Why we care that Terry Pratchett has died (10 reasons)

Sir Terry Pratchett has, as you know, died. The general reaction to this has been one of unalloyed and exceptionless dismay, tempered only by the comfort of knowing how close the nature of his death was to his stated hopes, and by the reassurance of the author’s many wise and uplifting sayings about death over the years. It feels almost rude to grieve too passionately over the death of a man who chose the Latin translation of “Don’t fear the reaper” as his heraldic motto.

So people have taken no doubt some comfort from knowing that Pterry (as his fans have long called him) died well – and, indeed, so far as the public can judge, lived well. But there has still been great distress, or at least a very deep grief, at his passing.

Why?

The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett

The latest part of my complete Discworld reread

Is it just because Pterry is dead? I don’t think so: I think it’s true of the book itself – this book feels like the end of Discworld. This is where it all ends.

I know, that’s hyperbole. The Discworld cycle didn’t just collapse after this installment – it went on for more than a dozen more novels. Some of those novels are good. Some of them may even be great.

But this feels like the end. This is where the world shuts down, gets a little smaller – from here on in, Discworld will seem smaller, and in a way less real. The Fifth Elephant brings the stories of Carrot, Angua and Vimes (and even Colon) to a fitting, even inevitable conclusion, and caps off the story of the Watch as a whole – leaving Night Watch as one last ‘Scouring of the Shire’ epilogue.

The fact that Pratchett didn’t realise this and wrote two more Watch novels after Night Watch, not to mention a whole bunch of cameo appearances (even the very next book after The Fifth Elephant, The Truth, was written as a Watch novel and contains heavy Watch presence) may be important for the cycle as a whole, but doesn’t in my mind change the finality of this novel, taken as a novel in itself.

But it’s more than that: The Fifth Elephant seems to me to represent the final obsolescence, in both practical and thematic terms, of the adventures of Rincewind and of Granny Weatherwax – the taming, in a sense, of the worlds that they inhabited. This is more striking as TFE immediately follows Granny’s Carpe Jugulum, and is largely set in the same part of the world… but not only is the book itself much more succesful than its predecessor, but its protagonist, Vimes, has a much easier time of it than Granny does in the end, despite a few tricky moments along the way. The juxtaposition of the two books underlines the thematic shift: the world that Vimes is conquering is the world that Granny lived in (there’s even a derogatory little jibe at Lancre along the way).

Because this is a novel about conquest. It’s that rare thing in modern popular literature: a pro-colonialist novel.

So, finished writing a short story!

What it’s about, I’ve no idea. And I think I already dislike it (which at least saves time).

But I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the end of it… which makes a nice change from my usual ‘start, get bored, wander off’ approach to writing.