I was glad to finally get the chance to read The Color of Magic, the first book in Terry Pratchett’s long-running Disc World series. As a longtime Tolkien
fan reading Pratchett’s work for the first time was a particularly rewarding
experience. Pratchett borrows just enough from the epitomes father of modern
fantasy to make the corkscrews in his narrative particularly effective.
Much of modern fantasy writing seems to be lurking in
Tolkien’s shadow. The Stilted writing is rich in archetypical trappings but
lacking in real substantive storytelling. What has emerged is a kind of epic
fantasy arms race; too many characters, convoluted lore, and tomes upon tomes
of plot. Pratchett was well aware of the state of his genre when he started
writing fantasy. His Disc World series was a great first push off a cliff into
the gulch of relative respectability that the genre enjoys today. He draws on a
vast array of stale formulas and puts them in blender adding a generous helping
of his own dry wit and rage. What emerges is something truly unique, by any
measure a satirical feat.
What sets Pratchett apart from many of his contemporaries is
his approach to world building. Right up front he takes on the often-ridiculous
conceits of fantasy worlds and gives them a colossal turtle-sized redecoration.
The key to Pratchett’s success is the mundanity that he allows to infuse the
most fantastical elements of his world. By contrast the settings in Tolkien’s
works are separated from our world by a kind of gauzy mythological curtain.
Despite all the war and tragedy and heartbreak Middle Earth couldn’t be further
off from the messy grey morality present in our world. Even the evil places are
perfectly, unremittingly evil. The sense of meticulously constructed antiquity
is almost oppressive in it’s grandioseness. Pratchett by contrast revels in
deconstructing the mythology of places and the creatures that inhabit them. Nothing
is as it seems and chances are it’s a lot less remarkable than you think.
Tolkien doesn’t create characters so much as he creates
archetypes. Even the Hobbits that function as the audience’s proxies are pulled
from an idealized vision of middle class English society. While the characters
are occasionally depicted as hungry or tired they are primarily motivated by
honor, vengeance or pure evil (and definitely not sex). Tolkien’s warriors,
wizards and elves seem to exist on a higher moral plane then contemporary man.
Pratchett takes an opposing approach. His characterizations, for all their
zaniness and sinister whimsy feel grubby and lived in. Like real people they
are more likely to act in their own self-interests unless sufficiently persuaded otherwise. Heroes aren’t honor
bound so much as they are driven by insatiable blood lust that may or may not occasionally
coincide with honorable deeds. We often see the actions of so called heroes
measured in collateral damage rather than purity of heart. In essence the
divide between Pratchett and Tolkien is a basic philosophical one. Tolkien’s
worlds are meticulously crafted binary systems, Good vs. Evil. He believes that
absolutes can exist and that with effort we too can move towards absolute good (and
maybe triumph over evil while we’re at it). This is a decidedly Christian point
of view, and a fairly commendable one at that, after all his generation killed
Hitler and invented zippers. Whether this kind of morality is still applicable
in our brave new world of soy lattes and terrorism is a deeply philosophical question far above my pay grade, however the massive trans-media success of the
Tolkien Empire would make a strong case that it is. Pratchett takes a different
approach. One might be tempted to call it pessimistic but I prefer to think of
it as a viewpoint that celebrates the quirks of human nature. Instead of using
fantasy as a means of projecting what we should be, Pratchett projects reality
onto fantasy to show us how we truly are in sarcastic high definition.
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