The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 7: Pyramids

In a lot of ways, Pyramids, the seventh Discworld novel, is a bold effort. It was the first book since Mort to introduce completely new characters without references to books gone by. We also get a closer look at the Assassin’s School, referenced in Wyrd Sisters, but given a life (ironically) of its own here. We also, in the first section, get glimpses of Ankh-Morpork that we haven’t experienced before.

Our hero for this story is Teppic, prince of Djelibeybi. He’s been sent to the Assassin’s School to learn a trade, one that’s fit for a member of the royal family, obviously. However, he doesn’t anticipate his father dying and himself becoming king quite as soon as he does…

Despite what you might read or hear, there’s very little that’s actually wrong with this book. Teppic and his adventures are exciting and a lot of fun and there’s hints of the seriousness of theme that would become commonplace in the later books that you get an inkling of through the conversations and interactions between Teppic and Dios, the high priest who spends a large part of the book resisting Teppic’s efforts to modernise Djelibeybi. There’s also a wonderful array of guest characters, some of whom will make an appearance in later books.

It’s just that the first half takes an awfully long time to set up the headlong rush of plot and pratfalls that is the second half. It’s not perfect: some of the aspects of the novel that deal with Teppic learning anew about his home culture come across as being slightly tone deaf in today’s climate, and the structure of the novel into four sections – delightful though the section headings are – does feel like it hinders the flow of the plot.

For the sake of saving you some bafflement later on, the sections are entitled:

Book 1    The Book Of Going Forth

Book 2    The Book Of The Dead

Book 3    The Book Of The New Son

Book 4    The Book Of 101 Things A Boy Can Do

I have to also add that if it seems that I am making a fuss of these sections, it’s because there hadn’t been chapters or divisions in a Discworld novel since The Colour Of Magic and it wouldn’t happen again until The Wee Free Men about fifteen years later.

The first quarter of the book is lovely: it’s the story of Teppic’s final exam interspersed with flashbacks that reference Tom Brown’s Schooldays wonderfully, which gives you a feel for what the graduates of the Assassin’s School are going to be like, both here and in future books. The second quarter talks about Teppic going home and going up against authority (in the form of the high priest Dios) and realising that being king is going to be hard. After the magical mishap that climaxes the second part, we get Teppic and Ptraci (Teppic’s sister) wandering the neighbouring kingdoms trying to find a way to get back to their kingdom and fixing the issue. That’s when Teppic stops being introspective and just gets on with having a fantastic adventure, and then the book completely lets rip. But it’s an uneven ride until you get to that part.

However, there are some wonderful scenes in it: the whole sequence of Teppic and Ptraci meeting up with a band of philosophers, the greatest minds on the Disc, and being a little underwhelmed by them is fabulous and, frankly, it is one of the great tragedies of literature that we never got the further adventures of You Bastard, the Disc’s greatest mathematician. There are also some lovely glimpses of Pratchett’s gentler side as well, as these broadly hilarious scenes are countered with quieter moments of domesticity and human relationships, particularly surrounding the artisans that populate the banks of the Djel and work in minor roles at Teppic’s palace (Dil and Gern, the royal embalmer and his apprentice, are particularly of note here). However, having the ghost of a dead king haunting his own palace and offering a commentary on events for the second book in a row does spoil the novelty of this story a little.

Pyramids was published amidst an upswing of interest in science. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time had recently been published as had James Gleick’s Chaos, while Stephen Jay Gould was continuing on with his stream of explanatory bestsellers. Halley’s Comet had recently visited the space around Earth and we’d had the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune around the time that this was published. This interest was starting to wash over into popular entertainment as well. The ideas in Pyramids about the fractal nature of Djelibeybi, as well as the concepts of accelerated and circular time were straight out of a lot of these books, although they had been seeded throughout most of Pratchett’s writing, and had been mentioned or used as plot points by loads of other writers in many other novels and short stories.

But Pratchett also shows that he’s thinking about the cosmology of the Disc and how it resonates with that of Earth, giving a nice variation on the Dungeon Dimensions that were explored in earlier books. But where those books explored the Lovecraftian beings that delighted in trying to get through to our world to torment the inhabitants, Pyramids engages with the idea that life in a universe where our ideas about the anthropomorphised cycles of nature become reality would be utterly horrifying. You can see it in the scene where the collected high priests of the various gods get together and are uniformly terrified at the thought of actually meeting their deities, a scene that Pratchett, as an atheist, may have enjoyed writing more than a little bit.

When I first read it in 1990, just a few months after Wyrd Sisters, I was a little disappointed in it. Part of this was because of the aforementioned pacing issues, which were brought about – to my way of thinking – by having the four sections of this book being roughly the same length (in my copy, the sections are approximately the same length to a variance of about 22 pages). This led to some sections being dragged out longer than they need to be, while others feel as though they have been truncated, with some material cut out from it. I loved the subtitles of these sections because they set themselves up beautifully in the form of a joke referencing other books (the first two are referring to the same text, an ancient Egyptian funerary text known by both titles; the third is a riff off a series of books by Gene Wolfe; while the fourth is a title of a style of book that would not probably have been unknown to readers growing up during the twentieth century).

But for all its faults Pyramids is an interesting mix of authorial narrative choices, and while the characterisation of some of the supporting cast can be a little bit bland and the politics can feel quite dated, it is ultimately a lot of fun, which is what we are really after when we read a Discworld novel, which is something I picked up on subsequent readings. As I said, it’s not a bad book; just not as excellent as the books around it.

Coming up next: things get weird for the Captain of the Watch when he discovers that he actually is a fair cop in Guards! Guards!