The Turtle Moves! (6 page)

Granny and Esk do not give in easily, though, and when Simon unintentionally manages to stir up the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, Esk employs her wizardly magic and witch's training to save the day, and thereafter is admitted to the University.

If anything in that is a direct parody of any other fantasy novel, it's news to me, and I read a
lot
of fantasy. No, with this book Mr. Pratchett has shifted from parody to something else—satire, perhaps, though it doesn't really seem to be that yet, or perhaps just plain comic fantasy. He's begun the transformation of his Discworld from a collection of silly ideas borrowed from all over to an actual world, with its own consistent (if somewhat ridiculous) society.

It's still about stories, though; it's merely shifted from being about fantasy fiction to being about the stories people actually believe and use to arrange their lives. The wizards of Unseen University never say that female wizards are against nature, against the law, or against tradition, but that they're against the
lore
—that is, that they're not something that's in all the stories about how the world works.

Yes, I know that it's a pun, that in British English “lore” and “law” are far more similar in pronunciation than they are in my own American dialect, but still, why bother with such a pun, and repeat it so often? It's clearly important, and what's important about it is that Discworld is a world that's shaped by stories.

In the first two volumes, there were certainly plenty of stories that affected the characters; Twoflower had become the Disc's first tourist in response to the stories he had heard, Rincewind had heard all the stories about Bel-Shamharoth, Liessa was living out a story, everyone knew stories about Cohen, and on and on, but no one tried to make reality (thin as it is on the Disc) fit the stories, unless you count Twoflower's frequent inability to see when it
didn't
fit.

In
Equal Rites
, though, wizards consider it essential to obey the lore, and abide by the story.

Not that these are necessarily the same wizards we encountered before. Although Unseen University is important in all three volumes up to this point, the only characters from the first two books to appear in this
one are the Unseen University's Librarian, whom we saw transformed into an orangutan back in the early pages of
The Light Fantastic
, and Death himself—oh, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, if those count as characters.

Somewhere between volumes, Unseen University changed management; at the start of
The Light Fantastic
it was run by Galder Weatherwax, Supreme Grand Conjuror of the Order of the Silver Star, Lord Imperial of the Sacred Staff, Eighth Level Ipsissimus, and 304
^th
Chancellor, while in
Equal Rites
the title is Archchancellor and Archimage of the Wizards of the Silver Star.
⁶⁸
The incumbent in that office is a man named Cutangle, and there are no mentions of all that unpleasantness that preceded his elevation to the post. Despite that, and despite the change in titles, since the Librarian is still there, and in orangutan form, it can't have been
that
long since the messy events described in
The Light Fantastic
.

Admittedly, not all the wizards who were characters in
The Light Fantastic
survived the book, but it still seems a bit odd that we don't see
any
familiar faces among the faculty. It's almost as if Mr. Pratchett were not thinking of this as the next volume in a coherent series at all.

Perverse of him.

At any rate, at the end of
Equal Rites
we have Simon and Esk established at Unseen University, ready to continue their adventures. . . .

And we never see them again. Granny Weatherwax, on the other hand, does return, fairly often.

But not right away. The next book was
Mort
, and the series forked again—or a new series was launched, if you prefer.

For the next news on Granny Weatherwax, skip ahead to Chapter 7a. For
Mort
, and the launch of that third sub-series, read on.

A
T THIS POINT IN THE SERIES, four volumes in, things are settling down to more or less their final form. The geography is fairly consistent, and the underlying attitude is not only firmly established, but stated outright a few pages in:

“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.”

That's reminiscent of Rincewind's attitude in the first two books, but stated more directly and up front here. With this novel, we are definitely no longer in fantasy-parodying mode, but in the far more interesting realm of commenting on human beings—or, as Douglas Adams called it, life, the universe, and everything.

The storyline this time is both fairly simple and completely unlike any fantasy cliché: Death, the anthropomorphic personification we've met in all three previous books, takes a human boy named Mort as an apprentice.
⁶⁹
After a bit of a rough start, Mort starts to get the hang of the job, though he does screw up one assignment with potentially nasty results, and discovers that his master took an apprentice for much the usual reason
any
master takes an apprentice—to hand off the business and retire. Which is not what anyone else, including Mort, wants; there are, in fact, good reasons for ordinary people to not want Mort to take over.

Death's adopted daughter Ysabell, first encountered in
The Light Fantastic
, is a major character in
Mort
. Death's home was also seen in
The Light Fantastic
, and is much the same here, though we get much more detail. We also meet Death's servant, Albert, and Death's horse, Binky, both of whom will be regular cast members hereafter.

Most of Mort's problems revolve around Queen Keli of Sto Lat; for once, Ankh-Morpork isn't a central location.

Despite Mort's bungling, matters get put to rights, of course—one thing the reader can rely on in a Discworld novel is that, while various characters may come to unfortunate ends, the story will conclude with Discworld as a whole carrying on much as it always has. The threatened catastrophe, whatever it may be, will be averted or survived or undone. In this case, Death takes his job back and finds Mort a new position.

