The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 5: Sourcery

It’s tempting to call Sourcery a return to the “roots” of Discworld after a couple of books away from them but, really, using the rest of the series for some perspective, they hadn’t actually gone too far from them. We get Rincewind and his lethal luggage back, as well as the return of the faculty of Unseen University (and the Librarian!) but it’s a different world in a lot of ways. For one thing, the success of Mort meant that Pratchett had some fairly high standards to maintain, and the wider awareness of the series now meant that he had to take some care with the way things were set out, ie, Discworld had to make sense, despite his many assertions over the years that it didn’t matter. So with this book we get lots of locations thrown in, and many of them of them would show up again in later books, so they had to be in roughly the same location on the Disc and with more fleshed-out relationships with other locations, but mostly with the Disc’s premier city, Ankh-Morpork, now featuring for a fifth book in a row.

Anyway, the story runs thusly: A young wizard (this time around he’s the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son, which on the Disc makes him a source of magic, therefore a Sourcerer) has come to Unseen University to stake a claim for leadership of the wizards. But the high order of wizardry has other ideas…

I have to say that I really enjoyed this when it came out: it had a higher ratio of jokes to page than the previous couple of books and it told a story that seemed to hark back to The Light Fantastic and the sense of impending doom that filled that book. However, the villainy is less otherworldly and has its roots in the more relatable and believable cause of child abuse. It feels like a conventional fantasy novel of the time but the relationship between the Sourcerer Coin and his dead father who is driving him to do everything that causes the plot to unfold is horribly familiar to anyone who had spent some time in the more grimy areas of modern literature (or real life, for that matter).

I felt that this was a much better-written book than some of the earlier entries in the series and it was around here that I got an idea that I could be watching an author becoming a lot more skilled at the craft. While not as polished or accomplished as Mort, this was a book that combined that same sense of character and setting with the madcap nature of the earlier books. It felt like a step sideways for Pratchett, a sort of experiment with the two types of story he’d done so far – combining the fast-paced parody of the early books with the conventional novels of the more recent entries in the series. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d become a full-time writer around the time of Mort, so he was able to spend more time on the creation of his books over a shorter period of time. What I mean is that he was able to produce a book in a shorter time while devoting more time to the actual craft of producing it because he wasn’t distracted by that annoying “work” that most of us have to put up with in order to indulge our real interests.  

At any rate, I felt that Sourcery not only contained an acceptable number of jokes but had a perfectly serviceable plot. I was pleased to see the return of Rincewind and the Luggage, as well as the development we got in the character of The Librarian and the expansion of what we knew about the Discworld, but I had a couple of friends who really wanted more novels like Mort and Equal Rites: comedies that told a story and featured some ongoing character development.

Back then I thought they were mad, frankly: the inclusion of characters like the Djinn, an upwardly-mobile genie, or Creosote, who lived in a palace that even I recognised as coming from the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, spoke to me of an author who loved to play with story conventions and cliches. The inclusion of Conina, the daughter of The Light Fantastic’s Cohen the Barbarian, and her awkward romance with Nijel the Destroyer, who promised his mother that he would wear woolly underwear under his loincloth, is unfortunately quite dated now, but still has some funny moments. We also meet the Patrician again. He is important in this book, despite being turned into a newt for a large part of it (he does get better, though) because it’s here that we see him as the character we will enjoy the machinations of for the rest of the series. He had appeared briefly in The Colour Of Magic and Mort, but you could be excused for thinking that he was a different person. Sir Terry, however, assures us that he is the same man, and it’s in Sourcery that we finally get him as someone we recognise (we’ll have more to say about this when we get to Night Watch).

But it was the inclusion of Rincewind that really had me thrilled. Although he’s not one of my favourite protagonists in the series, he did offer a certain amount of familiarity and comfort to a long-term reader such as myself. Despite the bittersweetness of him not having achieved anything like the success he was thinking of at the end of The Light Fantastic – he’s still useless at magic and held in contempt by the faculty of Unseen University – it was terrific to see him back in the role of main character. But his incompetence means that he is perfect for the role of something approaching a hero because his instinct for self-preservation has him singled out by the Archchancellor’s Hat, the repository of all wizardly knowledge, to transport it far away to find a suitable wearer who can use it to go up against Coin and his father’s ghost. There’s also the end of the world, another appearance by Death (settling into the personality that we would be familiar with for the remainder of the series) and a whole host of gags that send up any corners of fantasy that the previous books hadn’t already overturned.

What I found interesting, though, was that while there were a host of supernatural and magical elements to the book, it was driven by the needs and actions of the characters. Coin suffers at the incorporeal hands of his father who wants revenge on Unseen University; Rincewind feels ashamed at his lack of ability in the only field where he’s ever felt comfortable; while Carding and Spelter, the latest wizards trying to advance their careers at the casual expense of other people’s lives, discover that some prices might be too high for their ambitions. As another sidenote, the wizards are so decimated by what happens in this book that when we do meet them again, very few of them have any kind of ambition at all.

However, the plot feels far too reminiscent of The Light Fantastic, and while the climax has one marked difference (a bittersweet one that won’t be resolved until Eric), the conclusion has a lot of resonances with that book, and hat seemed to make it a slightly lesser book in some ways.

But the whole book, while possibly not as accomplished as Mort, spoke to a fair amount of development of Pratchett as a writer, and I really couldn’t wait to see what we got next.

Coming up next: If you bring a friend, we three can meet again and discuss Wyrd Sisters…