DIE LAUGHING! (Mort - Terry Pratchett)

Member Name: Pingu

Product:	Mort - Terry Pratchett
Date:	11/10/01 (42 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic level of invention

Disadvantages: Get real!

If you're an ardent Discworld fan you'll know that the year's wait for each book can be torture. How do you get through it? Well I spend the time reading them all again - except the year that Harry Potter was big, but that's another story. Going back over the old ones is a little wierd, because there is a high degree of evolution across the series - both in writing style, and in the nature of the Disc itself. After you've read the incredibly tightly crafted, intellectual style of the middle books, and then come out the other side, into the ridiculous economy of the latest novels, (so economical that, quite often, I can get to the end without being quite sure how things resolved themselves) the older books can seem a little unrefined. At the same time they have a kind of youthful freshness about them; it might be argued that Pratchett is now just using the Discworld as a fully established setting for a bunch of stories, whereas, in the early books, every plot furthered the creation of the Disc.

For me Mort is the first really powerful bit of writing, but also still really fresh, and remains my firm favourite on every re-reading.

It revolves around a young lad, some might say geek, called Mortimer, who is all knees and elbows, and has the social grace of a flatulent hippo. Things change when Death comes to the annual town fair, and requests that Mort be his apprentice. Mort is whisked into a world that he doesn't really understand, and is soon doing the rounds with the scythe, on a horse called Binky.

The first thing he is taught is that he must not become involved - people are fated to die, and he isn't allowed to try and prevent it. And, obviously, this is the first thing he stuffs up when he does his first solo round. He's supposed to take the Princess Keli, of Sto Lat, but rather takes a fancy to her, and so kills her assassin instead. What he doesn't reckon with is that history is capable of healing i
tself. Although walking and talking, the Princess is technically dead, and the world behaves as though she were - people stop noticing her, and, fairly soon, she is going to vanish altogether, and reality will be just as if she died when she was supposed to.

The book follows a number of central characters. Mort's story becomes a mad dash to find a way of preventing reality healing itself. Death's story revolves around him becoming more human as he delegates his supernatural duties to Mort. He experiments with 'having fun,' getting drunk, fishing, and all sorts of things. The Princess is fighting a losing battle to get people to notice her. And then there's Albert, Death's seemingly innocuous servant, who turns out to be rather important to the plot.

The touches of invention are just brilliant. Such as Death's library, where everybody's biography is busy writing itself. In itself it's a superb idea, but then it is also used very cleverly in a number of plot devices, rather than just being an invention for its own sake. Similarly the interface which splits the Disc into two alternate realities after Mort's cock-up; one where Keli is alive, and one where she died. The implications of this are superbly exploited.

Basically the book is superb. The only book which I may slightly prefer is Good Omens, by Pratchett and Gaimann, but it's a very close call. And you should definitely read both.

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