Most of you know this, of course.
It would be hard to describe it as a “surprise”, really. Alzheimers takes you down in eight years, give or take; it destroys your brain, and you need that to live. It had been eight years, and after his message – and Neil Gaiman’s wonderful piece on him – saying he couldn’t attend the annual Discworld convention, we knew it was coming. We steeled ourselves. It was still devastating – and at the same time, a sort of relief; his views on a death at a time of one’s choosing are well-documented. It is good to know he won’t be decaying slowly and unable to tend to himself.
Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite authors, but more than that, I think he is one of the very best authors of all time. Dickens has nothing on Terry Pratchett. Shakespeare can take a seat. But for all the outpouring of grief from the masses, the pictures of Pterry and Death, during his life it seemed like he was always in the shadows.
I mean, he wrote fantasy. Even though he was one of the most popular authors in Britain, fantasy is not considered “proper writing”. It’s not serious (though by god some of those books were serious, for all they were funny). It’s genre writing and thus not entitled to the respect given to proper literature.
That’s ridiculous. I’m sorry. He was better than so many of the “classics”, better than so many of his contemporaries, and despite his many fantasy awards the fact that his works were never given the same consideration as non-genre novels because they were fantasy drives me crazy. Why did he never win a Man Booker? Because he wrote fantasy. Pratchett never minded, was pleased he could make a living doing what he loved (and buying increasingly large greenhouses for the carnivorous plants). But there are still people who say “it’s only fantasy”, as if that means, somehow, it doesn’t count.
I discovered him at 13 or 14 – I can never keep those years straight – with Reaper Man. I’d always liked the Grim Reaper, so the cover caught my eye. In retrospect, it was a difficult novel to start with. I suppose many Discworld novels are a bit like that; you get much more out of them on a reread, when you understand more about the world. I read my way through the Death books at the time (Soul Music, Hogfather… Mort last, for some reason) and then branched out into Watch (Men at Arms) and Rincewind (Sourcery) books. I read them voraciously, though I didn’t understand all the jokes the first time through. I own many. To a young mind, Pratchett is a teacher, a philosopher, showing the way the world is by making a whole new one. Discworld, as it is said, is a world and a mirror of worlds. He was a good thing to find at that age, when one’s mind is clay, and I suspect he’s influenced my thought structure maybe more than any other one person. That spirit of fairness, that doesn’t exist but that we feel should. The Story as a thing, that is real and not-real. The mutability of history. The nature of people who, generally speaking, just try to get through life as best they can. There’s a great compassion to it.
His death was coming. We knew it. Let us acknowledge him as he was and ever shall be: one of the best writers of not just his generation, but of all time. And cherish the stories he gave us.