Terry Pratchett is fading away of early-onset Alzheimer's, he of the charming anthropomorphic personifications, Vimesy and the magnificient Weatherwax. Puck you, malignant spirit that would dare covet him so early...
He does not so much slip in an allegory as whack you on the head with it, subtlety to him is something that is rumoured to exist in the far shores of lit-academia, yet his words fill me with a sublime wonder and magic in a way that almost nobody else can any longer. The breathtaking clarity of a world so simple, a world full of problems so seemingly like ours and yet so much more... PG-13.
I so wanted to see where Destiny would take Carrot and his enigmatic sword, and Granny Weatherwax who so reminded me of my creepy great grand-mom and the awe I used to feel at her limitless earthy wisdom and conviction and owlish stare that laid bare and trivialized all my supposed secrets.
His works are at heart the greatest pantheistic vision realized in all fantasy that I have read - he appreciated an insight that is almost unattainable for the Tolkiens and LeGuins and especially the Lewises bought up on the Judeo-Christian trope of a world in black and white, of a clear demarcation between Good and Evil and Right and Wrong and things Done or Undone - he saw the world filled with Small Gods as one filled with wonder and of course, some unavoidable ugliness; where Other Things cannot easily be dismissed or enslaved or destroyed; and where the acceptance of multiplicity rids (or at least tempers) the world of its burning need to convert, or convince or efface other histories.
When other greater writers made the object of their protagonists' mission McGuffins while the journey revealed profound truths about existence, he made the act of seeking itself a McGuffin: The notion that it is all a bit of a silly joke, not exactly fatalism, but eulogizing this ability to laugh at ourselves as we do the things we are supposed, driven to do.
That it is fine if all this amounts to nothing at all...
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