The Colour of Magic

Eight years before he died in 2015, Terry Pratchett announced that he had a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I received this news with the same sense of terrible loss that I experienced when I learned in 1997 that the great British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch had contracted a similar disease from which she died two years later. I deeply admired both writers, though for very different reasons.  I can’t recall a single joke in any of Murdoch’s novels, though there were no doubt some. But it was a rare Pratchett novel that didn’t have me consistently amused, sometimes in stitches, but more often smiling at his wonderful wit.

I was delighted to learn from a talk Pratchett gave in 1985 “Why Gandalf Never Married” that his reaction upon reading The Lord of the Rings as a teen was much like my  own.  (Please see my blog on “Imagination” if you’re interested.) As he puts it in his inimitable way, “That damn book was a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of my life.” In that same talk, he makes clear, however, that he does not believe in magic. As far as I can make out, in this regard at least, he appears to be a typical reductive materialist. It is when he subjects the revered traditions of high fantasy to his pragmatic modernist wit that some of his best humour emerges. 

This is certainly the case with his first book in the Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, in which (according to the same talk) he attempted “to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns.” Namely take the piss out of them.  As much as I might like to, I will never be able to forget the scene in which the cowboys sit around the fire eating beans, a scene as noisy as it is smelly.  One of Mel Brook’s finest achievements. In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind the protagonist, a hapless, timorous magician, doesn’t so much use magic as have magic happen to him.  Something similar is going on with the clueless tourist Twoflowers, who has to be repeatedly rescued by his ferocious luggage, made of sapient pearwood and sporting hundreds of legs as well as an insatiable appetite for those who would harm his master.  In this work, Pratchett chooses the weak and the foolish to frustrate the designs of the powerful and wise.

Despite Pratchett’s claim that he doesn’t believe in magic, I can still sense in his work the metaphysically-frustrated longings of the teenager who was bowled over by Tolkien’s marvellous fantasy. There’s plenty of charming magic in the book, whatever its colour. The good news for those who agree about the merits of this work is that there are forty more  books in the series, itself a testimony to the powerful magic at Pratchett’s command.