The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 25: The Truth

Terry Pratchett hadn’t written a novel that didn’t feature a Wizard, Witch, Watchman or Death since Soul Music, so when The Truth was published, featuring the exploits of William de Worde as he sets up the city of Ankh-Morpork’s first proper newspaper, it was a breath of fresh air.

William didn’t come out of nowhere, though: he first featured in The Discworld Companion (compiled by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, published in 1994 and republished a few years ago as Turtle Recall), an encyclopaedia/source book of the Discworld novels up to Soul Music and including a couple of the short stories.

William’s entry takes up nearly a page in my edition and goes into some detail about what he does – sends a newsletter out to his subscribers – and how he makes a successful career out of widening his readership. For those of us who read this piece and wondered what it was about and wondered if there was something that we had missed in one of the earlier books (we hadn’t), it was a bit baffling.

But it all became clear in 2000 when The Truth was finally published. As the 25^th novel in the sequence it was a cause for some celebration and what we got was a belter of a thriller that drew on some of the more recent technological marvels that had been developed on the Disc, as well as Sir Terry’s own personal history as a journalist, and some made-up history of Ankh-Morpork (which consists of snippets of our own history that Sir Terry thought apposite to this story).

Essentially, William sets up a newspaper, mostly to see what would happen if he does, and becomes involved in unearthing and foiling a plot to depose and discredit Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.

Being told from William’s perspective, we get a fairly fresh look at the location and some characters that we already know. And it’s hilarious. Aside from the wonderful jabs at journalism, we get a barbed study about how people’s behaviour changes when they realise they are being observed. Part of me is glad that we never got a novel about social media from Sir Terry – and another part of me desperately wants it.

But we also get some fabulous new characters, as well: the gangsters Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, are a fantastic pair of grotesques who have come to Ankh-Morpork to see if there are any opportunities for them to use their particular brand of brutal mayhem in the service of their careers in crime. Being employed by the conspirators whom they regard as fairly typical toffs, they are startled and concerned that the city appears to be full of honest cops, talking animals, unconventional undead and – more worryingly – people that they can’t intimidate.

Pin sees himself as a sophisticated entrepreneur of crime and wants this caper to be an opportunity to make something of himself; Tulip, his partner in these endeavours, is mainly concerned with mainlining any substance that he believes will give him a buzz of some sort, and is also a highly-knowledgeable connoisseur of the higher arts. While they are very much their own people, any resemblance to Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction is purely -ing coincidental.

The honest cops we meet are largely the members of the Watch that we have met from previous novels. However, I found that their appearance in this novel was slightly disconcerting. We mostly deal with Commander Vimes, although William suspects that Corporal Nobby may be something other than he appears, an observation that delights Sergeant Angua, to his bafflement. Vimes, though, despite presenting as his usual self, comes over as quite intimidating here:

“You know what this is?” he said.

“It’s a truncheon,” said William. “A big stick.”

“Always the last resort, eh?” said Vimes evenly. “Rosewood and Llamedos silver, a lovely piece of work. And it says on this little plate here that I’m supposed to keep the peace, and you, Mr de Worde, don’t look like part of that right now.”

Having met Vimes in several previous novels, we know that this is how he works. But we are deprived of his inner monologue for this novel, so we don’t know that he always behaves beyond reproach, and he comes across as just another fascist cop who’s not interested in solving a crime, or at least in solving it properly. Since we’d had Vimes as our hero for several books now, this was deeply concerning to me, because William wasn’t viewing him as a forceful but lawful copper, but as someone who appeared to be genuinely threatening him. Which, in the years since this was published, has frightening implications in our own world as well.

Bluntly, Vimes is an important character to me, so seeing him as a potential bad guy was not fun.

Not unexpectedly, William is a little on edge, and that isn’t helped by the presence of Deep Bone, the informant who is able to give him some details on the plot. Deep Bone is, of course, Gaspode the Wonder Dog, another hero of past tales, but largely unknown to William.

So this has all the hallmarks of being a bit of what I like to refer to as a “greatest hits” novel, or a “crossover event,” as they call them in the comics and television worlds.

But here, as I said, the characters are being portrayed through the eyes of William, who barely knows them, which makes them appear fresh. And for a series that is twenty-five books long, keeping fresh is fairly important. Pratchett, too, seemed to be aware of that aspect of his writing and made numerous efforts at keeping the series interesting and relevant. The most obvious of these is that The Truth is the first of the novels to consciously bring itself (or Ankh-Morpork, at least) into a more modern age. The Ankh-Morpork of The Colour Of Magic (the first novel) was a very typical fantasy setting, redolent of any generic heroic fantasy story. By the time we get to Wyrd Sisters and Guards! Guards! (volumes six and eight, respectively), it has a more Renaissance feel to it. You can argue that there may have been some form of urban renewal since the first book (as a lot of it had burnt down in that one) and that some technological progress was being made. However, the events of Moving Pictures and Soul Music would indicate that progress is being made slightly out of sync to what we might be used to…

By the time The Truth swings around, the city feels a bit like London during the Seventeenth Century, with the rise of the merchant classes and the advent of some technology and commercially available magical items. But it’s still the same setting that we first met Rincewind and Twoflower in all those books ago, just different, as any city would be after a passage of years.

Pratchett also tries to keep the series interesting by inventing new characters. William makes no further appearances as a main character, but he does appear in later books, as do his staff, notably Sacharissa Cripslock, his chief journalist, and Otto Chriek, his vampire iconographer (the iconograph, as introduced back in The Colour Of Magic, is a camera that takes pictures through magical means, which may go part of the way to explain why the technological history of the Disc is a dog’s breakfast). So it’s great to know that they haven’t just disappeared out the pages of Discworld history like Teppic and Imp.

And they don’t wear out their welcome with these appearances, either: they help to remind you that even in books set in unfamiliar settings that you are still on the Disc, and their presence as members of the newly-created press mean that established characters suddenly have to be a lot more careful about what they say around them. This makes them more aware of their motivations and morals, which is often far more realistic than an interior monologue.

That renewed freshness was made apparent to me in 2019, 18 years after I first read it, when I had the opportunity to appear in an amateur theatrical production of The Truth. I joined the cast about a month into rehearsal, playing the small but pivotal role of William’s father, Lord de Worde. Another actor who featured recently on this blog might consider Lord de Worde as the most important character in the play, as it is he that sets the plot to oust Vetinari into motion. I, an actor of far more modest ambitions, was just glad to be taking part.

I have since acted in two more Pratchett plays and am currently in rehearsal for a fourth. These productions were all adapted for the stage by Stephen Briggs (the compiler of the aforementioned Discworld Companion) and retell the novels in varying degrees of effectiveness.

I’m not the biggest fan of his adaptations but I love how he condenses the stories and action into something manageable for what are predominantly amateur endeavours. It also forces you to think more about what the characters are doing and how they might behave when translating them onto the stage, making rereads even more interesting.

In any case, The Truth is a bit of a turning point for the series because it’s here that Pratchett commits to trying new ways of keeping the series alive and breathing rather than just more adventures of the same old characters. It also leads into a period of tremendous creativity in his writing and some of the most outstanding growth that he experienced as a writer since quitting his job and taking up being a full-time author. We’ve got some of the best novels in the series coming up in the next dozen or so entries and I can’t wait to take a closer look at them.

Coming Up Next: Death tries to get his old band back together before the universe unravels in Thief Of Time.