Books of 2006, part one

[sir_guinglain]

I’ve occasionally threatened a books post. I began writing this, finally, on New Year's Eve, and have returned to it from time to time. The turn of the year seemed an opportune moment to recall some of my reading of 2006. I’d managed to read a little more fiction than usual last year, which isn’t saying all that much.

These aren't, of course, really books of 2006 in the conventional sense, as they've almost all been around for years - a couple of centuries and more in the case of The Castle of Otranto - but this is a personal journal after all.

I've decided to deliver my reviews in instalments. I wrote about Pratchett first, before going to see the stage version of Feet of Clay, and have left my text unchanged.

Terry Pratchett and I have, in general, not got on. I remember vaguely hearing about the early books in the 1980s, and the impression I had from reviews was that there were some imaginative rehashes of old ideas from mythology and fantasy writing, but nothing special. During the 1990s, encouraged by the number of friends who liked Pratchett’s work, I read The Colour of Magic, and was disappointed. As vescoyia later explained to me, if I recall her correctly, it’s very much a parody of fantasy literature, and I am not familiar with the context. I’ve since tried a few Pratchetts more recently - Small Gods, thanks to narahttbbs, and one of the witch books at least - but was unable to finish them, mainly because I didn’t take to the sense of humour. I like the development of ‘hackneyed situations’, as Philip Pullman calls them in the context of his Sally Lockhart novels, as much as anybody - after all, Doctor Who is full of them in its own way. Yet somehow I found Pratchett a bit too self-satisfied.

Last May, after I’d aired similar views at a party, rustica tossed Night Watch at me from one of her many triple-banked (or so it seems) bookshelves. I am pleased to report that I actually finished this one. I still find all the paraphernalia such as Death unfunny, and the silly names do very little for me; but the problem of a man who is trapped in his own past, at a crucial point in his own career, is treated convincingly. I don’t like Pratchett’s mock demotic speech for the inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork, which somehow suggests to me that this is an author who is dishonest to his readers. All storytellers are, in one way or another, and the reader enters into a bargain with them; but I have trouble striking this bargain, because I don’t think that the writer in this case has thought everything through as much as he ought.

Nevertheless amid the characteristics which I didn’t like in Pratchett’s style, there is something about Sam Vimes which is very appealing. He seems to be the only human being in the midst of a chaotic and misconceived parody. Pratchett’s characters are mostly caricatures but Sam has a bit more to him. He’s convincing as a manager of men, as someone who can offer incentives to the lazy and corrupt to change their ways, and as a moral beacon in a cynical universe. His confronting a mob (IIRC - the book itself is long since returned to rustica) with cup of tea in hand might have smacked (like a lot of Pratchett) of the off-the-peg eccentricity I associate with Doctor Who apocrypha, such as Nicholas Briggs’s tea-waving Doctor from the AudioVisual series. Yet Vimes is written with warmth. He’s not the only Pratchett character, of the few I’ve encountered, to be written this way, but he’s the one where I think Pratchett seems least embarrassed by doing so.

I’m aware that I’m shuffling nervously into the lions’ den here, and to some extent this is the frustration of someone who sees that all the Pratchett-admirers out there, of whom there are many in SocT and my friends list in general, are enjoying themselves, and doesn‘t see the joke. Perhaps Pratchett suffers so that I can excuse the excesses of RTD’s Doctor Who. Then again, as the last Lady Nimue said, no-one has to like everything.