The Turtle Moves! (7 page)

In fact, the author himself agreed: “I went back a bit with
Sourcery
, because I knew the fans wanted more of Rincewind. I didn't particularly enjoy writing
Sourcery
, but it stayed on the bestseller list for three months. And then I said, ‘Sod the fans, I'll do what I like.'”
⁷⁴

At any rate, it's not one of the highlights of the series, despite all the magic being thrown around. Once again, we have no continuity in the population of Unseen University other than Rincewind and the Librarian, though at least details such as the title of Archchancellor and the description of the Tower of Art are now consistent. Whereas
Equal Rites
ended with the Archchancellor deciding to admit Esk and perhaps other promising females to the University, here Rincewind tells Conina that women are not permitted inside the gates—we've reverted to the earlier model. There's no sign of Esk or Simon.

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork appears again, albeit briefly, and this is where we first learn that he is the head of the Vetinari family. The name is a pun on Medici—the founders of the Medici family really were physicians, so I suppose one must assume that the Patrician's ancestors really were veterinarians. Much later we'll learn that as a boy Vetinari was called “Dog-Botherer,” so the name's resemblance to “veterinarian” is obvious to the people of Ankh-Morpork; it's not just a coincidence of pronunciation.
⁷⁵

Lord Vetinari's description is starting to read more like the character as we'll come to know him as in later books; his first appearance, in
The
Colour of Magic
, was so unlike the later version that many readers have suggested that it was Vetinari's predecessor, Lord Snapcase. However, Mr. Pratchett has explicitly denied this in interviews, instead attributing the dissimilarity to his own inexperience as a writer when he produced
The Colour of Magic
.

One thing about the high levels of magic thrown around in
Sourcery
is that it gives Mr. Pratchett a chance to write lots of descriptions of what amount to special effects—lights and sparks and colors splashing about, things melting, and so on. There's quite a bit of this in the earlier books, and it occurs to me to wonder whether it might have something to do with his old job with the Central Electricity Generating Board; he probably spent some time imagining what could go wrong with power plants, and adapted it into his accounts of magic running loose. Once he left that job to write fiction full-time the descriptions became less common, though of course that might simply have been because he'd been there, done that, and felt no need to further repeat himself.

At the end of
Sourcery
, despite the titanic magicks tossed about, everything is restored to what it should be, or at any rate what it generally was, and Coin is gone—but so is Rincewind, who we last see trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions, pursued by Things.

Naturally, he'll be back in
Eric
(see Chapter 11), but that's not for three books yet. First it's back to Lancre. . . .

R
EADERS WERE INTRODUCED to Granny Weatherwax in
Equal Rites
; in
Wyrd Sisters
we are privileged to meet the other two members of her newly formed coven, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick.

And in many ways, this is the novel where everything really comes together. The plot is intricate but entirely sensible, insofar as anything on the Discworld is sensible. The witches are in fine form. The other characters, from King Verence down to our Shawn, are all people, rather than mere parodies. Death and the Librarian put in their customary appearances in grand style. The Patrician, appearing only in a footnote, finally displays the cunning and efficiency that will be his hallmark hereafter. Leonard of Quirm is mentioned for the first time. Nanny Ogg's fearsome cat Greebo appears, along with the infamous song, “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All.” And there are no obvious inconsistencies with any of what's gone before.

The effects of the still-unnamed narrativium are at the heart of everything, and a second important phenomenon that I call “reality leakage”
⁷⁶
is apparent.

The story begins with Lancre's King Verence being assassinated by Duke Felmet and his vicious wife. A resemblance to
Macbeth
is obvious and intentional, though the story takes its own direction right from the start. A band of traveling players is involved; when Felmet wants to strengthen his position as king, he hires them to write and perform a
play about how a heroic duke supplants a bad king, only to have three evil witches interfere. The troupe's playwright is a dwarf
⁷⁷
by the name of Hwel.

Narrativium is evident in the way Hwel's play refuses to behave itself; it wants the story to be told
properly
, which is to say, more or less as the
Macbeth
Shakespeare wrote. The story knows what it ought to be.

And reality leakage—well, it seems that in addition to writing plays suspiciously like Shakespeare's, Hwel has these dreams that are unmistakably familiar material from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin's Little Tramp, even if he can't quite capture the humor in a way the other players appreciate. He also uses bits of story that the discerning reader will recognize as originating in Gaston Leroux's
Phantom of the Opera
, Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest
, and the like.

We already knew, from Rincewind's brief venture into an alien plane
⁷⁸
in
The Colour of Magic
, that it was possible for things to move between our world and the Disc. We saw in the account of the Seriph of Al Khali in
Sourcery
that there were some inexplicable similarities in certain stories and poems. Now, in
Wyrd Sisters
, it's made explicit that some residents of the Discworld have somehow tuned in to our reality. They see and hear it in their dreams. The similarities are not mere coincidence, but reality leakage between the two worlds.

This will be developed much further in later novels, but this is where it's solidly established.

There are other hints of things to come, as well. Hwel mentions a human raised among dwarfs—this would presumably be Carrot Ironfoundersson, whom we'll meet in
Guards! Guards!
There is discussion of the nature of kings, which will also be reflected in Carrot's eventual adventures.

