no man is an island, some are worlds
Friday, 28 November 2008 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtIt's usually quite easy to mentally map a Terry Pratchett novel, at least in terms of its issues and concerns and what have you - oh, it's The One About Religion, or The One About Vampires, or Film, or Fairy Tale, or Consumerism (And Cthulhoid Shopping Malls). This is not a flaw, but rather a natural upshot of his kind of emblematic writing and the very direct and acute response it supplies to particular modern-day issues. He's a surprisingly complex writer, but usually the particular themes and symbols of a novel will dovetail into each other with easily-graspable neatness. You can, in effect, see what he's doing. He's both a sophisticated social critic and a popular writer.
Nation is thus something of a departure. It's already unusual in that it's not a Discworld novel, taking place instead in a sort of alternate nineteenth-century Earth where things are almost, but not quite, identical to our own world (we don't, to the best of my knowledge, have tree-climbing octopodes, although one rather wishes we did). Its overt themes are postcolonial - daughter of Victorianoid civilisation meets son of island-dwelling primitive nation - and its characters work through fear, grief and sacrifice, but you can't say that that's what the novel's about because it's also about social expectation and community and war and gender and religion and tradition and science and bigotry and history and the nature of evil and what happens when a powerful, technologically advanced culture meets a smaller, less advanced one (hint: generally not good for either party. If the African colonial experience teaches us anything, it's that the destruction of a culture's soul goes both ways.) It is, in short, a complex novel.
So this would be, in my possibly slightly premature opinion (this book needs marinating) the work in which Pratchett actually overcomes the drawback of being an intelligent postmodern writer in a popular field. Popular writing is weighted with all sorts of expectations and the Discworld in particular, while a marvellous and powerful construct in its own right, could also easily become a millstone around the writer's neck. It's always a risk with genre - if you want to use the extremely useful shorthand of a generic code, you also have to conform to it to some extent. One of the reasons I am continually fascinated by the operation of genre is because of the extreme, hold-your-breath sort of pleasure of watching a good writer negotiate the tricky balancing act between using a genre and letting it limit you. I think Pratchett wins this one, but he can only win it by abandoning the Discworld, a generic juggernaut in its own right. He does things with themes (loss, grief) in Nation that he couldn't do with the Discworld; he resists expectation, he packs more in than the Discworld's familiar contours would allow.
At the same time he's still working within the expectations that we have about him as a comic and fantastic writer, and he uses that extremely cleverly to balance the seriousness of what he's doing. This is still a very funny, very acutely observed novel with more than its fair share of those classic, compacted Pratchett lines which cause equal parts amused snorting and recognition that their insights are profoundly true. He also doesn't stint on the occasional moments of broad comedy, mostly about booze and cultural misunderstandings. (I have conceived an undying love for the parrot. The bit where it debags the Grandfather Birds has me giggling like a loon every time I read it).
I think this is a very successful book, but not quite in the same way that the Discworld novels are - this one sneaks up on you, it doesn't allow the sort of popular postmodern pleasure of congratulating yourself that you've followed the writer's reference or unwrapped his themes. It takes work. It is, in an odd sort of way because I don't think Pratchett's been an immature writer since approximately Sourcery, a mature book. For this reason I find the most difficult and heartbreaking part of the novel to be the author photograph on the back flap, where he's now turned away from us. He has to give us a novel about working through grief and loss, because when this horrible disease catches up with him, the grief and loss are going to be extreme.
Nation is thus something of a departure. It's already unusual in that it's not a Discworld novel, taking place instead in a sort of alternate nineteenth-century Earth where things are almost, but not quite, identical to our own world (we don't, to the best of my knowledge, have tree-climbing octopodes, although one rather wishes we did). Its overt themes are postcolonial - daughter of Victorianoid civilisation meets son of island-dwelling primitive nation - and its characters work through fear, grief and sacrifice, but you can't say that that's what the novel's about because it's also about social expectation and community and war and gender and religion and tradition and science and bigotry and history and the nature of evil and what happens when a powerful, technologically advanced culture meets a smaller, less advanced one (hint: generally not good for either party. If the African colonial experience teaches us anything, it's that the destruction of a culture's soul goes both ways.) It is, in short, a complex novel.
So this would be, in my possibly slightly premature opinion (this book needs marinating) the work in which Pratchett actually overcomes the drawback of being an intelligent postmodern writer in a popular field. Popular writing is weighted with all sorts of expectations and the Discworld in particular, while a marvellous and powerful construct in its own right, could also easily become a millstone around the writer's neck. It's always a risk with genre - if you want to use the extremely useful shorthand of a generic code, you also have to conform to it to some extent. One of the reasons I am continually fascinated by the operation of genre is because of the extreme, hold-your-breath sort of pleasure of watching a good writer negotiate the tricky balancing act between using a genre and letting it limit you. I think Pratchett wins this one, but he can only win it by abandoning the Discworld, a generic juggernaut in its own right. He does things with themes (loss, grief) in Nation that he couldn't do with the Discworld; he resists expectation, he packs more in than the Discworld's familiar contours would allow.
At the same time he's still working within the expectations that we have about him as a comic and fantastic writer, and he uses that extremely cleverly to balance the seriousness of what he's doing. This is still a very funny, very acutely observed novel with more than its fair share of those classic, compacted Pratchett lines which cause equal parts amused snorting and recognition that their insights are profoundly true. He also doesn't stint on the occasional moments of broad comedy, mostly about booze and cultural misunderstandings. (I have conceived an undying love for the parrot. The bit where it debags the Grandfather Birds has me giggling like a loon every time I read it).
I think this is a very successful book, but not quite in the same way that the Discworld novels are - this one sneaks up on you, it doesn't allow the sort of popular postmodern pleasure of congratulating yourself that you've followed the writer's reference or unwrapped his themes. It takes work. It is, in an odd sort of way because I don't think Pratchett's been an immature writer since approximately Sourcery, a mature book. For this reason I find the most difficult and heartbreaking part of the novel to be the author photograph on the back flap, where he's now turned away from us. He has to give us a novel about working through grief and loss, because when this horrible disease catches up with him, the grief and loss are going to be extreme.
