The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 39: Snuff

At the insistence of… his wife, Lady Sybil? Or is it his boss, Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork…? Well, at someone’s insistence, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes is taking a two-week vacation. To sweeten the deal, Sybil and Young Sam, their son, will be coming with him. They are headed for The Ramkin’s ancestral country seat.

Vimes is not looking forward to it.

Of course, we know – courtesy of a lifetime’s exposure to police procedurals in print and visual media – that trouble will find Vimes, no matter how hard he tries to relax…

Snuff (2011) is the last book to feature Vimes and his crew as main characters. They will appear with minor parts in the next book, but this is, effectively, their last hurrah.

It’s not a bad book to go out on, frankly. The faults are few: the characterisations of some regulars which bothered me in Unseen Academicals continues here but, with one rather notable exception, it seems that Sir Terry Pratchett has been around these characters for so long that he can write them in his sleep. The Patrician may have softened externally but he remains as sharp as a tack underneath.

So anyway, Vimes goes on holiday. Whilst engaging in this (to him) unnatural pursuit, he becomes embroiled in a conspiracy involving the son of Lord Rust (with whom he first locked horns back in Jingo).

But Snuff is not just about humans: we met Nutt, the reformed orc, in Unseen Academicals. Snuff concerns itself with the lot of goblins. Now goblins have long been considered even easier cannon fodder than orcs in the realms of Fantasy, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that Sir Terry would take an interest in their rehabilitation, too. In this book we discover that goblins have a thriving and vibrant culture of their own; albeit one that is, unfortunately, all too easily exploited by greedy humans, despite the efforts of Miss Felicity Beedle (Young Sam’s favourite author, and neighbour to the Ramkins) to save them.

It is a gripping and fantastic tale that is spun in this book and it shows that not even a life-threatening disease was able to quell Sir Terry’s storytelling genius.

And, once again, we are also treated to the hugely civilising influence that Ankh-Morpork has been exerting over the world, making it a safer, wiser place than when we first visited it back in The Colour Of Magic. But again I am wondering – “head canon” is the term we use in fandom – if this is more of Sir Terry’s overarching plan to safeguard the imaginary future of a secondary world. We can’t really know for certain but I hope that it is.

So let’s sidestep briefly to discuss the main thing that bothers me about this book.

Willikins.

Willikins is Lady Sybil’s manservant, who gets co-opted to being Vimes’s manservant upon his marriage to Sybil. When we first met him, all the way back in Men At Arms, he seemed like a fairly typical butler: descended from Wodehouse’s Jeeves by way of The Remains Of The Day’s Stevens, with just a hint of Upstairs, Downstairs’ Hudson. A stolid servitor of the upper classes, despite not originating from there himself.

Well, Willikins has taken a bit of a character upgrade here and appears to be more like Michael Caine… Get Carter’s Michael Caine, rather than Alfred in the Christopher Nolan Batman films… although with Alfred, you never can really tell…

At any rate, there have been hints dropped at Willikins’s character throughout the successive books: in Jingo, we learned that he was a dab hand with a knife; in Night Watch, it is revealed that he has worked his way up through the ranks at Ramkin Hall, from junior staff to his present eminence.

However, here, he takes another step by developing a proper personality, but one that seems to be quite at odds with what we’ve seen previously from him. I don’t mind the streetwise Willikins we see here because it fits with the clues that have been dropped over the years but the amorality he displays in his dealings with other characters and the ease with which he slips into the role of “Bad Cop” alongside Vimes doesn’t rest as easily as the rest of his appearances.

That flaw aside – and I realise that it is entirely subjective – I love the way that Vimes manages to find allies and support from the inhabitants of this tamed wilderness he discovers himself in: we know from shows and movies such as Midsomer Murders, Blue Heelers, Mystery Road, Witness and Hot Fuzz that the countryside is often no place for a detective who is wise to the ways of the city but an innocent in the bucolic byways of the pastoral world. On the other hand, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple often did their best work in isolated country mansions.

However, this talk of other literary creations leads us out of this digression and to the aforementioned Felicity Beedle. She is the champion of the goblins and an accomplished author. Her series of books on the mysterious world of bodily secretions is an endless delight to Young Sam, with Vimes frequently finding himself in awe of the knowledge that his son has picked up from her texts.

Though, as anyone who spends any amount of time around small children knows, their fascination with what comes out of us is frequently rather more gross rather than engrossing.

We readers were lucky enough to be blessed by another Discworld text that accompanied the release of Snuff. Far lengthier than Where’s My Cow, the picture book that was published alongside Thud!, The World Of Poo is a delightful (for a given quantity of delightful, of course) story about Geoffrey, a young lad who visits his grandmother and amasses a vast knowledge of poo and the process that leads to its creation, shape, texture and uses outside the body. Despite being set on the Discworld it is factually accurate and is really a lot better than it sounds.

But it does suffer from something that Snuff and several of the more recent Discworld novels suffered from, in that it is very heavy on continuity-porn.

It doesn’t interfere with your enjoyment of the book, and it is a lovely trove of easter eggs for us long-term fans, but there’s a part of me that can’t help worrying about what those fabled “new readers” must be thinking.

Although I suppose that I needn’t worry too much. I mean, there is a lot to be said for the idea of there being no such thing as a casual fan of anything these days. And hardly any of the previous Discworld books depended upon prior knowledge of the series. And there is also three pages worth of “Other Books By This Author” at the front of my hardcover edition, so I may well be a lone voice in the wilderness on this.

Conversely, that dependence upon continuity is also what makes these last books more than the sum of their parts: by opening up the futures of these characters, we are gradually coming to terms with the fact that there will be no further adventures of them – despite the notes that Sir Terry left behind for future novels (the hard drive that held them being crushed under the wheels of a steamroller as per his will, notwithstanding).

Honestly, I may well be the only one who holds to this idea, but knowing that the characters were still enjoying their lives happily became a great comfort to me the first time I reread the books after his passing.

It’s really a rather sad way to live a life – being concerned about the futures of people who don’t exist – but by the time of Snuff‘s publication I had been reading and rereading these books for 26 years. I was caught up in Discworld, poorly mapped and chronologically baffling though it might have been when it started out. It was real to me and was a valuable part of my inner life. It had been there with me as a boy, a young man, a husband and a father. The stories had remained the same but the way I was taking them in gradually changed as my own circumstances changed. I had lived my life with the Discworld in a way that I had with very few other book series.

But Snuff was where I started to realise that it was coming to an end. And that had a huge influence on how I took in the last couple of books…

Coming Up Next: Moist von Lipwig takes on a vanity project for Harry King and the Patrician and starts Raising Steam.