The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 28: The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents

Way back in Reaper Man, mention was made of a fraudulent ridder of pests by the name of “The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents.” At the time, it was regarded as a humourous aside that riffed on the cynical nature of humanity via the legends of the Pied Piper, but it was a germ of an idea that clearly percolated within Terry Pratchett’s mind for some time before bursting out and flowering (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor) as a full novel in its own right.

The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents (hereafter referred to as Maurice) was first published in 2001, a full decade after Reaper Man. It was worth the wait, although I wasn’t too sure to begin with. More on that later, though…

Maurice is a ginger cat, scarred by life and its attendant worries, and roaming seemingly aimlessly through the countryside of the Discworld, accompanied by a young man who has a particular talent with a flute. However, Maurice and the boy – known as Keith – find themselves in the town of Bad Blintz, somewhere near the ominous-sounding land of Uberwald. Maurice plans to enact his usual scheme of unleashing a plague of rats upon the city and having Keith charm them with his flute-playing and leading them out of town, much to the anticipated joy of the town’s leaders.

However, the rats are beginning to rebel…

These are, of course, magical rats. Maurice and the rats spent a little too much time around the middens of Unseen University, the premier academy of magic on the Disc. They became more intelligent and acquired the ability to speak. As the only representatives of talking animals that they knew, they teamed up and began a series of scams that were designed to keep them comfortable. Unfortunately, the rats – led by the aging Hamnpork and the mystical Dangerous Beans (the rats learned to read off food labels and named themselves accordingly) – have started to feel as though they are being dishonest by continuing the charade and want out. Maurice has reluctantly agreed that Bad Blintz will be the last town the fleece. Alas, the inhabitants of the town have other ideas…

Pratchett was no stranger to the idea of children’s literature at this point: his first novel, The Carpet People, had been rereleased as a children’s book a decade earlier than this. This was fresh off the success of his wonderful Bromeliad series about a race of small creatures that live inside a department store who have to cope with life after it is demolished. He followed them both up with the fantastic Johnny Maxwell series about a boy who lives in an unremarkable city facing some quite astonishing challenges.

But for the better part of two decades he had been best-known as the author of the Discworld novels, not for kids but beloved by thousands of them among the hugely wide readership. Writing a kid’s book set on the Disc seemed a little redundant, however the themes of a story about the Pied Piper seem tailor made for a children’s book.

So Maurice was the first children’s novel set on the Discworld. In terms of what makes it a book for kids, it’s a little hard at first glance to differentiate it from a regular Discworld novel.

The most obvious thing is the chapters. The Colour Of Magic and Pyramids were the only books in the series thus far to have chapters, and even in those books they were more dividing points for action in the story rather than proper chapters. There’s also the tone of the book. Most of Pratchett’s novels for adults are fairly intelligent and require the reader to make some pretty impressive leaps in order to get some of the jokes. Likewise, the plots are frequently simple but convoluted in shape. There’s also usually a subtext that deals with some adult themes that are lacking in Maurice.

There’s also a distinct reduction in the number of footnotes in this novel.

What we do get is a story that explains itself a little more than other books do, and which has the same sort of jokes but with the edge slightly blunted: Pratchett is writing for an audience that isn’t less intelligent but which may lack some of the life experience that allows them to really get the most out of a scene or a joke.

But there really isn’t that much of a difference. There’s a scene where Darktan (one of the Educated Rodents of the title) has been dropped into a pit to fight a terrier named Jacko. Darktan gets his measure pretty quickly in a scene that is told almost entirely from Jacko’s point of view:

Jacko’s eyes crossed. A piece of Jacko that was very private and of interest only to Jacko and any lady dogs he might happen to meet was suddenly a little ball of pain.

It’s a scene that could have come from any of the earlier books, especially the description of Jacko as “… not a bad dog, according to the way of dogs” which is a variation of a line used in Witches Abroad to describe a lady of the Court of Genua who happens to be handy when Nanny and Granny need a disguise.

