The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 1: The Colour Of Magic

This is where it all started, really. Sir Terry had written three novels and a ridiculous amount of short stories prior to this but it wasn’t until The Colour Of Magic came out on the 24th November 1983 that he finally achieved a significant measure of success.

Like his previous novel, Strata (1981), this was a parody. But whereas Strata was a more subtle send-up of one work (Larry Niven’s Ringworld), The Colour Of Magic took aim at the entire genre of heroic fantasy and let rip.

It begins in a typical fantasy city, Ankh-Morpork. The name has echoes of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar from his series about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; two brawling, witty, thieving rogues who carouse their way across their world (and some others). There’s even a couple of characters (Bravd and The Weasel) who make a brief appearance early on the book to really drive the parody home (As a sidenote, it was interesting to read the recently rediscovered “The Quest For The Keys” in the most recent anthology of Pratchett short stories, A Stroke Of The Pen. This is very clearly not a Discworld story, despite being set in the city of Morpork, but it is a lot of fun and I’d recommend it to fans who love watching the journey that Sir Terry took from being a journeyman writer to the utter genius he later became).

At any rate, Ankh-Morpork is here a traditional fantasy city. It wouldn’t be until the second book that it would achieve some real character of its own, before it gradually gentrified itself into the Dickensian sprawl that we know it most famously as in the later books in the series, where it appeared in all but a few.

And it’s here that our two protagonists (I wouldn’t dare call them heroes) meet each other. Rincewind is a failed wizard, while Twoflower is the Discworld’s first tourist, who needs a translator. From there on they narrowly escape from tavern brawls, otherworldly monsters, opportunists and dragons, until it seems that they finally meet their fates onboard the Discworld’s first spaceship. And all while being followed by Twoflower’s lethal suitcase, The Luggage.

It’s a hell of a ride. These days it’s the “received fan wisdom” that The Colour Of Magic is a bit rubbish. Pratchett himself spent a long time advising people that it wasn’t a good place to start the series from.

Look, I’m not going to disagree with the creator himself but I’m going to give you the perspective of a person who had no choice but to start from the beginning.

It isn’t a bad book; it just suffers from not being as good as many of the books that followed it. That’s all, really.

I adore The Colour Of Magic. It was unlike anything I’d read in fantasy prior to this, and the send-ups (that I recognised) made me feel a little proud that the genre I loved reading was considered to be worthy of a piss-take of this magnitude.

I loved it all: the setting was ridiculously absurd but I was familiar with it from my pitiful knowledge of world mythology. The idea that the world sat on the back of a turtle swimming through the cosmos was familiar but also just ridiculous enough from my late twentieth-century perspective that it was perfect for comedy. The idea behind the final part of the novel – that there’s a mission to determine the gender of said turtle (named A’Tuin, for those who weren’t aware) – is brilliant as well, because this universe’s version of the “Big Bang Theory”, as mentioned in the opening pages, may well have been a genuine astronomical phenomenon that people on the Disc could have been worried about. Which was something else to love about it: the way that Pratchett mined a joke for as much humour as it could give without overstaying its welcome.

That sort of comedy was right up my alley: there was some ridiculous wordplay and terrible puns and some amazing physical comedy, but the most fun for me was picking up all the references to other books and stories. I was only 15 when I read it for the first time, and I missed a lot of the more subtle gags, and there were some jokes that I didn’t get until I read the basis for them a few years later, but the comedy was broad enough that I had a general idea of the type of story that was being sent up, if not the precise title. For instance, Hrun the Barbarian is a blatant satire of Robert E. Howard’s Conan. I hadn’t read those books at this point, but the Schwarzenegger movies had been released fairly recently, and I had enough knowledge of what they were about to realise what was being sent up. When I read the Conan stories some years later, there was a wonderful frisson of recognition to them, although the shadow cast by Conan over the genre is such that it would be hard to pin down a reaction to “just” Hrun.

(An added readerly bonus to all of this was realising that the adventure in which we meet Hrun also featured a setting and creatures heavily influenced by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. When I found out years later that Howard and Lovecraft were correspondents and friends in real life it added a tiny bit of a shine to that section of the novel.)

And the sections with Hrun also overlapped with a wonderful send-up of Anne McCaffrey’s venerable Dragonriders Of Pern series, which was a massive favourite of mine at the time (and still is).

As I said, I love The Colour Of Magic, and to an extent I have to agree with Pratchett and other fans in that it isn’t as good a novel as the other books in the series. I find the last section of the book to be quite different in tone to the other three, and the Discworld all across the book feels different in setup and geography to later books. Part of this is what TVTropes.com refers to as “early instalment weirdness” wherein the creator of a series or characters is making things up as they go and adding or discarding details according to the story they want to tell. You can argue that in Discworld it goes well beyond “early” until Pratchett is really comfortable with the world he’s describing, but it always feels fresh and wonderful wherever in the series you’re reading it.

As a place to start, though… well, I think it’s a fine novel to begin with. It didn’t put me off when I read it when it came out in paperback; in fact, I was thrilled when I read (in an interview conducted by Neil Gaiman) that there was going to be a sequel. And so were thousands of other readers who enjoyed it equally as much. It, and the early sequels were for several years underground bestsellers before the sheer momentum of sales (according to Pratchett, this was at about Mort, the fourth book in the series) brought it into contact with the wider world. The graphic novel adaptation was a moderate success as well but it, and the later TV adaptation starring David Jason and Sean Astin, really only proved that it was tricky translating Pratchett’s unique voice into different media.

But for a new reader, I’d probably also need to consider what they know about fantasy as a genre. If they’re reasonably well-read, I’d heartily send them off to The Broken Drum to meet Rincewind and Twoflower and begin their journey with them. For other people, with slightly different tastes… well, let’s wait and see…

Coming up next: Will Rincewind and Twoflower survive their plummet from the edge of the world? Find out in The Light Fantastic.