A-fucking-men. Mary Sue isn’t the word, Vimes has become some sort of wisdom archetype. I’ve always like how Pratchett did social commentary as subtext of his stories, but this book so far (I’m about 130 pages in) is like being hit in the face repeatedly with a MESSAGE wrapped in a story. I’m with you on Willikins too, oh my god he’s so much a child of the street and so worldly wise yaddah yaddah yaddah.
Me too, and I thought Vimes in the background as a powerful and iconic character was good. But here we are traipsing around with him YET AGAIN and I’m really not enjoying hearing about how much he hates himself for being rich and powerful.
I actually disagree with others in this thread about preceding books like Thud and The Fifth Elephant, as I really enjoyed both. But this feels like it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don’t think it’s Pratchett’s condition that is doing this, I think he’s just driven this particular character and story into the ground and there isn’t anything to say on it. I know that Pratchett is a republican and everything but purleeeeeeeeeease, if you’re going to have a message at the core of your story at least make it secondary to the plot rather than splashed over every single fucking page.
Can’t believe I’m whining like this, but I’m reading this book through gritted teeth and am seriously considering giving up on it, and as a Pratchett fan since the age of 10 that makes me really sad.
I thought that was the wonderful, wonderful thing about Thud. Do we have open spoilers here? Just on Snuff? Well, in Thud he got the message through in eight words:
WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN
That lanced through your heart and made the whole book fall clear. The message wasn’t drilled into you every moment from the get-go. It was delivered in quick, sharp, needle points.
I didn’t care for it. It’s not at all typical Pratchett, or typical Discworld. I don’t think I laughed at all through the entire book. After the mediocrity of Unseen Academicals, and now this one taking a nosedive into the depths of badness, I dunno. Maybe it’s his condition, maybe it’s just the normal thing of an artist taking his art in a direction I don’t happen to care for, I dunno. But I do know that I was extremely disappointed.
Is he parodying Harry Dresden and Lasciel? He has often picked at other sf/fantasy memes, but usually we get a great big clue.
Also, how did the goblin girl’s baby soul jar get into the cigar? It was hinted that it was beautiful and therefore perhaps desirable to some sicko collector, but she wasn’t killed for it, and even if she was, how did it get from the bloody hill to the cigar without attaching itself to someone else?
The soul jar in the cigar was a variant of the “Help! I am a prisoner in a fortune cookie factory” message – a cry for help. Which worked – it got the Watch investigating.
I, too, missed the usual humor. This read like a loving farewell to a best friend.
But I LOVED the set-up for and the resolution provided by the last line. I love the idea of Sam Vines inspiring the Discworld version of Jane A.
I’d have to re-read to find the specific sections, and maybe it was just me, but I remember at least two of his usual rambling paragraphs at the start (y’know, the ones that usually resolve into some kind of humourous relevant point?) that this time, just seemed to make no sense at all and were unrelated to everything else on the page.
I’d like to blame my own sleep-deprived baby-brain for misreading, or failing to take some detail in, but I suspect it might have been his Embuggerance at work
This is going to be a tough post for me to write, for reasons I’ll discuss a bit later. Regarding Snuff itself, I greatly enjoyed the story, and it was lovely as always to see Vimes and his crew in action. I think the goblin world was well-rendered, and enjoyed the meta-explanation of their relative absence from the Discworld to date (that is, nobody notices the downtrodden until Something Big happens).
But I’ve been getting the sense from his last few books that Pterry’s “voice” has been diminishing. If you compare his writing style even from just 5-6 years ago to the style we see in Snuff, Unseen Academicals, or I Shall Wear Midnight, it’s startlingly different. To me, the authorial voice of mid-2000s books like Thud or Going Postal feels much closer to Discworld novels of the 90s than it does to his most recent work. His prose is much more measured and focused in those pre-2006 books, never taking more than the minimum number of words necessary to impart a witticism or deliver plot advancement.
Pratchett’s more recent work is much more… meandering. Lines of dialogue are loaded with extraneous phrases that make all of his characters sound vaguely like elderly English men (“blah blah blah, oh dear, blah blah” or “blah blah blah, as they say”), whereas he used to be the master of imparting distinct character voices with brevity. Descriptions of locations and environments sometimes ramble on for pages in near-Tolkienesque fashion. And characters occasionally break out in page-long, single-paragraph monologues that sound less like the words an actual person might say, and more like long lists that should be (but aren’t) written in outline form. Not that these things are necessarily bad writing - but they do mark a noticeable change in tone and style.
