Funnier'n a three-legged horse from Goolalah (The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett)

Name: Brett Bligh

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Product:	The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett
Date:	29/03/01 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: light-hearted, inoffensive fun; twin narratives and twin topics ensure variety and keep the reader engrossed.

Disadvantages: middle-aged lack of satirical bite; VERY LARGE PRINT.

“Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.”

And so begins ‘The Last Continent’, the 22nd Discworld novel by bestselling author Terry Pratchett, which takes as its starting-point the satirical target of Australia. Having once been a massive Discworld fan, going back to the series after so long a gap reminded me of the reason why I tired of the books in the first place, and probably the same reason why the series has now become so perennially popular.

Discworld, you see, is a series which has become respectable in a somewhat middle-aged sort of way; reading a new volume feels more like sliding on a pair of comfy old slippers than readying yourself for a piece of biting satirical commentary on the errors of our society. This is probably best evidenced by the fact that it has been some considerable time since Terry Pratchett has introduced any new recurring central characters to the Discworld novels (he now seems quite content to alternate in his series between stories featuring the wizard Rincewind, the Unseen University faculty, the witches coven of Lancre and the Ankh-Morpork city watch, the first two of which are sometimes in tandem, as is the case here).

Not that there is anything essentially wrong with this, of course, since all of these characters and their customary settings, companions and situations are all well thought out, and since Pratchett populates each of his novels with a very rich ensemble of supporting characters. It is simply that the regular reader of the series cannot but help think that the author can’t be bothered to think of anybody new with an equally well-thought out background, and that he seems to be content in treading old ground (either this or, of course, that none of the new characters he has introduced recently have proved sufficiently malleable to reappear, something which would have almost equal meaning).

Treading old ground is precisely
what Pratchett is NOT doing here, however, in terms of narrative. For this is a story about the creation of a new continent (and, at the other end of the timescale, it death; no-one ever accused Pratchett of being scared of scale).

The exceedingly inept wizard Rincewind, a feature of the series since the very first novel (‘The Colour of Magic’), was last seen, to the best of my memory, in ‘Interesting Times’, in a land which more than superficially resembled China, at the end of which he was catapulted quite some considerable distance by the Wizards from back home (the Unseen University), but instead of landing in his home city of Ankh-Morpork, he landed on the mysterious continent XXXX, (in this novel referred to as “EksEksEksEks”).

This novel finds the utter coward attempting to make a life for himself in the Bush, when a strange apparition in the form of a Kangaroo appears and tells Rincewind that a hero is needed to save the continent. Unfortunately, Rincewind will not be given any specialist equipment as in the case of most quests, and his every attempt to run away (his gut reaction to most circumstances, as regular readers of the series will know) seems to lead him in the right direction to carry on his mission. Actually, one other problem Rincewind has is that the Kangaroo will not actually tell him what his mission is supposed to BE.

Running in parallel with this is another narrative involving the University faculty themselves who, after stepping through a window in the study of the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, find themselves stuck in the distant past on a continent still in the midst of being formed by a god, with the Librarian unable to control a bout of shape-shifting (his usual form being, of course, that of an orang-utan, he here seems to spend much of his time in such forms as a red-furred penguin and a deck-chair), and accompanied by the University housekeeper, Mrs.
Whitlow, a woman much fancied by many of the older members of the faculty (i.e. nearly all of them). It does not take long for the reader to work out that this is the distant past of XXXX, with the wizards bumping into the God of Evolution and showing him how to actually DO it, or to figure out who is to be the cause of the catastrophe — the plot synopsis on the novel’s back reads, “It’s the Discworld’s last continent, and it’s going to die in a few days, except…”, so this shouldn’t be much of a plot spoiler — or, logically, what is to be Rincewind’s quest. But the fun is in the reading, and at time Terry Pratchett can be very funny indeed.

Rather than the more general satire on life which marked the earlier Discworld titles, Pratchett’s tactic these days seems to be to choose a specific target for each book, be it Opera, China, or, in his latest novel as of this review, which I have not yet read, the invention of the printing press. Consequently, ‘The Last Continent’ is a book filled with sly (but rather gentle and inoffensive, I must stress) pokes at our Australian cousins, including the tendency to simply state “no worries” in any situation in the hope that somehow that situation will resolve itself, the need to turn every comment into a comparison with something which very probably does not exist (“bigger than a bat’s whatsit in Bujumbura” or something similar), etc.

The secondary target of the book, however, is the explanations offered to the world by science, as represented in this book by the young wizard Ponder Stibbons who has attempted to turn the art of magic into the practice of science (as happened with alchemy in reality) but who has come up against not only the inestimable force of Tradition in the University, but also against a faculty who are likely to ask awkward questions about his theories to which he can never qui
te respond sufficiently at the time. This, together with the discussion of evolution whose form in the novel seems to be mainly concerned with forcing the god of evolution to accept that the living creatures he creates should evolve on their own as a result of sex (a concept the god also has to have explained to him, causing much feet shuffling and embarrassment among the faculty until, thankfully, Mrs. Whitlow steps in), creates a subject thread throughout the novel which runs in parallel with the Aussie-baiting and serves to give the book a sense of variety as well as to beef up the word count.

Thankfully, Terry Pratchett is not one of those authors who blithely pad a book to death in order to satisfy the modern publisher’s desire for a nice, thick book (based upon the premise that a thicker book is more likely to be regarded as good value by the general punter and hence is likely to sell more copies), a practice which usually results in a central core of solid writing surrounded by a mish-mash of pointless drivel which is almost as tedious for the reader to read as it was for the writer to write. This ‘thickness-quota’ has, instead, been adhered to by the publishers themselves, and Terry Pratchett’s recent paperbacks have the largest font size I have ever seen in this format book intended for anyone over the age of five and situated outside the ‘large print’ section of libraries.

In any case, there is more than enough content here to keep the reader intellectually stimulated (in a relaxed, Horlicks-induced kind of intellectually stimulated state, anyway, but surely that’s what people read Pratchett’s book for), and the book is undoubtedly relaxing and fun. In this case, therefore, the fact that the page count (412) is padded out greatly by very large text really doesn’t matter.

The book would still be worth the asking price at half the size.

Summary: