatantly political matters--whether he's traveling to foreign countries, as he does in Jingo and The Fifth Elephant, or staying put as he does in Thud! and Night Watch. The murders Vimes is faced with in these later Watch novels are catalysts for events that might tear the city--the entire Discworld, even--apart, and it falls to him to come up with a solution that will defuse the situation.

Which, of course, he does. It occurred to me while reading Thud! that for all of Pratchett's willingness to mess up the Discworld universe, to introduce real-world politics and political crises, he's not quite willing to take the approach to its logical conclusion. Again and again, Vimes discovers that the murders he's been sent to investigate were orchestrated for the specific purpose of sparking wars, toppling kings, and resurrecting old enmities. By bringing the murderer to light, Vimes reminds both sides that they'd rather sit down and talk, and that their hatred for one another comes not from themselves but from an outside source. Unlike our own world, which progresses and regresses in cycles, the Discworld is constantly moving forward into enlightenment and away from warlike medieval notions of how the world works. It's a pleasant fairy tale, but especially with Pratchett trying to tell more realistic stories (and using his characters to moralize throughout these stories) it feels inauthentic. Are we really meant to accept that centuries of racial tension can be overcome by the discovery that Vimes makes at the end of Thud!? I think we all know a little too much about the real-world counterparts of such struggles to believe Pratchett's easy solution.

I would classify Thud! as a lesser Discworld novels, somewhere around the Maskerade level. It's funny as all get-out, of course, and the Discworld itself is as concretely real as it has ever been, but it's clear from the book's outset that the militant dwarf's murder could not have been committed by a troll, as his fellow 'deep-down' dwarfs claim, and experience teaches us that Pratchett is almost certain to reveal a vast conspiracy aimed at undermining the future of dwarf-troll relations. The mystery, in other words, isn't terribly mystifying--the book is more of a how- and whydunnit than a whodunnit, and both the how and the why hinge on a thin Da Vinci Code satire that is too subtle to be truly funny and too prominent to save the book from sinking into irrelevance the moment the egg-timer on this pop-culture phenomenon runs out (a problem that has plagued too many recent Discworld novels). The novel deals with the history and folk beliefs of both dwarfs and trolls, but whereas the former are by now the Discworld equivalent of Klingons--an invented species whose culture has become so fascinating that it threatens to overwhelm the human point of view characters--the latter have remained underdeveloped, and Pratchett has to scramble to come up with some smidgeon of folklore for them. The result is not so much a novel about strife between dwarfs and trolls as it is about internal disputes between two different groups of dwarfs, and as such is sadly reminiscent of the superior The Fifth Elephant.

Nevertheless, there are moments of profound beauty and wit in Thud!, primarily focusing on Vimes. I laughed until I had tears in my eyes at Vimes reading a tattered, much-loved children's book to his one-year-old son, and as usual, Vimes' interactions with his family and extended household have the ring of truth and serve to remind us why we love this decent, honorable man. And then there's this little piece of quintessential Vimes-iana, tucked away in a footnote:

Vimes had never got on with any game more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves.

But for most of the novel, Pratchett is less concerned with letting Vimes be than he is with letting him talk. Or, more accurately, monologue. With the roles of the other Watch characters so drastically reduced, most of Thud! takes place inside Vimes' head, and we get to watch him think about and respond to the events he witnesses in typical Vimes-ian fashion--by getting angry. Anger is unquestionably Vimes' defining characteristic--his incandescent rage at the unfairness of the world, at the strong preying on the weak, at the way that real people are used up and tossed away by those who claim to be trying to make the world a better place. To Pratchett's credit, he uses Vimes' anger as a plot point in Thud!, in which a vengeful spirit recognizes in him the potential for a champion and tries to turn him into a creature of pure rage. The way in which Vimes fights and eventually confounds this creature reveals to us the bedrock of his personality, the importance he places on his self-control and on his ability to police himself and be certain of the rightness of his actions. It is a true psychological insight into one of Practhett's most interesting characters--albeit one that largely repeats the Gonne plotline in Men at Arms--but sadly it comes swathed in hundreds of pages of cod-philosophy.

"I don't habitually beat up prisoners, if that's what you're suggesting," said Vimes.

"And I am sure you would not wish to do so tonight."