However, there’s a later scene where Keith and Malicia (the daughter of Bad Blintz’s mayor) fall afoul of some ratcatchers and escape only by tricking them into taking some supposed rat poison and withholding the antidote. The revelation that the “poison” and “antidote” are both laxatives is not a joke that Pratchett would have used in the other Discworld novels, but is one that definitely appeals to children who might be reading.

So there’s a slight change of authorial voice to show us that this is a book for kids. But honestly, this could have been an adult novel because the idea of sentient rats trying to find a paradise on earth that is described to them from the pages of a picture book is a surprisingly dark theme for a children’s book. That the book, Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure (a tale that is “quoted” epigrammatically at the beginning of every chapter) is now available as a real artefact is a whole ‘nother story. Likewise, the fact that the supporting cast don’t all survive the story is also a hint that the reader may need to be quite stern of mind to complete it.

There’s also Malicia, the mayor’s daughter I mentioned earlier. She, too, is a fan of books, but the sort of books that feature plucky young heroines having adventures in magical settings that bear little resemblance to the real world, but which also seem a little too dark and grim for children to read… rather like many of the fairy tales in our own world.

But I haven’t even mentioned the dark presence that talks inside the rats’ heads; a presence that threatens to drive the rats insane before they manage to uncover the plot that is ruining their last chance at their own happy ending…

Maurice won the Carnegie Medal, a prestigious award selected by the U.K.’s librarians. It was the first major award that Pratchett won, belying the “accusations of literature” that he brushed off in his author bios.

At the time of publication, I thought it read like an award-winning novel, to be perfectly honest.

It had properly thought-out themes that would challenge children and still keep them reading; it featured characters who changed significantly over the course of the book as a result of the things that happened to them; and it also read like a fantasy novel written for people who don’t really like fantasy.

This is an old complaint of mine: the only real magic we got was the method by which Maurice and the rats became sentient: all the other magic in the book was caused by vaguely-undefined psychic powers, and a hint of suggestion taken from a nasty idea that had real historical roots. The fact that the world in which the story takes place is a disc that sits on the back of four giant elephants who in turn stand on the back of a giant space-faring turtle isn’t even mentioned, which makes the book feel like a story from an alternative past rather than an established secondary world.

Frankly this could describe a lot of the later Discworld novels, but I really enjoy them so I’m excluding them from my rant about “literature that wins awards”, because – here comes another section of a longer rant that I’m sparing you – most fantasy and science fiction deals with these themes. It’s just that it’s frequently only acceptable to the literati when it’s presented as a kids book, or “kiddilit” as Mary Gentle once referred to it.

So, I wasn’t disposed to enjoy it the first time round. I’d spotted those telltale signs of what I thought of as award-bait literature and groaned, but I pressed on.

I’m really glad I did. Because the story starts from something that is an imaginative and funny retelling of a well-known fairy tale and becomes a dark critique of how stories can inspire and destroy us at the same time. But it was a close-run thing: I think that, Carnegie Medal notwithstanding, if I wasn’t a fan of Pratchett already, I might not have persevered with it and not come to realise just how subversive it really is.

Pratchett never dipped back into Maurice’s story again, alas, finding another avenue to tell stories for younger readers on the Discworld that was even more successful just a couple of years later. So Maurice, Keith, Malicia and the rats remain lonely only children within a larger series, just like Teppic, Victor and Ginger and Imp y Celyn were. Not unloved or neglected, but examples of a wider world that existed outside of the mainstays of the series.

Besides, in recent years there was a movie made of Maurice’s story. I haven’t seen it (yet), but the initial reports from people who had suggested that it was a fairly decent retelling as adaptations of Pratchett’s work go. Successful enough, at least to have caused a sequel to have been greenlit and to be in production as we type and read here. So while Pratchett himself may not have continued the story, it’s good to know that Maurice and his friends are still out there somewhere.

Coming Up Next: Vimes takes a good hard look at his past decisions in Night Watch.