Mort by Terry Pratchett

thoughts on Terry Pratchett’s Mort

If there was one word to describe Terry Pratchett’s writing, it would have to be “unexpected.” For a book that is titled Mort and is about the apprentice to death, the story is surprisingly upbeat and hilarious. While the plot is rather heavy business: love and death and fate and mortality and wizardry and time and reality all coming head to head, it is also completely and utterly ridiculous. Death deciding he would rather try out being human is what sets the wheels in motion. There is also frequently such a casual irreverence in his tone and in the characters that it catches you off guard aand you have to laugh. More than the ridiculous plot, however, the book is uproariously funny because, I believe (or would hazard a guess anyway, never having met the man) that Terry Pratchett himself is funny. He is witty and clever and most of all, unexpected. He has an uncanny knack for telling a story in such a conversationalist style to make it familiar, but then just when you think you know where he’s going with a a thought, he turns everything upside down on you, and again, all you can do is laugh. Perhaps it is the way in which he makes such ludacris and absurd references and happenings seem perfectly normal, like when Cutwell nonchalantly sits on an old pizza, the description of Albert’s porridge “which led a private life of its own in the depths of its saucepan and ate spoons,” or the descriptive phrase “with all the apparent acceleration of continental drift” that make the book so comical. Or perhaps it is the wry sarcasm that all the characters seem to use on eachother, with comments like “You wouldn’t believe how many horses we don’t get up here.” and “What time is sunset around here?” “We normally manage to fit it in somewhere between day and night.” Pratchett is a pro at subverting expectations (even expectations that you wouldn’t think could be subverted), and it is there that his comical genius lies. Mort is a hilarious book because Pratchett himself is a casually but ridiculously hilarious person. As if his writing style and the language of his characters is not proof enough of that, the description of the author in the very back of the book stands as enough evidence to solidify the case. It reads, “Terry Pratchett lives in England, an island off the coast of France…” and goes on to explain how by writing Discworld novels on an island off the coast of France, Pratchett is full-filling a very circular “Very Strong Anthropic Principle,” and thereby proving “the whole business true. Any questions?” My only question is, which hugely entertianing Terry Pratchett novel should I read next?