Vimes opened his mouth to shout the grag out of the building, and stopped.

Because the cheeky little sod had got it right slap-bang on the money. Vimes had been on the edge since leaving the house. He'd felt a tingling across his skin, and a tightness in his gut, and a sharp, nasty little headache. Someone was going to pay for all this... this... this thisness, and it didn't need to be a screwed-up bit player like Helmclever.

And he was not certain, not certain at all, what he'd do if the prisoner gave him any lip or tried to be smart. Beating people up in little rooms... he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one. You couldn't say "we're the good guys" and do bad-guy things. Sometimes the watching watchman inside every good copper's head could use an extra pair of eyes.

Justice had to be seen to be done, so he'd see it done up good and proper.

As an infrequent occurrence, a way of hammering in a point at the book's climax, this sort of over-the-top rhetoric works, but Vimes goes on in this fashion for the better part of 350 pages, and has been doing so for three or four books. Whereas the earlier Watch books charted changes in Vimes' personality--from a broken-down drunk, he learns to believe again in the ideals whose bankrupcy broke his heart, and becomes a major player in the city--recent books in the sub-series have simply made Vimes more Vimes-ish, and as a result the character and its voice are at the cusp of becoming parodies of themselves. The fact that Pratchett doesn't seem to notice this suggests that he may have committed the humorist's cardinal sin--that of taking himself too seriously. Vimes' politics, which at this point we can only assume are also Pratchett's politics, are not enough to support the novel, especially when one considers how unoriginal they are. Surely, most Pratchett readers above junior high age don't need to be told that race wars are stupid and hurtful?

While Pratchett has no problem conveying Vimes' anger, and does a decent enough job of sketching the outlines of his deeper feelings for his family, he still can't quite manage tender emotions, which only contributes to the devaluation of Vimes as a person. Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett has demurely turned away whenever his characters came close to expressing earnest, delicate emotion--romance, heartbreak or grief. Pratchett is of the Douglas Adams school of humorist writing, which means that he doesn't quite know how to marry his laugh-a-minute style with genuinely human characterization. Ten years ago, when I first started reading him, Pratchett was the only game in town if you were looking for intelligent, thought-provoking, original fantasy and didn't know where to turn outside of the mainstream, and you took his lumps with his delightful sugar. The intervening decade has seen a sea-change in the fantasy genre. Pratchett is no longer the only name to call up when asked to suggest intelligent, well-written fantasy, even within the mainstream, and in a year in which Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys so believably married humor and realistic emotions, a book like Thud! seems almost anachronistic. Like many Pratchett fans, I've long been thoroughly invested in the notion that Pratchett is worth looking at, that he says important things and says them well, but it occurs to me that as time passes, I can find less and less ways to justify this argument. I can still see myself handing a reluctant, slightly snobbish reader a copy of Wyrd Sisters or Mort with the full expectation of blowing their minds, but the later Discworld books strike me as lesser and more ephemeral efforts--half pop-culture references, half unsubtle moralizing.

The most fun I've had in Discworld in recent years has been with the YA Tiffany Aching novels, The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, which match delicate psychological portraits with exciting plots, a less strident form of Pratchett's trademark political thinking, and genuinely funny humor. Possibly the best thing about the Tiffany books, however, is the way in which they give us a fresh perspective, or rather two fresh perspectives, on Granny Weatherwax, Pratchett's second most recognizable and beloved character. The books, which might as well be subtitled The Young Esmerelda Weatherwax Chronicles, chart Tiffany's growth into what is almost certain to be the next witch of witches, the most powerful and most influential witch in her region--the next Granny Weatherwax, in other words. They give us a glimpse of the making of a Granny Weatherwax, and although in some cases they repeat storylines and ideas that we've already seen from Granny's perspective (both books owe a great deal to Lords and Ladies), there's enough freshness in them to counteract the repetition. Perhaps more importantly, through Tiffany's eyes we see Granny as others see her. Instead of living inside Granny's head, as the adult witch novels forced us to do, we see her from the outside, and although Pratchett can't quite resist the urge to give Tiffany the 'correct' attitude towards Granny, by enforcing a distance from the character he allows us to see her world more completely, without being overwhelmed by her philosophy of life.

