Terry Pratchett - Nation

It's that time of the year when publications put out their Best of 2010s. Because a lot of my energy in 2010 has gone into feeding Goodreads, I thought I'd share some of the highlights of my reading year as recorded originally on the site. Today, Terry Pratchett's Nation

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After half a lifetime's parting, this year I reunited with Terry Pratchett.

As a teenager, I wasn't a huge fan of the Discworld novels - no, let me refine that. I lapped up any Discworld book that focused on Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who respectively, taught me about psychology and innuendo. The series I truly loved though was the Bromeliad (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), the epic tale of a community of nomes who have their faith destroyed and then rebuilt, in a kinder, wiser way. While the series probably lent strength to my growing skepticism about religious belief, it taught me a lot about people.

Last summer I picked up a copy of 'The Amazing Maurice', and rediscovered Pratchett. And then, joy of joys, I met Tiffany Aching - with Roald Dahl's Matilda, one of the most human, most likable, most entertaining and wisest characters you'll ever come across. You can learn a lot from Tiffany Aching, and it won't hurt a bit.

I find there's little point in trying to describe what a Pratchett book is 'about' - I doubt a synopsis of a storyline will ever convince a non-believer to pick one up. However, I think you can summarise the general feelings a Pratchett book will evoke - alongside the wry and occasionally broad humour, there's a deep, deep love of our humankind with all its foibles, feeble- and narrowmindedness, and latent glory.

I have to admit, I didn't go into Nation with any particular expectations. I finished it this afternoon in tears. As is my wont, after reading it I went in search of reviews.

The reviewer in the Independent seemed to hit the "point" of the book, but miss the magic:

The idea of starting out afresh on a tiny island has brought out the best in fiction writers from Defoe to William Golding. Children relish these stories, but in this novel Pratchett is writing for everyone. Mau's Dawkins-type monologues as he questions all his supernatural beliefs go on a bit at times, but also point the way to Pratchett's central belief in the power of science and reason to liberate – if left in the right hands. True to form, Mau's island ends up incorporated by the Royal Society as a haven for visiting scholars.

Odd anthropological insights – sometimes backed up by jaunty footnotes – combine with fantasy as Pratchett introduces tree-climbing octopuses and beer that has to be spat in to make it potable. There are plenty of jokes. Aware that local gossip is trying to pair her off with Mau, Daphne thinks "It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing".

Frank Cottrell Boyce in the Guardian though (one of my favourite YA reviewers) seems to have found what I did

Nation has profound, subtle and original things to say about the interplay between tradition and knowledge, faith and questioning. During his initiation ritual, for instance, Mau discovers that the island isn't haunted at all, and that his dad and uncle have already been there and left supplies and a canoe for him. On one level this means the ancient ritual is a piece of empty theatre. In another sense, though, it's a rite of passage that is supposed to teach him self-reliance and courage. In fact, it gives Mau a much more profound knowledge - of how much his dad loves him and how valued he is by his society. Without the theatre of the ghosts, he wouldn't experience the reality of the love.

Pratchett has visited this theme before, in the Bromeliad trilogy, where a group of nomes have developed an obviously stupid religion based on a magic stone, "the Thing", and a belief in "the Heavens". It's ridiculous, but it turns out to be sort of true.

Ridiculous, but sort of true. Pratchett in a nutshell.


p.s. Late Pratchett seems to feature less knowing footnotes. Although they delighted me as a teen, as an adult I am finding this to be A Good Thing.

Three thoughtful pieces

I

In my second year at Otago I took a year-long psychology paper, one entire semester of which was devoted to the driest, direst examination of the visual system possible.

The one thing I got out of this course - well, I have to admit, I learned a lot, and 'scotoma' remains a favourite word - but the one thing I treasure out of this course was that I was introduced to Oliver Sacks' writing for the first time. In addition to his collections of case studies, Uncle Tungsten is one of my favourite memoirs. I'm delighted to hear that another collection, The Mind's Eye, is on its way.

So my first thoughtful piece is Steve Silberman's recent interview with Sacks, where Sacks discusses writing, medicine, and his own experience with ocular melanoma:

In my preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, I quoted G.K. Chesterton’s attack on science as a cold, impersonal, Sherlock Holmesian business, whereas his fictional detective, Father Brown, proceeds by a sort of uncanny empathy. I think as a writer, one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses — the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms.

I hesitate to use the word purity when there have been so many uncomfortable frauds in science. One can feel ideally that science shouldn’t need policing, because there’s much more pleasure in a genuine result than in making anything up. Nothing that one could make up will be as deep and interesting as the reality. Freeman Dyson says something like, “Nature’s imagination is much richer than ours.”

II

My second thoughtful piece comes from a few months back: Atul Gawande, in the New Yorker, on dying.

I vastly admire Gawande's ability to draw out the strength and vulnerability of both patients and medical practitioners, to move from a single person's situation to a macro-economic one and back again. His essays are always insightful and affecting: this one should be published as a stand-alone edition, a modern manifesto on dying well.

III

It's a sad but logical segue from my second choice to my third, Aida Edemariam's interview with Terry Pratchett in the Guardian. I rediscovered Pratchett in the past year, after a gap of a decade and a half - the Tiffany Aching series has become a firm new favourite.

Pratchett is living with Alzheimers, and is a vocal advocate of assisted suicide:

He doesn't say it in so many words, but that [grief over losing his parents in recent years] must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — "the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain"); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.

"Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down," Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) ". . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.