The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 10: Moving Pictures

We haven’t visited the wizards of Unseen University properly since the events of Sourcery, so Moving Pictures was a very welcome entry in the series for me, especially after the return of Rincwind in Eric, the previous book.

Imagine my surprise then, when after a really big build-up at the beginning of the novel, the wizards play a fairly minor part in the rest of the story.

The story, because without an understanding of that much of what follows here will make little sense, mostly follows the adventures of Victor Tugelbend, perennial student, is seduced away from his studies (for want of a better word) at UU by the allure of the “flicks,” a form of entertainment new to Discworld, but quite familiar to us. Victor – among many others – follows his dreams to the secluded location of holy Wood where the alchemists behind the success of the flicks are setting up shop. Unbeknownst to them, though, they have been drawn to Holy Wood because an entity from before the dawn of time finds everything they are doing to be hauntingly familiar…

Across the 41 books of Discworld, there are several standalone novels that are referred to as the “industrial revolution” series. These novels, to summarise them roughly, take an aspect of our “roundworld” existence, place them on Discworld and poke them with a stick until something happens. While many of these stories aren’t as highly regarded as other subseries in the set, they still offer a lot of fun to the reader.

As you probably guessed, Moving Pictures is satirising a lot of movie cliches and tropes. The book should be admired simply for the amount of jokes Pratchett is able to employ in the service of a fairly pedestrian story, but it’s also noted for the debut of a lot of characters who play major parts in the series later.

Let’s take a look at them first.

Victor is a fairly generic character: he could have been replaced with Teppic from Pyramids and we probably wouldn’t have been surprised at all. However, he does bring a fairly competent perspective to the novel as he has been enrolled at UU for many years (courtesy of a bequest that provides for him for as long as he remains a student at the University – a bequest that Pratchett cheerfully stole from Grimsdyke, a character in Richard Gordon’s Doctor series of novels). His knowledge of magic, as well as other aspects of life) make him a fairly believable character. He becomes a major flicks star through being in the right place at the right time as well as being a shrewd exploiter of situations.

Theda, or Ginger, is the first “it girl” in the flicks and becomes part of a double act with Victor, appearing in loads of flicks with him. She becomes the unwitting pawn of the entity that slumbers below Holy Wood and is instrumental in both releasing it and reimprisoning it.

Gaspode is a stray dog who, through exposure to the magical waste at UU, has developed the ability to talk. He is attracted to the studios at Holy Wood because it offers a change from the dangers of Ankh-Morpork. However, he soon teams up with Laddie a goodlooking, but quite dim, dog who has become a major star as well, with people thinking that he is the brains of the partnership, much to Gaspode’s disgust.

C. M.O.T. Dibbler has come to Holy Wood because he can see dollars in the offing. He becomes a producer of flicks and inflicts a reign of terror upon his underlings.

Detritus is the first troll to have a named and speaking part in the Discworld novels since Kwartz and his family in The Light Fantastic. He has come to make a fortune as a flickjs star and also to, it is hinted at here and confirmed in later books, make a fresh start after a rather shady past.

With the exception of Victor and Ginger, all these characters will make return in multiple books in the future and become much-loved fixtures of the Disc.

But we also have to mention the Wizards. Somewhat depleted after the events of The Light Fantastic and Sourcery, a lot of the UU faculty appear to have lost a lot of their ambition, too. What depletes a large amount of what is left is the arrival of Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor. He’s a loud, no-nonsense outdoors type of a wizard who loves exercise and early mornings, which makes him the mortal enemy of the slovenly wizards. However, it becomes clear that he is also fiercely competent at keeping the rest of the wizards in line, mostly by delegating his responsibilities to them so that they don’t have time to plot against him, and by terrorising them enough that he intimidates them into accepting his status quo. The wizards will return in loads of future volumes as well, and we find out more about them in each one.

So this can be considered a fairly important novel because a lot of the future of Discworld is created here. Is it any good, though?

It’s definitely a lot of fun and the story was certainly not out of place in the fantasy genre as it stood in 1990. But the mix of pop-cultural references in a clear fantasy setting didn’t sit easily with a lot of reviewers – I read one by Norman Spinrad, an author I have a great deal of respect for, where he was baffled by the choice to have a character who was an orangutan in the book simply so that the climactic scene could riff off King Kong as well as Attack Of The Fifty-Foot Woman. He’s not technically wrong, but the existence of the Librarian had been established in previous novels and this was just a very happy coincidence rather than a shaggy dog of a joke set up just for this book. It’s probably the first case of one of the books being a little tricky for newcomers, but for those of us who had been travelling to the Discworld for a while it was a hoot.

This was also the beginning of a remarkably fecund period in Pratchett’s career. In addition to this novel, he published four other books in 1990 before settling into a comfortable routine of one or two a year for the rest of his life. This gives the books of this period quite a bit of energy and that is reflected here. The jokes, as I said, come thick and fast and while they aren’t as natural or as polished as the ones  we get in Soul Music a few books down the line (a novel that feels like Moving Pictures was a dress rehearsal for it), they serve the admirable purpose of making us laugh. A lot. Which for most of us is what we read Discworld for: it famously wouldn’t turn into “serious comedy” for another three years with the publication of Small Gods.

But more on that when we get there.

For myself, I find this one of the weaker books. It’s hilarious and the story is solid, if unremarkable. But aside from the commentary on how people forget the second word in “show business” and instead get starry eyed about movies, as well as the arch asides on how absurd human behaviour (usually from Gaspode), this is a pretty disposable entry in the series. Yes, we meet a lot of characters for the first time and have their stories and situations set up, but that could have happened just as easily in the relevant books.

It also features what is possibly the most prurient of the Josh Kirby covers: as you can see in the photo, it features Ginger lolling seductively atop Detritus, with Victor and several other characters in the background. Last time I mentioned that Kirby had been parodying other artists and styles in his previous cover: here I think he just threw out any ideas and went straight to channelling John Norman’s Gor novels. I can’t really defend this one, though: it’s not matching the mood of the novel at all and it is hideously dated in its attitude thirty-something years later.

But this book is important to me for fairly superficial reasons: it was the first one in this series that I bought in hardback. I mentioned way back a while that I usually waited for the paperback; this time, when I went to the bookshop, I saw this on sale for just a few dollars more than what the paperback would be: the cover had been torn at some point and couldn’t be sold at full price. So it was great to have the latest book out so that I could be ahead of the pack for once and I could read reviews without being spoiled, something that had never happened before with this series and wouldn’t happen again for about a decade.

But this also meant that it was going to be more than a year before I read the next new Discworld novel…

Coming up next: Death takes a holiday, but who takes care of his business while he’s away? Find out in Reaper Man.