My sad suspicion is that Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s is affecting his work, although maybe not in the ways that one might expect. From interviews I’ve seen (as well as his stirring articles on the subject of the right to die), he seems as sharp-minded and clever as ever. But I do know that he can no longer write by hand. Instead, his last several books have been written by dictation, and that, I think, may be the cause of the change in his style. Pratchett’s best works were all physically written by him, straight into a word processor - and notably, I’ve never really felt like those books sound much like Pratchett’s spoken voice. Pratchett-on-paper always sounded to me like the perfect American storyteller, actually: concise but thoughtful, given to brief but hilarious turns of phrase, and always cleverer and more knowledgeable than anyone else in the room (but compassionately and humbly so). Pratchett’s more recent, dictated books, on the other hand, sound more similar to what he sounds like when he speaks out loud - very proper and English, and somewhat given to rambling.
Pterry is my favorite writer of all time, and it’s very saddening to me to even think about the fact that he won’t be around much longer. Considering how much joy his books have given me, and how important they have been to shaping my own perspective on the word, it was hard even to write this post. Given that, I’m very much inclined to give his current books a lot of leeway, and it is in part because of that that I force myself to overlook what feels like a diminishment in his writing style in books like Snuff.
Fortunately, the underlying stories Pratchett is telling in these books, and the thoughtful and compassionate perspective he always offered, are both still well in evidence in these new books, and for that, I will gladly continue to buy and devour anything he writes the day it is published, even if the new books don’t quite elicit the same wonder and joy of the old.
Just so. He is best used now, I think, the way Pratchett uses Granny Weatherwax - as a powerful but peripheral character. There are still some characters that have stories to be told - Angua, for instance, or Agnes Nitt.
I personally think that the best writing he’s done since Night Watch has been the three Tiffany Aching novels, especially Hat Full Of Sky. They seem to have come to an end with I Shall Wear Midnight, but I’ll bet we see the Nac Mac Feegle again.
I am hesitant to ascribe the poor quality of Snuff to Pterry’s condition … yet.
He has always been erratic. Some poor books, some good books, then some poor books. Looking at the most recent Discworld books I rate them:
Monstrous Regiment Really bad. Going Postal Top notch, one of his best. Thud! Filler. Making Money Not as good at Going Postal, but fairly decent. Unseen Academicals Filler. Snuff Bad.
So not exactly on a roll but not a complete downhill arc either.
(All of this is complicated by the fact that someone else might easily have the exact opposite of tastes and rate these completely backwards from the above.)
That’s true. Some of his early works are just plain stinkers - Colour Of Magic, Eric, Sourcery - and others, while not awful, were flat: Moving Pictures, Pyramids, Jingo.
A poster upthread made a very interesting point about Pterry’s writing style changing as his literal writing style changes, from typing to dictating his books.
I think that’s true (although I suspect the ratio of “poor to good” in my mind is rather lower than for most - IMO he didn’t really write a single “bad” book between Reaper Man and Wintersmith), but my previous post wasn’t about the quality of the books per se. I do think, regardless of the overall quality of the stories being told, there is a very dramatic difference in the writing style between Pratchett’s pre-mid-2000s books and everything he’s written since. My hypothesis is that it has to do with how he’s writing the books (typing vs dictation), though I admit that’s speculation on my part. But I do think that the change in basic style is severe, and I’m honestly shocked that more people haven’t seemed to pick up on it. Snuff feels, tonally, completely different to me than, say, Men At Arms or Night Watch.
Different goblin girl - the one who put the pot into the cigar was one of the captives who were worked to death on Howandaland (or wherever the slave camp was). The girl who was murdered was in the Shires, a day or so ride from Ankh-Morpork.
The chief goblin in the Shires burrow looked at the dead body and told Vimes a pot was missing–I assumed this was the dead body of the murdered girl–did they send the bodies back from Howandaland too? (No longer have book so honest questions from memory only.)
Okay, that makes sense for the cigar part–but how did Stratford show the barkeep the pot without it sticking to him? Did he handle it with gloves? How would he know it had to be handled carefully? Or were pots generally not sticky in ordinary circumstances?
Ha–snuff or pot? Play on words about drug smuggling?
I think only the pots that contain the souls of dead baby goblins (a very small percentage of them indeed) have the problem with sticking to people (and for that matter, the pot didn’t stick to Fred Colon until he explicitly claimed ownership of it) - there are references to humans stealing goblin pots, which would be self-correcting behavior if all the pots were cursed.
