The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 3: Equal Rites

This one came as a bit of a shock. There were no ties to either of the previous books – save a surname shared by a character in this and in The Light Fantastic – and there were fewer jokes, although it was still very funny.

The story was quite different, too: the world was in peril again but the details of it were almost incidental to the plot, which was about a girl who tries to break into wizardry, a hitherto exclusively male fraternity. Eskarina Smith, the girl in question, is the eighth child of an eighth son (the number eight having mystical properties on Discworld). Esk has very obvious magical talents, and the witch tasked with training her, Granny Weatherwax, soon discovers that she is more than she can handle, so they begin a trek to the Unseen University, the home of wizardry on the Disc…

As you may guess I don’t recall enjoying this one as much as the earlier books when it first came out. The jokes weren’t as plentiful and the story seemed a little more… sensible and conventional than what had gone before. Esk struck me as being a fairly generic stubborn and strong-willed protagonist who would stop at nothing to achieve what she wanted, while Granny Weatherwax… well, Granny would undergo some slight changes between here and the next book she appeared in, but I was instantly struck by what a memorable character she was. I was 18 when this came out in paperback and my experience of elderly women as protagonists in literature was quite limited, but I knew a few in real life, and Granny reminded me of some of them, particularly when they didn’t think I was listening to them.

So Granny was a bit of a hoot, and the way she dealt with anything that challenged her authority or experience was simply to pretend that it didn’t, while believing that sooner or later it would cease to be a problem. Since the book was all about challenging hierarchies (especially patriarchal ones), I could easily believe that Granny was simply the distaff version of those grizzled old heroes I read a lot about in David Gemmell novels who didn’t give in while fighting against what they believed to be wrong.

This was also a much slower book than the previous two. Now I don’t mind a story that takes its time to unfold and let out its mysteries, but Equal Rites seemed to take an awfully long time to do so for a book barely 200 pages long. However, when the story really kicks in, it lets rip with a vengeance and the climax and conclusion seem to just fly by which made it a joy to read.

But the thing that really bugged me was that there were no mentions of anything that had happened prior to this story! I don’t know about you, but I don’t like stories that suddenly veer away from characters that you’ve been following for ages and then go somewhere else for a while: for a long time I wasn’t a huge fan of the first book of The Two Towers because, while there were mentions of Frodo and Sam, we only followed the rest of the fellowship. Fortunately, that feeling really only lasted for a little while (usually until Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli met up with Eomer), but I still find it somewhat unsettling when we get a sudden and lengthy viewpoint shift in a book when we have been following a character for a long time and suddenly they disappear. It was like that with this book: I’d had two books reading about Twoflower and Rincewind and this story just carried on like they didn’t even exist! Fortunately, it was good enough that this didn’t matter. Also fortunate was the fact that I did love seeing a series growing in front of me, especially when I’d gotten in on the first book. So my objections stemmed from the fact that the author was trying something new in an established setting. Once I realised this, I started to enjoy it as a novel in its own right a lot more.

However, something that I did like right from the start was that it fleshed out the Discworld a little more. During Granny and Esk’s separate travels to Ankh-morpork, we discover more about the domestic side of the Disc. And it is a total delight. Our heroines have different journeys because they have to interact with the world in different ways and their achievements, though less flashy than Rincewind and Twoflower’s, are still momentous and brilliant.

The conclusion of the book leads the reader to believe that Wizardry on the Disc has been changed forever. Alas, as we’ll see in just a couple more books, this is not the case: the wizards remain as sexist and hidebound as they ever were. And it continues that way for the remainder of the series, except for a couple of scenes a few volumes from the end when Esk makes her all-too-brief return, so the point of this book may be considered to be lost, or at least misplaced. Although in a speech given in 1985, entitled “Why Gandalf Never Married”, Sir Terry gave a lot of reasons why wizards and witches had different styles of magic and philosophy. A lot of it came down to the fact that nearly every female practitioner of magic that he could think of was evil. So this book was his attempt to redress that balance. As an attempt it was terrific and pointed and offered a bit of hope of some kind of change; something that, unfortunately, was not discussed again in the series until, as I said, a couple of books near the end. Of course, you can argue that there was no need to change the wizards because we got the Witches books, which were the continuing adventures of Granny Weatherwax and, later, Tiffany Aching. But it would have been nice to have seen the wizards unbend a little, despite all the hints we get throughout the series that they might not be as bad as we might think they are.

But it was a game-changing book for Sir Terry. It was serialised on BBC Radio’s Women’s Hour (like The Colour Of Magic a couple of years previously), and his name led a lot of new readers to believe that he might have been female, simply because he wrote female characters vividly and realistically.

For me personally, the slight change in perspective was interesting. I’d been thrilled when this book had come out and while I was initially disappointed, it was a good story and for a long time I considered it the “quiet” novel in the series: a great read, like the others, but told in a different, less openly hilarious way. I loved how we saw Unseen University again, and how the Librarian had remained in the orangutan form he had been zapped into in The Light Fantastic. In reality, though, Sir Terry was flexing his literary muscles with this book, exploring further in the next story what he would later call “the joys of plot…”

Coming Up Next: Death wants to take a holiday, but he needs a locum, a stand-in. Watch me spend an entire post not referring to Mort as “Little Death.”