The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 18: Maskerade

Since several of the previous Discworld books had dealt with populist topics like movies and music and theatre and exposed some of the ridiculousness of them, it seemed only fair that Pratchett would take a good hard look at one of the most elitist art forms and give that a good solid kicking as well.

In Maskerade (1995), Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg find themselves in Ankh-Morpork chasing after royalties from a book Nanny has written as well as looking for Agnes Nitt, a young would-be witch we first met in Lords And Ladies, and who is viewed by Nanny and Granny as a suitable replacement for Magrat who has gone off to be Queen of Lancre and is thus unqualified to be the junior member of a coven.

However Agnes has been bitten by the theatre bug and has wound up in Ankh-Morpork’s Opera House, where her vocal talents are in considerable demand, just not in any way she might have deemed probable…

Maskerade is one of the first Discworld novels to do a crossover of characters and settings. We have the Witches, now firmly established in their own series, travelling to Ankh-Morpork, which is the traditional territory of the Watch and the Wizards. Interestingly, though, there is very little interaction between these sets of characters. This makes for a more interesting read for those people who just want to focus on a particular set of characters but for those of us who were brought up on comic book crossovers, the opportunity for X to meet Y is kind of hard to resist thinking about. Pratchett himself dealt with his situation by just not giving the characters from the different books many chances to meet with one another… until the later books, that is…

So a lot of the action of this book takes place at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork. We do get to roam some of the streets of that wonderful town, but only in the company of Agnes, Granny and Nanny who are there as tourists (well, Nanny is: Granny has, of course, been here before). So we get a lot of vicarious joy in watching them experience places like The Shades, or meeting people like the members of the Thieves Guild and seeing how those interactions go.

But it is the Opera House that is our primary venue here. And it isn’t long before we realise that the plot being enacted here is being ripped off from Gaston Leroux’s classic novel The Phantom Of The Opera, although Pratchett does make concessions for fans of the Lloyd-Webber musical of the same name.

Agnes has been employed as a member of the chorus at the Opera House but what she’s really doing is acting as a voice for Christine, a rather beautiful but also insipid and dim young lady who can’t sing but will draw a crowd. It also helps that her father loaned the current owner of the theatre, Seldom Bucket, a large sum of money. Agnes learns quickly that all is not as it seems in the Opera House: for one thing, it appears to be haunted, with Box Number 8 being left empty every evening for the purpose of the opera house ghost having somewhere to enjoy the show from.

(I just want to diverge from the story for a moment to ponder the timeline of the opera house: back in Wyrd Sisters, we had Hwel and Vitoller (playwright and company manager) wanting to build a theatre unlike anything anyone had ever seen in Ankh-Morpork before. Given that we found this out in the latter part of that book (after the coven had performed their magical spell moving Lancre fifteen years into the future) how has the city now developed to the point where they have a popular and reasonably well-established Opera House, complete with ghost? In-universe, it has only been a couple of years since Wyrd Sisters, after all.)

Anyway, Agnes also meets Walter Plinge and his mother. They work at the Opera House, and Mrs Plinge is very protective of her son as he doesn’t operate in the world the same way that most of the rest of us do (Walter also wears a beret everywhere he goes as well. This is not just an odd piece of headgear: it is a lovely piece of foreshadowing about the plot. Because a beret was the hat of choice of one Frank Spencer, the hapless protagonist of the classic television series Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, which starred Michael Crawford. Crawford later became a major star of theatre, leading productions such as Barnum and… The Phantom Of The Opera. This is a brilliant running gag in the vein of people mistaking Imp for being Elvish in Soul Music.

Agnes also comes into contact with Mr Salzella, the manager of the Opera House, who resents the fact that it is now owned by someone who really doesn’t appreciate the finer points of opera.

What we eventually get is a rollicking, hilarious story that mixes elements of Phantom, Amadeus, Cats (well, Greebo, anyway), any number of classic operas and musicals as well as the whole process of creating opera, one of the most revered and fiendishly complicated theatrical forms out there…

But we also get a lovely spin-off in the form of a subplot involving Nanny’s literary ambitions. You see, prior to the events of this book, Nanny had penned a cookbook entitled The Joye Of Snacks, and Granny uses this as an excuse to take the trip to Ankh-Morpork. She doesn’t believe that Nanny has been getting the royalties she deserves, so Granny decides to kill two birds with one stone and get Nanny her money AND find out what Agnes is up to (Granny working out what Nanny is owed is also a lovely piece of foreshadowing for a key moment later on in the book).

And several years after Maskerade was released we got the delightful Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook (1999), which was compiled by Sir Terry and Stephen Briggs, who was beginning to carve out a career as a creator of literary spin-offs based on the Discworld (he also compiled a guide to Discworld and adapted many of the books for the stage, and read many of the audiobooks as well).

Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is wonderful and contains many recipes that can be recreated in your own kitchen as well as some homely advice for people in search of “fulfillment” in their personal relationships.

For me, the cookbook made a lovely accompaniment to Maskerade, despite there being four years between them. It was very clearly inspired by The Joye Of Snacks and it’s an example of the quality of Discworld spin-off merchandise: well-put together and designed, with the personal approval of Pratchett himself. Pratchett frequently said in interviews that if you bought a Star Wars light saber (for example) and it was a dud, George Lucas would never hear about it because it wasn’t his problem, but Pratchett had fans mailing and emailing him all the time and if something was faulty, he’d definitely know about it. So he did the quality checking of all the Discworld merchandise personally, for the sake of his own peace and quiet.

But back to Maskerade. The climax results in a change of management at the Opera House, though not of ownership, and some other staffing changes as well in the chorus: Agnes decides to return to Lancre and take up the mantle of junior witch in the coven.

It’s a rather prosaic ending about someone finding out that she is best-suited for something she hadn’t wanted to do in the first place until discovering that other, more glamorous, options weren’t allowing her to be as true to herself as she might have wanted. Although, part of me resented the fact that she wasn’t going to be doing what she had chosen for herself simply because she couldn’t be a star. I know a lot of people n the world of theatre who have never been more than a face in the chorus or a minor player and it’s everything they have wanted and it makes them perfectly happy. But I’ve also known people who are superb at their jobs and they hate it because they have aspirations in other areas. So this choice might be perfect for Agnes, while other characters in the book find that they love the theatre enough to throw everything they have at it.

It all really comes down to the individual.

And Granny.

Coming Up Next: There’s a murderer on the loose in Ankh-Morpork and the Watch have to work out who’s got Feet Of Clay.