[LINK] "Terry Pratchett's Joyful, Absurd, Human Fantasy"

[rfmcdonald]

Julie Beck's essay at The Atlantic about Terry Pratchett, passed away today, is a superb tribute to the writer's genius.

There is deep truth to be found in fictional stories, no less so if they include witches and wizards and a flat earth carried through space on the back of four elephants on the back of a giant turtle. Fantasy at its best is more than just escapism. The distorted funhouse mirror of an imagined world can sometimes reflect our own more clearly than the most realistic fiction. Pratchett’s books were fantasy at its best.

But what set him above and apart was his sense of joy. The Discworld novels are satirical, but it’s a kind satire, running over with affection for all the wacky, messed-up things in life. Even death.

One of Pratchett’s greatest and most beloved characters is Death, capital D, the walking personification of the end that waits for everyone. He looks like a classic reaper—a skeleton in a dark robe, wielding a scythe, talking only in all caps. But he rides a horse named Binky. He loves cats. When the Hogfather—Discworld’s equivalent of Santa Claus—goes missing, Death stands in, donning a beard and a red cloak, and doing his best to bring presents to Discworld’s children, even if he finds it a little hard to adjust to the role.

Death is “implacable, because that is his job,” Pratchett once wrote in The Guardian. But “he appears to have some sneaking regard and compassion for a race of creatures which are to him as ephemeral as mayflies, but which nevertheless spend their brief lives making rules for the universe and counting the stars.”

[. . .]

This wonder in life shines through in his writing, in all of his characters, from the gods down to the rats. (Who are met by their own Death—sometimes called the Grim Squeaker. Whimsy even at the very end.) The people and the creatures who inhabit Pratchett’s world are determined, difficult, insightful, and absurd. As are we all.