Re-read review: Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, part 2 -The (original) witches
Previous entries in series: Discworld overview
As someone who secretly wanted to say 'witch' when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I of course have to start with Pratchett's witches, who are a perfect example of why I wanted to be one1. Discworld witches are mostly benevolent - though not always nice - embodiments of female power, self-determination, and special knowledge. They are liminal beings, operating in the space between normal human society and the other, light and dark, life and death. They are useful to their neighbors as healers, midwives, and defenders against non-human threats, and usually respected as such, but they never quite fit within society. But, as is noted in 'Maskerade': "There was nothing like that 'not fitting in' feeling to stimulate the old magical nerves." The older and wiser witches know that their position on the edges of things gives them perspective, a clearer view of the world. And as for those who would try to take advantage of it...well any witchfinder in the bad old days who got hold of a real witch would have had a problem on his hands! They are a subversive force, both within the world of the story and in ours, and I love it2.
1. But not the source of that wish; I didn't start reading the Discworld books until I was in high school.
2. You think elves are cute? Think the lost heir is really the best king, or the poor girl should of course marry the enchanted prince? Think you know what sin is? The Discworld witches have some things to say about that.
I've been speaking of the Discworld witches as a collective, and indeed they normally come in threes, but each one is her own distinct person:
Granny (Esmeralda) Weatherwax would be the chief of the witches...if witches had a hierarchy, which they don't3. While she has the strongest magical talent - she can put her consciousness into other bodies, or catch a sword in her bare hand4 - her real strength is in her iron will and her "headology", the ability to get into someone's mind and find their levers. She is proud, sharp-tongued, something of a loner, a cynical about people, and certainly wouldn't call herself a hero. She stands on the edge of the dark, and it calls to her. But being so aware of her own shadow has in fact given her a very keen sense of right and wrong. Granny Weatherwax declaring "I can't be havin' with this" is the start of many a Discworld villain's downfall.
Nanny (Gytha) Ogg is Granny's oldest friend and her perfect foil. Where Granny is tall and skinny, all real and metaphorical sharp edges, Nanny is short and plump, a saucy old lady who embraces life with gusto. Where Granny is a spinster, Nanny Ogg is the revered matriarch of a large family - all of whom are called Ogg, the names of her many husbands and lovers being of little consequence and never mentioned. Of all the witches, Nanny is the best at making friends with normal people. Granny might be able to manipulate them, but Nanny can earn their trust. While Granny might sniff at her penchant for singing dirty songs and lack of dignity - "You're a disgusting old baggage, Gytha Ogg" - her cheerful friend has always been an important grounding force in her life.
The "maiden" role of the coven5 is first filled by Magrat Garlick. Magrat is a bit of a hippie, prone to wearing flowy dresses and amulets, believing strongly in the inherent healthfulness of herbs, and being rather too uncritical of fairytales. Granny Weatherwax is exasperated by this, considering her "wet". But Magrat definitely grows a spine as she gains more experience. Though she leaves the coven to become queen of the tiny kingdom of Lancre, with Agnes Nitt taking her place, Magrat keeps up the witching on the side and is still an important factor in several later stories. Agnes is the goth witch - or, at least, she tried to be. Eventually she decided she was just too fat, rosy-cheeked, and sensible to pull off that aesthetic but, in the process, created a second personality called Perdita. Perdita is basically a very rude imaginary friend/alter ego, but she does come in handy occasionally. Agnes has an amazing voice, and briefly leaves the coven to pursue a career in opera, but things get a bit weird (see 'Maskerade' below).
There are quite a few other witches who turn up in one story or another, but the last who is truly a main character is Tiffany Aching. However, her books are more young-adult focused and form their own arc, so I'll save her for a later installment.
3. As they are "nothing but a pack of ringleaders", organizing witches is worse than herding cats.
4. Giving an equivalent of the "I ain't got time to bleed" line from 'Predator', of course. But, by the rules of magic, she does have to find time later.
5. The third part of the traditional "maiden, mother, crone".
The books that focus on the original witches are, in roughly chronological order:
Wyrd Sisters:
This is the book that introduces Granny, Nanny, and Magrat. Unlike some Discworld characters, their characters are fairly fully formed from the moment of their introduction:
'"Round about the cauldron go, In the poisoned entails throw..." What are these supposed to be?' 'Our Jason slaughtered a pig yesterday, Esme.' 'These look like perfectly good chitterlin's to me, Gytha...'
'Please, Granny.' '...All right, all right. "Whole grain wheat and lentils too, In the cauldron seethe and stew"? What happened to the toad?' '...You know Goodie was against all unnecessary cruelty. Vegetable protein is a perfectly acceptable substitute.'...'Oh, well. "Double hubble, stubble trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bub-'"WHY isn't the cauldron bubbling, Magrat?'
