I see there’s no thread on Terry Pratchett’s final novel, so here it is.
Open spoilers, so be forewarned.
I enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s more tightly plotted than many of Pratchett’s recent books, and it’s a fitting denouement to the entire Discworld. I admit I had a tough time reading the first section, though. You’re slapped in the face with the fact that Pratchett wrote Granny Weatherwax’s death as his ideal way to go - no fuss, no muss, and peacefully in bed with your cat.
Does it feel like Terry wrote it? I haven’t felt that way for the last couple of books.
I agree the last few felt a bit off. This one does feel like he wrote it.
Not his best but perhaps his best in several years.
It’s Prachett but it’s pretty obvious there were a lot of things in the book he probably wished he had the time to flesh out a bit more. The parts of the story involving the Elf Queen’s transformation, the rallying of the old men, Miss Earwig, and even Mephistopheles the Goat felt incomplete. It wasn’t my favorite Discworld novel by a long shot but it was a much better farewell than Raising Steam.
She aten’t dead.
The first half felt stronger - more “Pratchett” - than the second half. There’s an endnote to the effect that PTerry usually did revision up to the last minute, and this may not be as polished as he might have liked, but we wanted you to have it anyway. Which suggests a certain awareness of the flaws and it is good enough that it doesn’t feel like Salmon of Doubt redux.
The Elf Queen’s story definitely needed more development. It’s a hard sell to believe a creature so fundamentally self-centred could adapt, and even in what is a children’s book it seems to happen to quickly and too easily.
There are also some tonal inconsistencies - the Elf incursions simultaneously include playing silly buggers with the beer in the Chalk, and outright slaughtering lumberjacks in Lancre. They are meant to be probing for weaknesses, and the lumberjacks were particularly isolated, but the gulf between the two levels of “mischief” is absurd.
But it’s a lot better than Raising Steam, because there is character conflict, because the writing is better (again, especially in the first half), and because there is some kind of arc (Tiffany choosing her own path rather than following Granny’s footsteps) rather than just the completion of a task.
They were also kidnapping and mistreating babies on the Chalk. I don’t know, done well this can really add a sense of “otherness” to the elves, since the whole thing about them is that they can and will do whatever amuses them at the moment, whether that’s messing around with you, stealing your stuff, tormenting or outright killing you, or they just give you a gift and send you on your way. But once you establish that elves behave this way it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that Nightshade could reform, or would even understand what that entailed.
I thought this was a little rough in spots, and probably would have benefited from some rewriting, but I’d have to agree that overall it was better than most of his recent adult Disc novels (incomparably better than Raising Steam specifically) and not at all a bad way to close the book on the series.
Something I’m not 100% clear on… is Nightshade supposed to be the same character as the Queen in Lords and Ladies? (I have read the other Tiffany books, but it’s been a while - I can’t remember any of them).
I ask because the Queen of the Elves in Lords and Ladies was so utterly evil and sadistic that the idea she’d reform so easily (or in fact, at all) seems somewhat incredible. It doesn’t come across as the same character to me.
Yes; it’s made clear that Nightshade is the same Elf Queen who was in both Lords and Ladies and The Wee Free Men. And maybe he did try to reform her, but The Shepherd’s Crown is such a warm, happy, optimistic book that I will forgive it anything. It’s incredible to think that he wrote it knowing that it would be his last book, but it’s a such a fine epitaph that criticism is almost superfluous. And he had {and damn, I typed “has” automatically and had to go back and amend it} a fine way of redeeming a character: Mrs Earwig was wonderful. And now I am sad because there will be no more Discworld books. I’ve read them all. Thank you, Sir Terry.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, although this is a Discworld book, it’s a more child-aimed Discworld book than the others. That changes the characterisation a bit. It softens the darkness a bit by focussing more on the young people and giving more weight to the idea of rehabilitation than adult Discworld books do. Though TBF it is still pretty dark at some points. The language used is also different.
It did read, to me, better than the last Vimes book (I liked Raising Steam). I wasn’t surprised to read in the postscript that Pratchett would have edited further, but that was because you could see a few hurried bits, and Pratchett never hurried his story, but, like it said, the beginning, middle and end were all there.
It would work fine even without the postscript and I’m really glad that Pratchett wrote in a major character death as part of his last work, and then had people in the book move on from it, like his readers and his family have to.
I don’t think Tiffany was based on his daughter, but I do think she was based on him having a daughter, and it was lovely to see him saying, via that death and its aftermath (of someone that I don’t think was based on him, just someone who was the right age to die without drama) “don’t let anyone say you should try to be me. You are you.” That’s one of the things that made me cry.
Yeah, I agree. In an ideal book Geoffrey and Mephistopheles would either have been fleshed out or left out {and truthfully Geoffrey was a nice idea but didn’t add that much}, and Nightshade’s redemption needed more build-up, but overall it felt more like a properly constructed novel than * Raising Steam* or Snuff did. I don’t know if it was the editing or not, but it felt like the story had been shaped through the process of writing, whereas his last couple of books had felt like the characters were already set, he just had to add some events: Snuff really added nothing to Commander Vimes that we hadn’t learnt from Thud, and as a result it felt a little superfluous. With Tiffany you truly felt that events genuinely hadn’t been decided, that in addressing the Elves she herself would be changed, and if the mechanism for the final conflict was a little inevitable, her leaving Lancre for the Chalk and setting up by herself felt wholly right.
It’s fairly clear that You was a set up for something involving Granny Weatherwax, but that idea really just petered out into the slightly unsatisfying “Granny is everywhere”. And yeah, Mephistopheles was definitely being set up for something more than clever animal accomplice: there was even a flash of Octarine when he met You, implying that they were both vessels for something magical, but that wasn’t followed up either. There again, we did get Mrs Earwig redeeming herself awesomely by being her utterly pigheaded self, and being met by cheers:
I cried so hard. I had avoided spoilers. I mean, I knew Something Big happened based on a few “OMG don’t read this review. Major spoilers in the first paragraph” types of tumblr warnings, but I didn’t know what … like if something happened at the end or if it was even non-book stuff. So I was 99% taken off guard.
I hate it, but yet it seemed…right. Like it was a nice bit of closure.
It did feel unfinished, unpolished, but not terrible. You can see where there would have been more substance had he been able to work it out, but it stands as is just fine. Especially because it’s a Tiffany book.
I’ve been having a hard time accepting that that’s the last one.