Why Terry Pratchett Will Always Be Brilliant & Relevant
Marc Burrows Best of Edinburgh Fringe Stand Up Comedy Tour extolls the brilliant storytelling of Sir Terry Pratchett.
Marc Burrows Comedy Show
In the autumn of 1983 a mere 500 copies of the new book by a largely unknown author called Terry Pratchett hit a small number of shops and libraries across the UK. It was called The Colour of Magic, and 500 copies was all that publishers Colin Smythe Ltd, a small company based out of Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, had printed up for the home market. Pratchett’s previous releases, The Carpet People in 1971, Dark Side of the Sun in 1975 and Strata in 1981 had all been well received by critics, but their sales could generously be described as “modest”. Pratchett, nominally the PR manager for a branch of the electricity board, was not a major figure in British publishing, not even in the rather smaller world of sci-fi and fantasy, and his fourth book, a move away from the wry science fiction of his previous two novels into fantasy parody, had the lowest print run of any of his work so far – a reaction to the shrinking of the library market, and the fact this was technically a collection of four (interconnected) short stories, which tend to sell less than full novels. Though Pratchett and his publisher knew the book, an attempt to do for fantasy what Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had done for sci-fi, was his best so far, expectations were still fairly minimal. There had, after all, never been a truly popular funny fantasy.
That was forty years ago. It took three years for those first 500 copies to sell, but by then things had started to move. The paperback had come out; published by Corgi, a much bigger fish in the marketplace. With a distinctive cover by Josh Kirby and off the back of a well-received serialisation on Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’, expectations were now much higher. Corgi printed 26,000 copies, and would have to reprint later in the year, and again the following year. Twice. The second Discworld, The Light Fantastic, followed in 1986, by which time Pratchett had found his rhythm – two more novels (Equal Rites and Mort) would emerge in 1987. There would be at least one (and usually two) Terry Pratchett novels published almost every year between 1986 and 2016 – this latter especially remarkable considering he’d actually died in April of 2015. The Colour of Magic went on to sell two million copies. Pratchett’s collected work – 59 novels, 41 of them set on Discworld – plus various short story anthologies and spin offs, have sold over a hundred million worldwide. There is nothing modest about those results.
What was it about The Colour of Magic that succeeded where previous Pratchett books had not? What was it about the Discworld series that connected with the public so dramatically that it led to him enjoying a couple of years as the best selling living author in the country (a position, alas, lost to the game-changing and unprecedented success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series)?
The key was his deeply perceptive understanding of human nature. While the Discworld stories took place in a fantastical setting — a flat world resting on the back of four elephants atop a giant turtle — the issues tackled were utterly, recognisably human. The witches, wizards, and anthropomorphic personifications in his books struggled with prejudice, political chicanery, and existential dilemmas, much like any of us. The police commander Sam Vimes, for example, encapsulates the quintessential struggle between law and morality. Vimes is a man of the law struggling with a bubbling anger that means he’d prefer to skip the formalities and take the law into his own hands, with maximum prejudice, but with an iron will that stops him from giving into that urge. That’s as compelling a representation of how civilised societies work as any.
Moreover, Pratchett was a master of wit and wisdom. He had a quote for every occasion, touching on issues from the ludicrous nature of prejudice (“so many crimes are solved by a happy accident – by the random stopping of a car, by an overheard remark, by someone of the right nationality happening to be within five miles of the scene of the crime without an alibi”) to the complexities of life (“A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores”) and death (“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away”), which Death himself eloquently captures as a character in almost all of the books. Pratchett's works were not just funny; they were biting social commentaries. His compassion shone through, while his outrage at injustice resonated in narratives that exposed societal flaws.
That humanity is there in the first Discworld. Rincewind, the cowardly wizard at the story’s heart, might be dragged through absurd situations involving dragons, chthonic monsters and falling off the edge of the world, but his reaction to those phenomenon (mostly to run away) is completely relatable, and his bafflement and frustration with the sheer bloody-minded nonsense that the world throws at us even more so. Pratchett took that idea and ran with it, and his growth as a writer was evident as he moved from parodying fantasy tropes to probing into the essence of humanity. Small Gods, for example, is on the one hand a story about a talking tortoise who thinks he’s God, and on the other a blistering treatise on how the purity of faith can be poisoned by religious dogma. Pratchett was not just a humorist but a chronicler of the human condition, examining topics as complex as economic inequality and institutional corruption. More than once the question of “what is a person” was the thematic heart of a book that could also make you laugh til you were sick. The fact that he wrote so quickly and with such a dedicated work ethic, means he improved constantly through his career. The author of The Colour of Magic in 1983 and Mort in 1987 are already worlds apart, and by the turn of the millennium he was churning out masterpieces. His run of form in the early 2000s, covering 14 books from 2001’s Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents to 2012’s Dodger, might be one of the greatest in English literature.
Pratchett rode the momentum from those initial 500 copies of The Colour of Magic to a hundred million books sold, an OBE, a knighthood and bonafide national treasure status. The sheer scope of his work, combined with an incisive wit and a heart full of compassion and its close cousin, anger at injustice, have cemented his legacy as a giant. Even with his passing and the inevitable march of time, his observations remain as relevant today as they ever were. Terry called the Discworld “a world and mirror of worlds”, and that’s what his books did – they reflected us. Like Dickens before him, his work will still be doing so in hundreds of years.
Marc Burrow’s The Magic of Terry Pratchett is both a book and a comedy lecture on the great man.
The show was rated one of the best reviewed shows at the Edinburgh Festival 2023 and is playing in London at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 12th October – you can get tickets here