Some of Mr. Pratchett's strengths really begin to emerge here. In previous novels, his attempts at the frightening have mostly taken the form of long falls, sharp blades, wild magic, and tentacular horrors such as the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, none of which are actually scary to the typical reader. Oh, he may have conjured a few chills in
Mort
, but after all, that was all about Death. In
Wyrd Sisters
, on the other
hand, he manages a couple of genuinely creepy scenes, notably the final fate of the Duchess.

The depth of characterization also takes a quantum leap here. We
care
about these people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg and company are wonderful creations. We met Granny before, in
Equal Rites
, but she's much more strongly realized here.

This jump in quality may be why
Wyrd Sisters
was the first of the novels to make the transition to the screen, in six animated half-hour episodes that aired on Britain's Channel 4 in 1996. It was a fairly faithful adaptation, and generally enjoyable, if not brilliant. The cartoon versions of Granny and Nanny don't quite live up to their ancestral text, but I quite liked the animated Magrat. The series was released on DVD, but is no longer widely available.

Alas, we won't see the witches on the page again until
Witches Abroad
, six(!) novels later. You can skip to Chapter 14 for that. The next one chronologically instead begins what I call the “Gods and Philosophers” series. . . .

T
HERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY that some Discworld books are one-shots, singletons, stand-alones, not part of any of the several sub-series. They will name
Pyramids
and
Small Gods
and The Truth as examples.

Naaah.
The Truth
as examples.

All of these alleged singletons fall into two categories, so far as I can see—they deal with either religion and philosophy (as in
Pyramids
and
Small Gods
) or with the effects of some new technology or other significant sociological change on Ankh-Morpork (as in
The Truth
). I've therefore labeled them as two series: “Gods and Philosophers,” and “Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat.”

The former series is never set primarily in Ankh-Morpork, while the latter is almost entirely in Ankh-Morpork, and on those occasions when the city isn't the actual setting (as in
Moving Pictures
), most of the characters are natives of Ankh-Morpork.

That's reasonable enough; the people of Ankh-Morpork aren't especially interested in religion and philosophy, but they're
very
interested in new technologies that might make them some money.

Pyramids
is unrelated to anything that went before, except that it's set on the Discworld—we've seen that happen before, with
Equal Rites
, when a new series was starting. Being one of the “Gods and Philosophers” series, it' s mostly set well away from Ankh-Morpork—but not entirely.

One oddity of
Pyramids
, relative to other Discworld novels, is that it's divided into four “books”—not chapters as such, but “The Book of
Going Forth,” “The Book of the Dead,” “The Book of the New Son,”
⁷⁹
and “The Book of 101 Things a Boy Can Do.”
⁸⁰
These aren't independent stories making up a larger narrative, like the four sections of
The Colour of Magic
, but just very long chapters.

Our protagonist, Teppic (or Pteppic, or Teppicymon XXVIII), is the son of the god-king of the ancient river kingdom Djelibeybi.
⁸¹
When we first meet him, however, Teppic is a student in the Guild of Assassins in Ankh-Morpork, preparing for his final exam.

The scenes at the Assassins' Guild, which take up much of that first book, “The Book of Going Forth,” don't really have all that terribly much to do with the main plot, but they do give Mr. Pratchett a chance to shamelessly parody
Tom Brown's School Days
. Teppic's chum Arthur is a character swiped directly from
Tom Brown
, save that where the original was a devout Christian, the Discworld version is a devotee of the
Great Orm,
⁸²
a rather less kindly deity than the Christian one. It makes the bedtime prayer scene rather more entertaining than the one in
Tom Brown
.

This modern education is how Teppic manages to grow up with ideas and attitudes that are rather inappropriate for a pharaoh.

No, I don't mean a willingness to dispose of political obstacles with blades or poison; that's perfectly normal for monarchs in most circumstances, though I admit it doesn't seem the sort of thing one might expect of most current European royalty. I mean an unwillingness to throw himself wholeheartedly into a life of meaningless ritual.

Still, when his father dies, Teppic returns to Djelibeybi to take up the role of god-king, and rather carelessly agrees to entomb his paternal predecessor in the largest pyramid ever built.

The thing is, the Discworld has a very intense magical field, as has been noted many times by now, and that means that pyramids on the Disc really
do
focus cosmic energy, just as some New Age believers claim they do here. Sharpening razor blades is nothing; they do
far
more than that.

Most of Djelibeybi's pyramids harmlessly flare off their excess energy every night, rather like oil refineries flaring off natural gas that's not worth the trouble of recovering, but the big new one Teppic has inadvertently commissioned—well, things don't go quite as planned in that regard.

Djelibeybi, as should have been bloody obvious by now, is a parody of ancient Egypt, complete with sacred crocodiles, animal-headed gods, pyramids, mummification, cat worship, god-kings, and the like. The neighboring land of Ephebe, which Teppic will visit, is a parody of Golden Age Greece, well-stocked with philosophers and replete with references to the Discworld version of the Trojan War—or rather, not so much a parody of the actual ancient Athens as of the popular misconceptions thereof.

Yes, it's definitely parody, and arguably a parody of fantasy, but it's not the sort of “fantasy” one finds shelved with the science fiction at your local bookstore; instead it's the fantasy versions of actual history that's being mocked, what one might call the Hollywood versions of Egypt and Greece—or perhaps the schoolboy version.

And the story winds its way through commentary on tradition, religion,
politics, philosophy, business, family, and camels, among other things, before finally reaching a satisfactory conclusion.