Stop trying to be so damn amusing! (Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett)

Member Name: KingHerrod

Product:	Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett
Date:	27/06/02 (553 review reads)
Rating:

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Terry Pratchett - oh how he is loved and feted amongst readers, such wonderful fantasy, so observant, so astute, so amusing - to name but a few comments of praise that I have read about Pratchett, both on this site and in the press at large. I have long sat on the fence over Pratchett; I saw the appeal, I could see the observation of our modern world in his Discworld fantasy series and I have on occasions smiled at some of his jokes. However, I have always found the Discworld series of books average, no more no less.

Wyrd Sisters has sat on my shelf un-read for a year, left over from a time when I thought that I liked Pratchett. So, I thought that I would give him another go - to make sure that my decision that he was just average was correct.

The novel itself is a re-write of that famous Shakespeare play, whisper it, Macbeth, or if you want to speak it aloud, the Scottish play. In fact, the plot is Macbeth and then a Macbeth within a Macbeth, within a Macbeth. First gripe, I got it the first time, this is Macbeth, with more comedy and supposedly some observational twists on the theatre and our modern entertainment business. Yes too many plots within a plot of Macbeth make for tired reading.

Wyrd Sisters revolves around three witches, caught up in the dastardly doings of a Duke and his wife. The Duke has murdered the rightful King of Lancre and taken the throne for himself and scheming wife. Our intrepid witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Margrat are left to wonder whether to meddle in politics or not - they know you see that the rightful heir to the throne is alive and if they could just come up with a scheme they could get rid of this Duke and his power crazy wife, who were ruling the Kingdom in a manner that upset even the land - then Lancre would be fine again. But witches weren't supposed to meddle, it was against their code!. That is it really, it is a: will the evil impostor King be found out and made to account
for his actions; will the rightful banished heir make a triumphant return; will the heir want to be King; and will the witches be able to save the Kingdom and still get home in time to check their warts?

Pratchett as is his standard (although blatantly stolen from Douglas Adams), plays with words and people's standard interpretations of them, he adds life and thought to things that we would consider inanimate and thoughtless, such as storms, trees and the land itself and irritatingly he has to tell a joke at least once every 4 or 5 lines. These jokes involve some kind of supposedly amusing metaphor for what is going on or one of some kind of witty observation at how witches are perceived and how Pratchett perceives that they actually are. Most of these jokes are lame and very few help the plot, while, grudgingly, some did make me smile, especially when Pratchett takes words and their meaning in such a non-literal manner, which is Pratchett at his best, but no where near as spot on as Douglas Adams.

""I don't reckon a lot of kingdoms do that sort of thing", she said. "You saw the theatre. Kings and such are killing one another the whole time. Their kingdoms just make the best of it. How comes this one takes offence all of a sudden?""

There are a few modern themes within the book, Pratchett seems to imply that people are better off with rulers that do not think too much (well I wonder if he is happy with old George W Bush - he doesn't seem to think too much). "No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way they were much better at it." Environmentalism features heavily, the Kingdom of Lancre itself is upset at the thought of its trees being chopped down and animals persecuted and whilst this is a good topic to present in a pop
ulist book the mere fact that you present it, does make your book good. The one excellent theme and well-executed part of the book was Pratchett's exploration of the power of words. Spread a rumour and it becomes the truth, smear your opposition and they become unelectable etc etc and in this part of the novel, he hits on a problem that we have with the power of television and the media and our political parties.

The writing itself is average, the book is easy to read, but the constant barrage of poor jokes, interspersed with the odd amusing one, makes the novel hard to read and detracts from the flow of what little real plot there is. Pratchett, a little like Nick Hornby, would to me write better books if he stopped trying to be side splittingly funny twice a page and just concentrated on fewer quips - because some of Pratchett's quips and observations are amusing, but too many just becomes plain tiresome.

In the end, I had little desire to continue reading this book beyond a third of the way through. I did finish it, but it was a struggle and a let down, I knew the type of ending we were going to get, the constant humour of exactly the same nature got boring, much like a stand up comic telling the same joke, over and over, but in very slightly different ways. I was so dejected with the book, that by the end it had put me off reading anything else afterwards altogether and it is for that reason that it gets 1 star. It does have redeeming features; as I have mentioned, but a book that you don't want to read is not a book that you can recommend. Having read this, my decision that Pratchett was an author that I just find tedious and repetitive, seems all the more correct and I would say on the basis of the 5 Discworld books that I have read, I have given him a good go - not even average is my view now.

Published by Corgi.

ISBN: 0-552-13460-0.

Priced: £5.99.

332 pages long (about 150 too long!)

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