Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, has a vision of future greatness for the city. Harry King, a millionaire who has made his fortune from other people’s rubbish, is going to help him achieve this… with appropriate supervision, of course. Dick Simnel, the brains behind this vision – a literal transport of delight, if you can forgive me – just wants to build his trains and see them running across the world. Moist von Lipwig just wants to survive another day, thanks very much…
Raising Steam (2013), Sir Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel, gives us the clearest idea yet of what the future of the Discworld could look like. It brings the Disc into an Industrial Age, where the luxuries of a modern world are on the brink of being made available to all who may care to use them. But things aren’t going as smoothly as the Patrician might want: certain elements among the dwarves are fomenting rebellion against modernity again and the train, specifically the Iron Girder, Simnel’s engine, upon which he tests all his innovations (making it, I’m sorry (not sorry) to say, a rolling prototype), appears to be developing a form of sentience and is also fiercely protective of her creator. But the storyline involving a race against time to save the Dwarven King from a coup appears to have equal billing to the exploration of what a working railway would mean to the Disc.
This leads to scenes that contain the explosion of industries that run as subsidiaries to the railway: accommodation, tourism, catering, importing and exporting – as well as the economic boom that this new form of transport brings.
There are also a range of railway stories that Sir Terry satirises, from The Railway Children to Brief Encounter. These spoofs aren’t as plentiful as they have been in some of the earlier Industrial Revolution novels (as they’ve become known), but they are still quite effective. Of course, railways aren’t as big a source of jokes as say, movies or rock music are but there’s still a lot of fun to be had.
Possibly the biggest surprise, though, is Dick Simnel, inventor of the steam engine. We learn fairly early on that his father Ned has been killed by his work on the steam engine – which may cause the reader a pang when they remember Ned’s work in Reaper Man. Dick is presented to us as the Discworld’s version of George Stephenson, inventor of the steam engine on our Roundworld, or possibly Richard Trevithik, who was the first to use one to transport goods. At any rate, he is presented to us as one of the main characters in the book, despite the fact that he plays little part in the story, save causing it to occur: the events swirl around him and are influenced by him, but he is a facilitator rather than a protagonist. You might even say (hopefully before I’m going to) that he drives the plot. Or at least, drives the plot device.
He is also one of the most rounded and realistic characters in the entirety of the Discworld canon: he is not a comic character, nor does he have things happen to him so that he can deepen as a character: he enters the story fully-formed and the things that happen to him seem to affect mostly him, rather than the more usual cast around him. It’s a wonderfully subtle piece of writing, and one that doesn’t seem out of place in this novel, which is branded as a comedy but feels more like – as do a lot of the later Discworld novels – a work of almost allegorical literature with occasional funny bits.
I say allegorical warily because it is tempting to draw counterparts with the events on the Disc with some similar events on our world, but Sir Terry is wise enough to keep things vague enough so that you can’t quite pin down just who he might be taking aim at.
However, it’s easy to see what he is taking aim at: the acts of the “grags”, the ultra-conservative dwarves who object to what they see as the casting aside of thousands of years of history and culture for the sake of modernity, are easy to make parallels with. That they are exiles in their own land, living in caves in the wilderness and attacking what they see as symbols of a permissive culture – like the tall towers of the clacks network – makes them very easy to pin your own prejudices onto. But again, there are no real specifics to back it up. Which is a theme that Pratchett has returned to again and again: you can’t say that it’s one group of people and not another because it keeps on happening over and over, with only the targets of outrage changing.
This theme does get overegged a little by Pratchett: the grags seem to be much worse antagonists than we would normally experience in a Discworld novel, targeting wedding parties and radicalising young men to commit atrocities while they stay out of the way, or placing those who they disagree with on a list of people to be murdered.
But you can’t blame a gifted writer for making some obvious parallels with events of the previous twenty years or so.
These parts of the novel are superb: the anger that Pratchett rarely let out bubbles to the surface in these sections and his condemnation of, and contempt for, the grags is vivid. However, his treatment of the other characters does feel weaker by comparison: his portrayal of Vimes in particular feels almost perfunctory, especially after the great moments he got in Snuff, the previous book. But again, like Going Postal and Making Money, we are seeing the Commander through Moist’s eyes, so things are bound to be different.
Moist himself also goes through a bit of a change, but one that reader is there for. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Moist is not one of my favourite characters, but here he fully redeems himself. He does so by taking on the cause of the Goblins, the creatures introduced in Snuff. Here we see them, as other non-human races have done, carve out a niche that they find acceptable in Discworld society and become yet another group trying to survive in a world that doesn’t seem to be properly made for them.
Which inadvertently leads to a gem of dialogue where Moist discovers just what these later books are really all about:
‘But you’re all dwarfs. What can you possibly achieve?’ groaned Moist…
‘Tomorrow. That, Mister Lipwig, is what we can achieve. Tomorrow.’
…which just reminds you of what a powerful writer Sir Terry was.
Unfortunately, though, the book also slips up occasionally and presents some moments that just jar, showing that Sir Terry was fighting a debilitating and lethal illness at the same time that he was writing this. It’s difficult to pin down just what is “wrong” with this novel (short answer: objectively nothing) but the tone sometimes quavers and spends a lot of time on things that don’t matter to the story or which rub harshly against the strong and vibrant voice that we know from past books.
On a lighter note, we were also gifted with some accompanying material, similar to what we got with Snuff. In this case it was Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook; An Illustrated Guide To The Railway. Ostensibly written by Mrs Georgina Bradshaw, a seasoned patron of the railway, this was a guide to traveling on the new railway and dealing with customs and tourist attractions along the various routes that the trains would travel on. While not as funny as Snuff’s The World Of Poo, this was a lovely accompaniment, riffing off the Bradshaw Guides of the nineteenth century.
While we’re on the subject of people who knock about on trains, I must talk about a missing opportunity that Sir Terry didn’t see. With the parts played by heroic railway workers in the last quarter of the book, which is a chase sequence straight out of the Old West set in Uberwald, my headcanon now includes a vampire named Bram who becomes obsessed with the railway and gets employed as a stoker.
…
I’ll get my coat.
…
At the time of publication, we weren’t aware that this was going to be the second-last book. Despite the flaws, which are really only issues for die-hard fans like me, this was a lot of fun. It was also part of a new burst of creativity from Sir Terry. He’d recently begun a five volume Science Fiction series with Stephen Baxter called The Long Earth. His short stories and non-fiction were beginning to be collected in anthologies, many of which hadn’t seen the light of day since they were first published back in the 1970s and ‘80s.
The Discworld, too, was undergoing a bit of a renaissance, as well. The more recent novels had been more about characters and their lives rather than magical hijinks and peril, making them a little more like the “literature” that Pratchett frequently worried about his writing becoming. This seemed like a fairly natural progression since a lot of the books in this second half of the series featured much more mundane and recognisable foes than the denizens of the Dungeon Dimensions and other Dark Lord-ish villains we had from a lot of the first few volumes.
It seemed at the time that Sir Terry was going to continue to be turning out his books on a slightly slower-than-usual basis, despite being forced to change his means of writing and lifestyle to accommodate his Alzheimers diagnosis.
How tragically wrong we were.
Coming Up Next: Tiffany Aching helps us all come to terms with loss in The Shepherd’s Crown.
