Terry Pratchett discusses the full range of Terry Pratchett’s writing, from Discworld to his equally successful, award-winning novels for children and the unrelated “stand-alone” novels. It explores Pratchett’s development as a writer, showing how “story” – the narrative we build about ourselves and the world – can be both liberating and shackling.
There are readers who encounter Terry Pratchett and consider that he surely cannot be writing about the world we live in, simply because his most famous creation, the Discworld, rests upon the backs of four elephants standing upon a giant turtle swimming through space. As if a universe which is essentially nothing apart from a few furnaces transforming a very simple chemical element into a less simple element, is any more plausible.
Upon the Discworld, where magic has a habit of leaking out of the more occult books, the job of librarian at Unseen University, where the Discworld’s wizards are trained, is a high-risk operation. Unseen University probably possesses the only library in the world where unwary readers of dangerous texts can find themselves not reading, but being read. We know that knowledge is power, that books can change the world… In our ‘Roundworld’ we have key religious or political texts, or influential novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.On Discworld, the relevant equation is: ‘knowledge=power=energy=matter=mass’. Collections of books warp space and time, perhaps because a book itself is an exercise in warping space and time Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for instance, brings us to nineteenth-century Russia, just as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men takes us millions of years into the future. Collections of books are therefore a tangled mass of wormholes (or ‘bookwormholes’?) in what Pratchett named L-space, linking the space-time continuum. This explains why second-hand bookshops all look the same.
As a librarian, this model made perfect sense to me. True, Pratchett’s ‘Librarian’ (owing to a misdirected bolt of magic) ended up as an orang-utan, but we in the profession were perfectly used to being paid peanuts, and many of us did, during the time Pratchett’s books were coming out, feel that did we possess 300 pounds of muscle, huge yellow fangs, and a hair-trigger temper, there would be far less talk of budget cuts and reduced book funds. When we discovered that, as a schoolboy, Pratchett had wangled himself a ‘Saturday job’ in his local library where, in return for a few unspecified light duties he could waive the restrictions on how many books he could borrow at a time, and that he was now writing lines like ‘There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way [library users] kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them,’ we knew he was on our side.
And so it was that, when, the Science Fiction Foundation was planning a book of essays on Terry Pratchett (Guilty of Literature, 2000), I contributed the chapter on The Librarian, which set me upon the trail that would result in Terry Pratchett for the ‘Writers and Their Work’ series.
Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett’s attitude to ‘book-learning’ is certainly ambiguous. Characters like Nijel the Destroyer in Sourcery, learning how to be a barbarian hero from a manual allegedly written by the greatest hero of them all, are figures of fun. Magrat, the junior component of the Crone-Mother-Maiden ‘three witches’ trope which includes the formidable Granny Weatherwax and the bawdy Nanny Ogg, works literally ‘by the book’, not quite understanding that witchcraft is as much about ‘headology’ – understanding and occasionally manipulating people – as it is about spells and magic.
Intellectuals and people who analyse literary texts certainly get short shrift in Pratchett’s fiction: he appears both to celebrate books and reading while dismissing those who seem to prefer books to ‘real life’. In fact, this attitude is not as anti-intellectual as it seems. Nijel the Destroyer may be mocked, but the book’s villain is Coin, who orders the Library’s destruction. The wizards of Unseen University, whose main preoccupations are squabbling with their colleagues and gaining the best seats at the meal-tables, are comic figures whose joy lies in how closely they adhere to the stereotype of ‘bumbling academics’ but the greatest danger to society lies in people like Fred Colon of the Watch, educated at ‘the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and . . . the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me’. Fortunately for the wizards, they have the Librarian.
A spiritual forebear of Pratchett’s Librarian might be Shiyali Ramanrita Ranganathan (1892-1972), who was the first Librarian of the University of Madras. As well as taking library classification further into L-space by devising a ‘faceted’ classification scheme called Colon Classification.[i] Ranganathan also devised the ‘Five Laws of Library Science’:
Books are for use.
Every Reader his book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
[The] Library is a growing organism
The Librarian is an example of Ranganathan’s contention that librarianship is a service. He serves his clients and defends his library. In Jingo he fulfils Ranganathan’s Second Law, handing over to the policeman Sam Vimes the book on Klatch that he requested: ‘It paid to look at any book the orangutan gave you. He matched you up to books’. The irony of the fact that he communicates through sign language and a single sound (‘ook’) which can mean anything he chooses it to mean[ii] is not lost upon the reader, nor his fellow-characters. His skill, however, is to mediate between knowledge-seeker and sought knowledge. The complexities of L-Space reduce, in the end, to the simple matter of the right piece of information arriving to the right person at the right time.
Terry Pratchett partly came about because, as a librarian, I felt that he had got librarianship right – even the ridiculous things about us. If that also make me one of the ‘Critters’ inhabiting L-space ‘grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism’, I think I can live with that..
[i] No relation to Fred.
[ii] One of the joys of reading Pratchett is that you are always discovering new wordplays and evidence that he is a lot cleverer than you are. It took me thirty years to realise that The Librarian’s most common utterance (‘ook’) is three-quarters of the word ‘book’.
Andy Sawyer is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. He was formerly the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool Library and Director of the MA in Science Fiction Studies.
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