I'd very much like to see Pratchett give the Watch novels the Tiffany treatment. It's time to get out of Vimes' head and find a new point of view character, and I have to say, the character I'm currently most curious about is Young Sam Vimes. I can't help but wonder how this young man will avoid the twin pitfalls of becoming his father and moving so far out of his father's shadow that he no longer recognizes himself (I think it's safe to assume that, with Sam and Sybil Vimes for parents, being spoiled is not something this kid has to worry about). I think it would be interesting to see Vimes through his son's eyes, but whether or not Pratchett does this I hope he moves out of Vimes' head. I've been a Discworld fan for 12 years, and Pratchett remains the only author whose books I simply can't not read, but I would dearly love to see him return to the series' glory days, and remember that it was the stories, not the sermons, that made his world great in the first place.

An Agnostic Goes to Synagogue: A Rosh HaShana Post

Terry Pratchett's 13th Discworld novel, Small Gods, charts the evolution of a virulently missionary (in the extreme sense--crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, that sort of thing) religion into a more permissive, liberal one. Brutha, a simple-minded but fervently devout novice in the Omnian holy city, finds himself in the unlikely role of prophet when a one-eyed turtle speaks to him in the voice of God (it's Pratchett. Just go with it). Together, they topple the institution that has sapped Om of his power (Om is fueled by belief, and his believers have long since transferred their faith to the religious establishment that has calcified around him), and erect a more tolerant, benevolent one in its place, a religion that respects the individual's right not to believe.

The next time we meet an Omnian priest, in the 23rd Discworld book, Carpe Jugulum, several centuries have passed. The Quite Reverend Mightily Oats is tolerant, benevolent, respectful of the beliefs of others, apologetic for his church's past misdeeds, and crippled by doubt. He reads his holy book and notes only its contradictions and improbabilities. His every utterance of faith is matched by a faithless thought. By the book's climax, however, Oats has abandoned his milquetoast permissiveness for a hardcore, old-time-religion type of faith that allows him to defeat a supernatural menace. As the book ends, and as a sign of appreciation for his courage, Oats' putative but resistant flock joins him for a prayer meeting where

The singing wasn't very enthusiastic, though, until Oats tossed aside the noisome songbook and taught them some of the songs he remembered from his grandmother, full of fire and thunder and death and justice and tunes you could actually whistle, with titles like 'Om Shall Trample the Ungodly' and 'Lift Me To The Skies' and 'Light The Good Light'. They went down well. Lancre people weren't too concerned about religion, but they knew what it ought to sound like.

It's a passage that's stuck with me, like a loose tooth that one can't help tonguing, for more than five years. Wasn't the point of Small Gods to get rid this sort of fire-and-brimstone religion? Didn't that book--and our own experiences in the real world--teach us that monolithic, dogmatic religious institutions could do terrible evil, and weren't we supposed to be happy about the end of old fashioned Omnianism? Why did Pratchett now turn around and speak so nostalgically about the same kind of mindset that gave us witch-burners and torturers?

These questions have stuck with me because, of course, I can see Pratchett's point. The fire that consumes and devastates is the same fire that empowers, that gives courage and strength in our darkest hours. There's an ideal medium between the two, but ultimately, true faith is incompatible with I-respect-your-right-to-disagree-with-me-about-the-fundamental-nature-of-the-universe tolerance.

Pratchett and his two competing approaches to religion came very powerfully to my mind this morning in synagogue (and if there is a God, I'm certain that's a smiting offence) as we were wrapping up morning prayers for Rosh HaShana. Following the Torah reading, we sang two hymns--Avinu Malkenu (Our Father, Our King) and Shechina Mekor Hayenu (Divine Presence, Source of Our Life). The former is a traditional hymn, several centuries old at least, in a standard call-and-response format: the audience repeatedly sings a short phrase, and the cantor replies with longer, varying phrases that constitute entreaties to God. The latter is a modern creation which follows the same structure, appealing to the Shechina, the divine presence that is Judaism's answer to The Sacred Feminine.

Here are a few things the congregation tells God when they sing Avinu Malkenu: We Have No King But Thou; Remember That We Are As Dirt Before You; Provide For Those Who Die In Your Name. Here are a few things the congregation asks from the Shechina when they sing Shechina Mekor Hayenu: Teach Us To Recognize Our Limitations; Show Us The Path of Gentleness; Provide For Those Who Struggle for Peace and Justice. Even the melodies make it clear which of these hymns was written by folks who truly believed in God's divine retribution and which by someone who wanted to be politically correct.

