Guardian Review

Terry Pratchett, like TS Eliot's Webster, has always been much possessed by death. The short biography he used to have on his book jackets began with the information that he was born in 1948 and is still not dead. It went on to say that he began work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, "work experience meaning something in those days". Like all good storytellers he writes against death, creating impossible escapes, thrilling dangers, the come-uppance of the wicked and so on. But unlike many creators of fantasy worlds he makes sure his readers know death is real, while at the same time finding ingenious devices to help us to accommodate that knowledge. His characters die quite frequently. When they do, they take time to realise what has happened. They are met by Pratchett's personified Death - a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie - who has organised himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behaviour, prompted by his long association with our agitated species. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting - people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. The device means that good characters can die without outrage, though I remember being shocked by the first death I encountered - that of an ordinary, brave dwarf in Men at Arms who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. Pratchett invented the City Watch of his squirming and insanitary metropolis Ankh-Morpork, he once said, so as to make heroes of the supernumerary guardsmen and extras who are present in most stories simply to be killed in droves to show how bad the bad characters are, before the hero deals out justice. Corporal Carrot of the Watch is just such a hero - with a twist. He is the lost heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork, has the birthmark and sword to prove it, can control crowds by a kind of charisma, and turn marauding desert Dregs into football teams. But he has the sense - or innocence - to remain a simple guardsman, under Captain Samuel Vimes, who was, when we first met him, a drunken and despondent good cop, and has grown, in the Discworld series, to become commander and then Lord Vimes, keeping order with Carrot and the wily Patrician, or politician, who rules the city, Lord Vetinari. At the end of Jingo , one of the best of the novels, Vimes arrested a whole army and its blimpish commanders for disturbing the peace. He is married to Lady Sibyl Ramkin, a large lady who breeds swamp dragons, and is expecting his child. In Night Watch, Vimes finds himself - along with a peculiarly unpleasant criminal called Carcer - caught in a time-warp, back in his own early days as a Watchman, trying to change the course of a bloody revolution. He is also concerned to prevent his own callow self as a lance-constable from getting killed, so that he may get back to the present and his child may be born. He has become a dead hero called John Keel, who helped to organise the barricades, but was also a Watch captain at Cable Street. His opponents include the corrupt Unmentionables, who arrest and torture people. It is a way of adding to a cumulative tale-series that by now - on ordinary human time-scales - has more unknown events at the beginning than at the end. Its world is, as Vimes has always said it was, rough and nasty. Pratchett has said once or twice recently that his imagination is getting darker. The storyteller's dealings with death have become grimmer and not so calmly comic. The series began as a parody of the fantasy world of sorcerers and magic, with the adventures of the cowardly wizard Rincewind who is always being projected through space-time, accompanied by a bad-tempered piece of luggage on hundreds of little legs. Rincewind survived by being a survivor, and by invoking the million-to-one chance that is a dead cert in a magical tale. He has not appeared for some time now, whereas the characters from the tales of the witches of Lancre and the complicated polity of Ankh-Morpork have appeared more grimly. Evil in Discworld has been getting more solid and nastier, while the ordinary defenders of com mon sense and practical morality have been suffering from exhaustion. Granny Weatherwax, the senior witch in Lancre, began like Vimes as a ribald comic "character" and grew into complications and intelligence. She faces real moral problems. She plays (and fiddles) a gambling game against Death for the life of a mother or a child, and then has to choose which to save when she wins. She makes the practical choice, and doesn't ask the husband, who would have made the sentimental one. She has recently been faced with a genuinely nasty set of vampires whose comic edge only makes them nastier - like Pratchett's elves they are supremely speciesist and egocentric. She is given to entering a state of suspended animation during which she carefully hangs a label on herself - "I aten't dead", or, more recently, when readers had believed she might have been defeated, "I STILL aten't dead". Vimes too, inhabiting his own past as a dead hero, is in a state of suspended animation. I have never liked stories where characters visit either the past or the future of their "real" lives - except possibly for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . Such stories attenuate both their reality and the hopes and fears they meet in the story they are now in. This feeling is strong in Night Watch . The alternative Vimes is only a hypothesis. But the nastiness he faces - loosely based on the fascist nastiness of the real Cable Street and on police corruption and torture everywhere - is unusually nasty for Pratchett, and Death's appearances are only perfunctory and not consoling. Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. Our ends are Death and, as I said, Pratchett likes to move wild laughter in its throat. His real horrors are the Undead, and the bad witch trapped in a hall of mirrors unable to find the door to life or death, and the ghouls who try to invade from beyond the confines of space-time. There is something a bit sleight-of-hand about turning Vimes into an Undead and making him face real horrors in an alternative past. This weakening of fictive reality is not compensated for by our meetings with the young Vetinari as a junior member of the Assassins' Guild, or the urchin Nobby as a police informer, or the dead-rat salesman Dibbler before he got his slogan of "Cut-me-own-throat". But there is one lovely touch. One of the dead Watch heroes is the stolid Reg Shoe - who will reappear as a conscripted zombie, greenish, smelly and prone to lose body-parts, in the multispecies Watch of the fictive present. Stories both trap people in a continuum and console them with images of beginnings and ends. Pratchett is a master storyteller. AS Byatt's A Whistling Woman is published by Chatto. To order Night Watch for pounds 15.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. To win a signed copy of Night Watch , the entire Discworld backlist and signed artwork visit www.guardian.co.uk/ books. Caption: article-byatt.1 His characters die quite frequently. When they do, they take time to realise what has happened. They are met by [Terry Pratchett]'s personified Death - a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie - who has organised himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behaviour, prompted by his long association with our agitated species. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting - people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. The device means that good characters can die without outrage, though I remember being shocked by the first death I encountered - that of an ordinary, brave dwarf in Men at Arms who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. Pratchett invented the City Watch of his squirming and insanitary metropolis Ankh-Morpork, he once said, so as to make heroes of the supernumerary guardsmen and extras who are present in most stories simply to be killed in droves to show how bad the bad characters are, before the hero deals out justice. Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. Our ends are Death and, as I said, Pratchett likes to move wild laughter in its throat. His real horrors are the Undead, and the bad witch trapped in a hall of mirrors unable to find the door to life or death, and the ghouls who try to invade from beyond the confines of space-time. There is something a bit sleight-of-hand about turning Vimes into an Undead and making him face real horrors in an alternative past. This weakening of fictive reality is not compensated for by our meetings with the young Vetinari as a junior member of the Assassins' Guild, or the urchin Nobby as a police informer, or the dead-rat salesman Dibbler before he got his slogan of "Cut-me-own-throat". But there is one lovely touch. One of the dead Watch heroes is the stolid Reg Shoe - who will reappear as a conscripted zombie, greenish, smelly and prone to lose body-parts, in the multispecies Watch of the fictive present. Stories both trap people in a continuum and console them with images of beginnings and ends. Pratchett is a master storyteller. - AS Byatt.