The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 4: Mort

We met Death in the three previous Discworld novels. In The Colour Of Magic, he (for want of a better pronoun) had seemed a somewhat quixotic individual, prone to fits of random destruction, while in The Light Fantastic, he was more introspective and humanlike, going so far as to have a house and an adopted daughter. In Equal Rites, he interacts more with his, er, clients while becoming a figure that is slightly interested in and baffled by humanity.

In Mort, the fourth Discworld novel, he takes on an apprentice…

In a lot of ways, this is a progression from the previous books: Rincewind makes a brief appearance, there’s a reference to Granny Weatherwax, but it is mostly its own thing. The biggest callback to the previous books is in the character of Ysabell, who appeared as a minor character in The Light Fantastic and becomes a little more fleshed-out as a personality here. But it’s very different to the previous books, as well: there’s a confidence to the writing and the story that wasn’t in any of Pratchett’s previous novels and it fairly races along as it unfolds its story. The characters also feel a little deeper and hold more than one dimension: Mort himself, while possessing all the requisite qualities of an 80s Fantasy hero – naivety, uncertainty, a lot of “book knowledge” but not much common sense – is also quite level-headed and responsible, taking everything he does very seriously.

Mort marks a change to the Discworld, too. The first few books had a fairly bog-standard Fantasy setting (albeit one on the back of a turtle) but it used them to send up cliches in the genre. Here, the setting becomes less of a part of the story and more of a backdrop for the characters to act out their story against. We got hints of that in Equal Rites but that story still relied heavily on the Discworld and its place in the universe. In Mort we see further into that: Mort works on a farm before he gets employed by Death, so his perspective on the world is slightly different to that of Twoflower and Rincewind, the more white-collar heroes of the first two books. He enjoys the novelty of going to a big city (Ankh-morpork, featuring in its fourth straight appearance as a setting), as well as meeting people of different social classes. The story takes time to unfold – Pratchett often refers to this book as being where he discovered the “the joy of plot” – and the Discworld becomes a solid, more realistic place for a story to happen in. We don’t get as much feverish, outlandish geography here – the description of the sunlight (slower than the sunlight here on Roundworld) oozing over mountains in the morning is delightful, as is the description of the Disc from Death’s perspective riding high above it on his pale horse (named Binky), but we don’t get things like The Colour Of Magic’s Wyrmberg or The Light Fantastic’s troll mountains, or even creatures like the Zoons from Equal Rites. The Disc is becoming a little more like a conventional fantasy setting in Mort, so that stories can take place where they need to, in places that have that frisson of exoticism but the familiarity of the everyday.

Like Equal Rites, Mort explored themes that were fairly common in fantasy literature: free will; facing the consequences of your actions; stepping up to do things that you don’t necessarily believe that you are capable of; and that old favourite, modernity versus traditionalism. But it dealt with them in ways that most fantasy didn’t normally do: as an example, Mort discovers that being Death’s apprentice isn’t all about travelling to exotic places and meeting interesting people very briefly; he also learns when you have any kind of job with responsibilities you may have to deal with things that might make you uncomfortable morally. When he saves Princess Keli from an assassination attempt (because princesses should be saved, right?) he learns that sometimes doing what is right can go very wrong.

Mort also marked a change in Sir Terry’s writing habits. His first few books had been reasonably profitable hobbies for him (he once said in a talk that I attended that the advances he got from his publisher allowed him to build slightly larger greenhouses for his garden: he calculated that if it kept on, he might conceivably be able to afford to build a greenhouse over Western Europe) but the success of the Discworld novels meant that he was considering quitting his day job (public relations officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board) to become a full-time author. Mort allowed him to do this. The first three Discworld books had not been huge sellers but they sold extremely well for fantasy and – most importantly – they were still in print, proving that his writing had legs. Mort, however, was a bona fide bestseller, that sold large amounts of copies outside of specialty shops. It was also the first of Pratchett’s books to be optioned for the big screen, with the famous story of a studio executive loving it but wanting to get rid of “the whole Death angle” because audiences wouldn’t enjoy Death as a comedic character (this was, as Sir Terry frequently pointed out, about a year-and-a-half before Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey made Death a comedy hit). Sir Terry was not a household name yet, but it wasn’t going to be very far off…

For me, though, this was where I started to meet other people who had read these books. Part of that was that I was in my first year of university when it came out in paperback and I was meeting a lot of new people who had the same interests as me. The joy of finding other people who loved this series as much as I did made it even more special.

I don’t want you thinking that I was a social pariah because I was a nerd: a lot of the bullying and harassment that characterises the life of people who are apparently interested in geeky or nerdy stuff miraculously passed me by, but my interests were still looked down on by people who considered themselves my intellectual superiors (and who I had almost never seen reading for pleasure themselves). I’d shared some funny parts of earlier Discworld books with my friends but they had been mostly bemused or bewildered. The success of Mort, combined with a new and wider circle of friends at university, meant that I had another common bond with a larger group of people. It also meant that I was starting to loan out my copies to other people, which was something I hated to do normally. This was because my books frequently didn’t come back to me: people who would consider it a huge faux pas to steal a bottle of wine from one of your parties, or to not return an item of clothing they had borrowed, frequently have no problem in not returning a book. However, I was becoming a little more self-aware by this point in my life (I was 19 when Mort came out in paperback), so I tried to be a little more generous. I would celebrate when my books were returned to me, even if they were in a condition that other people rather scarily referred to as “read” (One plus to that, though, was that when I was able to secure the lovely Folio Society edition of Mort seen in the photos above this paragraph, I was able to consign my very worn-out paperback to the bin without remorse). I kept reminding myself that this all meant that I could talk about these stories with other folks in the way that we would talk about other things we enjoyed: I was contributing something to our friendship. This may seem obvious but to me, a person who spent his life relying on other folks to get me through a lot of social situations, I started to find interacting with others a lot easier. I’m not terribly introverted but I am awful at small talk and other forms of social lubrication. Realising that other people liked some of the things that I did, and that it was a way to find out about other things that they might like to talk about was a revelation.

Mort was, it seemed, a breakout book for me as well…

Coming up next: Rincewind returns, and he gets involved in a tense dispute involving headgear…