A Blink of the Screen

FOREWORD BY A. S. BYATT
    I remember buying my first Pratchett – it was
Men at Arms
– in a bookshop in Sloane Square. I badly needed to be psychologically elsewhere and the bright heap of Discworld novels looked like a possible retreat. I turned them over. At first glance Josh Kirby’s covers with pink and bosomy cartoon women as well as energetic dragons did not seem to be my kind of thing. I think what persuaded me was the word Ankh-Morpork. Anyone who could think that up was a real writer. And a discworld had been part of my childhood – there was an illustration in the book of Norse myths I had, of an Indian myth of a world balanced on four elephants on a giant turtle surrounded by a snake.
    I took the book home, read it without stopping, and was hooked. I bought all the books and read them in order. Every summer, whilst thinking out my writing, I read them again. There is always a joke I hadn’t quite got. There is always the quite extraordinary narrative pull of a great storyteller. Later I came to appreciate Josh Kirby’s art too . His creatures have a gleeful wild energy and intricacy – both brash and sophisticated – which is exactly right for these tales.
    Terry Pratchett says his readers are people who work with computers. But my literary friends are often addicted as I am – I once had a very polite tug-of-war over a new book (I think it was
Thief of Time
) with my scholarly and brilliant editor in a bookshop where I was giving a reading. Last week I had a good talk with a philosopher at a high table about imaginary worlds in general and Pratchett in particular. Also, people who don’t read, read Pratchett. Boys of twelve who hate books. I hope he is never taught in schools – his biography on the back of the books used once to claim that ‘some people had accused him of literature’, and of course he is literature, but best enjoyed in solitude and retreat.
    J. R. R. Tolkien used the term ‘secondary worlds’ to describe fictive, invented worlds with their own creatures, geography, history, people. Human beings have always needed the existence of the other, the unreal – imaginary people and things that are other than ourselves – from fairy tales to myths to urban legends. A maker of secondary worlds needs great resources of inventiveness – both on the large scale and in the fine detail. Pratchett’s world is wonderful because he has the sheer energy of the great storyteller: you think you know all it is possible to know about a dragon, or a policeman, or a plot or a landscape, and he tells you more, a lot more than you had any right to expect, and this is exhilarating.
    From book to book he gets better and his world gets more intricate. He gets more and more attached to his own characters, who become more complicated – consider the way in which Captain Vimes grows from being a drunk in charge of a dysfunctional Night Watch to a commander who can arrest two armies for a breach of the peace. He finds it hard to go on disliking characters. He can invent irritating minor forms of life: an imp that operates a Gooseberry – or Disorganizer – belonging to Vimes, which is redeemed by the discovery that it can do the office accounts; an accountant called A. E. Pessimal, sent to inspect the Watchmen, who turns out to be a hero. (Wikipedia constantly illuminates Pratchett. I didn’t know that the word ‘pessimal’ means ‘bad to a maximal extent’ or ‘most wanting in quality or value’.) But he can do real evil too: take Mr Pin, the villain in
The Truth
, or the Chief Quisitor, Vorbis, in
Small Gods
– both with the ferocious single-mindedness, true cruelty, and narrow vision which can’t change.
    As Tolkien says, secondary worlds must be coherent. There is a risk of the creator being romantic, or being seen to have designs – didactic or sentimental – on the reader. I reread Tolkien for the landscape and the persistent sense of danger. I have problems with stories of real children who find themselves in secondary worlds – rather as though their reading had engulfed them. J. K. Rowling is a brilliant inventor of details of magic, but her world has its origin in a boarding school, a place to which I do not want to return. I never enjoyed C. S. Lewis, because I felt he was morally manipulating me as well as his characters. Philip Pullman writes beautifully and dramatically but he is writing against Lewis, and again runs the risk of becoming didactic and controlling.