Mortifying Fun (Mort - Terry Pratchett)

Member Name: wyrdsister

Product:	Mort - Terry Pratchett
Date:	12/02/02 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, Entertaining, Imaginative characters

Disadvantages: none

I was bored one day back in 1993, I looked at my small bookshelf and realised I had read all my books to death (pardon the pun) and needed a change. I thought to myself, well I’ll pick myself up a new book and spend some quality time on the sofa. I had only been in England 6 months and I had never heard of Terry Pratchett, as his work had not then reached the continental bookshops. What first attracted me was the cover. It was bright, colourful and brought a smile to my face. Being of the French persuasion, naturally I pick Mort.

Mortimer, or Mort as he is called, is the sixteen years old son of a farmer. He’s cheerful and very helpful in a clumsy sort of way. His parents, although quite found of him, are a bit worried: he thinks a lot, and surely that’s not good. So it is decided that Mort should be apprenticed. At the annual hiring fair, Mort was still waiting long after everyone had gone. No one had wanted to hire him and his determination to stay until midnight was stronger than the humiliation he felt. So when Death came and offered Mort a job, he decided he wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.
When Mort wakes up in Death’s cottage the next day, he meets the rest of the household: first, there’s Death’s daughter (by adoption) Ysabelle who is generally annoyed and addicted to pink and chocolate and then there’s Albert, the Reaper’s servant, who can fry every kind of food available.
To start with, it seems to Mort that being Death’s apprentice involves cleaning a lot, having Death hinting about his daughter’s assets and being hated by the aforementioned daughter. But he eventually gets to go with Death to learn about THE DUTY: it’s a king’s assassination and a harsh learning experience for Mort but across a crowded room, he sees a girl: princess Keli and he wants to see her again, so he asks for a day off.
And then it all went wrong.
Intri
gued by this new concept, Death decides to give it a go and sends Mort to do THE DUTY. The problem is that Keli is on the list. Call it love or clumsiness, but Mort misses and saves the Princess. Well sort of: reality on the Disc is a strange thing, it is not always logical and very, very stubborn: reality knows Princess Keli is dead and Mort is in really big trouble because she’s still breathing. Now it’s a race against time to save the princess from reality who has cottoned on to the fact that something is not right. And to make matters worse, it seems that Death fancies a change of carrier, perhaps “something nice working with cats or flowers.”

The fourth book in the Discworld series, Mort is full of humour and humanity. It is also a good story to boot. Pratchett style of writing is very “cinematic” and this book is easy to read. The characters are well drawn and invariably flawed in some way, making them accessible and almost instantly likable. Pratchett really excels at bringing to life the more quirky characters the imagination can conjure up, yet nothing is ever quite like you might expect them to be. Who would have thought Death was a slightly depressed seven feet tall skeleton riding a horse called Binki. After all, this is the Disc, a flat world lying on the back of four elephants supported by the giant space turtle Great A’Tuin, this is a world where everything can have a place and a personality to go with it (and perhaps a small garden). And it all makes perfect sense somehow or maybe I’m just insane.

Summary: