A willingness to wake up every day and go about life, despite all the oppressive things that afflict people. What faith means to him here and in the rest of his books is a kind of hope. This idea that humans need faith even if they don’t ascribe to any of the institutional religions pops up throughout Pratchett’s books. Granny folded her arms and stared calmly at the visitor, meeting his gaze eye-to-socket. Of course, as a mortal herself, this meeting with Death could have bad ramifications for her. She knows who to expect and knows she wants to bargain for the life of the baby in exchange for the life of the cow. So, when Granny is asked to help a baby dying of Red Bugge, she spends the night with the boy in the stable where a cow is similarly stricken. After all, this is Death we’re talking about. Even so, they frequently deal as well with significant stuff. THEY TEND TO LOSE CONCENTRATION.ĭeath, in Pratchett’s books, is usually very droll, and his scenes are often comic. GENERALLY SPEAKING, THEY GET VERY UNEASY WHEN THE DECEASED TAKES A CONSTRUCTIVE ROLE IN A MURDER INVESTIGATION. “But he just killed me! Strangled me with his bare hands!” Undershaft, the chorus director of the opera, suddenly discovers, in a sort of out-of-body way, that he’s been murdered and is now talking to Death: Since there is a killer loose in the opera house, there are a good number appearances of Death, a character, all skull and bones, who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s Discworld books but rarely as often as in Maskerade.įor instance, Dr. The old terror of human impermanence - it doesn’t get more serious than that. It was the terror of impermanence, the knowledge that all this would pass away, that a beautiful voice or a wonderful figure was something whose arrival you couldn’t control and whose departure you couldn’t delay. It was one of the most ancient terrors, the one that meant that no sooner had mankind learned to walk on two legs than it dropped to its knees. It stalked the place like a great dark animal. (If this sounds like a take-off on the Phantom of the Opera story, it is - except, of course, for the witch part.)Īnyway, at one point, Granny is ruminating about opera as a performance is underway: Nitt, nee Agnes Nitt, a sister witch from Lancre who has come to the big city to become an opera star, and (b), incidentally, solve the mystery of a series of murders at the Opera House. Granny Weatherwax is at the at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House with her sidekick Nanny Ogg in order to (a) lure back Perdita X. He employed them to wrestle with the deepest human longings, dreads and values, such as in this scene from his 1995 Discworld novel Maskerade. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t only aimed at getting a laugh. In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy.
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