Along the way, though, we learn a great deal about the metaphysics of the Discworld. In
The Colour of Magic
, we got to see Fate and the Lady playing games with the characters; here we see that the entire Discworld actually has a pre-ordained history, and that Bad Things Happen if it gets disturbed. This might be considered the first significant appearance of the effects of narrativium, one of the basic elements of the Discworld, the element that pushes events along the paths that make a good story.

Narrativium is
why
those threatened catastrophes are always averted, survived, or undone.

It's not mentioned by name here, and won't be for many volumes yet, but its effects are obvious. History—which is simply the story of everything—has a course laid out, and pushing it off-course, pushing against the narrativium, damages reality.

It could be argued that the first hints of the existence of narrativium were earlier, such as Granny Weatherwax pointing out in
Equal Rites
that million-to-one chances come in nine times out of ten, but it's only in
Mort
that it first becomes a major force.

It could also be argued that this idea of preordained history has something to do with the History Monks, who won't be introduced until
Small Gods
(see Chapter 15) and don't really come into their own until
Thief of Time
(see Chapter 32), but that doesn't seem to fit. No monks show up to help undo the damage Mort causes, so I think we need to put this down to narrativium—the need for a story to play out properly.

Story has been important all along, of course, but here it's made explicit that story is the single most powerful force in the Discworld, that it influences everything that happens. To some extent, everything is predetermined—but not really, because stories allow for twist endings, alternate plots, and so on. It's sometimes possible to derail a train of events, switching it from one story to another.

We also get further into questions about the nature of reality. These were mentioned in passing in the first two books, with such incidents as Rincewind finding himself briefly on a different plane
⁷⁰
in order to escape death, and in
Equal Rites
, where Simon's studies endangered Discworld's reality, but here we find Death (and sometimes Mort) becoming realer than the ordinary inhabitants of the Disc, with interesting consequences. It's obvious that “real” isn't an absolute in the Discworld, but something measured on a sliding scale—not only is reality thin on the Disc, it's not distributed evenly.
⁷¹

And where
Equal Rites
seemed almost to be deliberately avoiding links to the first two books, staffing Unseen University with unfamiliar faces except for the Librarian,
Mort
ties itself back in. When the action moves to Unseen University
this
time, Rincewind appears in exactly the role he had at the end of
The Light Fantastic
, and is clearly that same familiar character. He plays a small but significant part in the story. The Mended Drum, the tavern we'd seen in
The Colour of Magic
, is mentioned. The
Patrician is mentioned, and the “One Man, One Vote” system explained, though this Patrician doesn't quite match the description in
The Colour of Magic
.

If you ask me, this must be where the author realized that yes, he was writing a series, and that consistency can be a virtue in such an enterprise. Readers appreciate the little connections; it makes them feel smart, a part of the in-crowd, when they recognize a reference to previous volumes. It gives the whole thing an added touch of reality by demonstrating that these elements exist even when they aren't part of whatever story's being told at the moment.

You know, after four volumes, most series are starting to run out of ideas and momentum. Four books in, Discworld was just getting up to speed.

As Mr. Pratchett said in an interview, “By about book four, I discovered the joy of plot.”

At any rate, at this point Discworld has pretty much taken on its standard form, though it's still well short of its eventual mature state, and we have three sub-series going, starring Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, and . . . no, not Mort, nor Ysabell, but Death himself. He'll appear briefly in almost every book, but won't play the lead again until
Reaper Man
, discussed in Chapter 13.

First, it's back to Rincewind and the wizards.

A
H, RINCEWIND IS BACK, ALONG with all the rest of Unseen University, as we return to a pre-existing series for the first time.

JL . It was already established that the eighth son of an eighth son is a wizard. Generally it ends there, since wizards are supposed to be celibate, but what would the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son be?

The answer is a sourcerer. The spelling is deliberate; where wizards use the Disc's existing magical field, sourcerers generate their
own
magic, and lots of it.

Ipslore the Red, a wizard with ambitions unsuited to his position, deliberately sires eight sons in order to create a sourcerer, one who will do his bidding. He has the misfortune of dying while the boy, Coin, is still an infant, but doesn't let that stop him.

In due time, Coin arrives at Unseen University, whereupon a great many university inhabitants—not including most of the wizards—flee for their lives, Rincewind among them. Rincewind falls in with Conina, a daughter of Cohen the Barbarian, and later with Nijel the Destroyer, a book-taught barbarian hero, and Creosote the Younger, Seriph of Al Khali. The Archchancellor's hat, oddly reminiscent of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat,
⁷²
is also involved.

Frankly, at least to me,
⁷³
this book feels like a step backward. The humanity of
Equal Rites
and
Mort
has been cast aside in favor of pyrotechnics and parody. Several of the characters are surprisingly one-note. Al Khali is a parody of King Shahriyar's capital in the
Thousand Nights and a Night
, combined with Xanadu from Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” and bits of a few other “Oriental” settings. Conina and Nijel are parodies of various sword-and-sorcery heroes. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear, to little purpose beyond some cheap humor.

Of course, lots of things appear in Discworld books solely for cheap humor, all the way through the series, so I suppose I shouldn't cavil at that, but there doesn't seem much more than that here.