As the title of this post states, I'm an agnostic, but even on the days (and they are getting fewer and fewer) when I believe in God, I can't quite find it in myself to believe that the creator of the universe cares whether I drive on the Sabbath. One of the accusations that is frequently leveled at Reform Jews is that we pick and choose from the divine commandments only those that we find it convenient to follow. This is not without merit, but I prefer to look at it in another way: I'm a Reform Jew because being one allows me to keep in contact with a cultural and ethical heritage that's very important to me while maintaining my free will. Being Reform means that the onus of making the distinction between the important and unimportant aspects of millennia of accumulated religious worship falls on my shoulders, which is where I want it to be.

I dipped an apple in honey today, symbolizing my wish for a sweet new year, but I did so with the understanding that dipping-an-apple-in-honey is an accoutrement, one that falls far short of penetrating the importance of the day--a new beginning, but also the beginning of a period of judgment and reflection, a final opportunity to amend one's faults and begin the new year as a better person. It's a distinction that, all too often, I feel that my fellow Jews fail to make. Just ask my brother, who along with his fellow IDF recruits was treated to a Rosh HaShana talk from his base Rabbi. What should have been an interesting hour apparently devolved into Gematric explanations for the tradition of eating a fish head in the holiday meal.

But as much as I'd like to sneer at this Rabbi and his simplistic approach to our shared faith (or perhaps at his expectations from the level of comprehension and interest he would receive from his audience), who do you think had a more meaningful time this morning in synagogue? I'll bet you anything he wasn't making glib comparisons to Terry Pratchett novels. I genuinely do believe that injecting a permissive, tolerant, respectful tone into religious worship is a worthy goal, but it's hard to maintain that conviction when I juxtapose some of the modern Reform prayers--essentially an attempt to fabricate tradition out of whole cloth and with a multicultural twang--with something like the hymn U'netane Tokef:

On Rosh HaShana their fate shall be written, and on Yom Kippur it shall be sealed.

How many shall pass on, and how many shall be born, who will live and who will die, who is at the end of their life and who is not at its end, who in fire and who in water, who by the sword, who by a wild beast, who by hunger and who by thirst, who in an earthquake, and who in a plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who shall rest, and who shall wander, who will live peacefully and who shall be harried, who will be calm, and who will be tormented, who will be poor and who will be rich, who will be brought low and who raised high.

And repentance and prayer and charity shall lift the evil of the decree.

According to tradition, U'netane Tokef was written by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz around the tenth century, as he lay dying from wounds inflicted by a Bishop who had failed to convert him to Christianity. The story is, of course, apocryphal, but the power of the hymn can't be denied. And if I had my way, we would never sing it in on Rosh HaShana. U'netane Tokef is part of the Musaf--the segment of the Rosh HaShana prayer that expresses the wish for the erection of a third Temple and the resumption of animal sacrifices, neither of which are on my wish list for the coming year. And yet, what in the entire catalogue of modern Reform prayers can match up to the fervor of this hymn?

I wouldn't like for this post to be mistaken for a request for pity. I've never felt sorry for my inability to feel fervent faith. It's not something I've ever needed, or felt the lack of. I've managed to talk my way around the inherent hypocrisy of attending religious worship without feeling religious conviction, with various explanations that pretty much boil down to the fact that I go to synagogue, or light Shabbat candles or keep Kosher or forgo bread on Pesach, because I feel that I should. And whether or not we like to admit this, the fact is that Reform Judaism is a very comfortable place for people like me, who want contact with their birthright that isn't incompatible with a modern lifestyle (which isn't to say that there aren't devout Reform Jews. I haven't taken a poll or anything). I'm comfortable with being the agnostic in the synagogue, and when it comes to it I suspect I'll be comfortable with being an atheist in synagogue as well, but I do wonder if my brand of faith has what it takes to make it through the ages. When the bad times come, will our ersatz services and gender-neutral prayers be enough to help us get by? Will we even turn to our faith?

Shana Tova to you, if your tastes run that way. And if not, remember that each day is, in itself, the beginning of a new year--as holy as any other, and as worthy of celebration.