As that passage suggests, this tale is based on a combination of Macbeth and Hamlet - with a bit of 'The Prince and the Pauper' thrown in. The old king of Lancre has been murdered (which is just death by natural causes, for kings) and his heir has been sent off to live with some traveling players. But the new king hates the kingdom and the witches. And they can't be having with that, of course. They'll just have to see that the right man ends up on the throne.
Witches Abroad: Magrat Garlick inherits the wand of a fairy godmother6, and the coven sets out to save Emberella from her other godmother's determination to give her a 'happy ending' whether she wants one or not. There are a lot of jokes about the witches' reaction to 'foreign' things like absinthe or the running of the bulls, and a lot of fun subversion of tropes from fairytales and other witch-related media, as a postcard written by Nanny Ogg illustrates:
Dear Jason et everybody,
Whot a life, all kinds of things goin on, what with talkin wolves and women asleep in castles...please send someone to Mr. Vernisage over in Slice and present Mrs. Ogg's compluments and what a good hat he makes, he can say 'As approved by Nanny Ogg,' it stops 100% of all known farmhouses...
But it is mostly about the way that powerful narratives can shape our thinking and our lives, for good or for ill.
This story adds in a little more diversity, as the city of Genua is the Discworld stand-in for both France and New Orleans. Emberella (AKA Ella Saturday) is mixed-race, and we get to meet a voodoo lady named Erzulie Gogol. She has a Baba Yaga house, except since she lives in a swamp it has duck feet instead of chicken legs. Even if the voodoo probably isn't 100% authentic it is presented more sympathetically than in most fantasy media, on a moral par with Lancre magic:
...'Ain't that all messin' with dolls and dead people and stuff?' 'Ain't witchcraft all runnin' around with no clothes on and stickin' pins in people?' said Mrs. Gogol levelly. 'Ah,' said Nanny. 'I sees what you mean.' She shifted... 'I got to admit, though...'she added, 'sometimes...maybe just one pin.' Mrs. Gogol nodded gravely. 'Okay. Sometimes...maybe just one zombie.'...
Discworld zombies, incidentally, are not mindless shambling things. The one in this story, for instance, retains most of his personality and drive, and he and Mrs. Gogol have a shared goal.
The importance of knowing who and what you are, and of self determination, is woven all through the book. As Granny Weatherwax says:
'Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy...But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say "I do", yes? You can't make happiness...All you can do...is make an ending.'
6 - Which has a
distressing tendency to reset to "pumpkins".
Lords and Ladies: When the coven returns from their trip abroad, they find that some younger would-be witches have been messing around near the stone circle that marks a "thin place" between the Discworld reality and Elfland. Most humans have forgotten how nasty elves can be. But the elder witches remember. Unfortunately, the performance of a play on midsummer night in honor of the wedding of King Verence7 and Magrat threatens to let the 'Lords and Ladies' through just as the witches are distracted. Nanny is having dinner with the dwarf Casanunda ("World's 2nd greatest lover", according to his calling card); Granny is getting deja-vu of things that never happened and has to deal with the Archchancellor of Unseen University8, who has been getting nostalgic about how they used to date fifty years ago; and Magrat is having second thoughts about being queen, feeling like she has given up her agency for a life of tapestry-making. But Granny has a wild idea for how to fight back involving bees, and Magrat discovers the armor of a legendary queen that gives her the inspiration to fight for her hive.
This book manages to combine classic elf lore, Shakespeare, multiverse theory, magnetism, and bee life history to give some really creative explanations for things like the relation of Elfland to the human world, or why elves hate iron. It also made use of the "more guidelines than actual rules" joke eleven years before Pirates of the Caribbean - in this case relating to the rules of magic.
7 - "Some people are born to kingship. Some achieve kingship, or at least Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-Countryship. But Verence had kingship thrust upon him."
8 - The rest of the wizard contingent includes Ponder Stibbons, the Bursar, and the Librarian (an orangutan). More on them later!
Maskerade: The Lancre coven needs a new member now that Magrat is queen. Trouble is, Agnes Nitt - the most promising young witch - has left town to join the opera in Ankh Morepork. But Granny Weatherwax has just discovered that Nanny has published a book of aphrodisiac recipes under the title of "A Lancre Witch" and insists that they go correct this so no one thinks she wrote it...so they might as well go collect young Agnes on the way. Meanwhile, Agnes discovers that the Opera House has a ghost - and he seems to have started murdering people.
This book is mostly a send-up of 'Phantom of the Opera', of course. But it has a lot to say about art as an expression of truth and beauty vs. art as a commodity. For instance:
'What'd I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I'd like to know, if I'd said that money wasn't important?' Salzella smiled humorlessly. "'here are people out on the stage right now, sir...who'd say that you would probably have made better cheeses...You see...cheese does make money. And opera doesn't. Opera's what you spend money on.' 'But...what do you get out of it?' 'You get opera...'
This book is a bit more uneven in quality than some of the others. The visit to Nanny's publisher provides a fun sub-plot. Granny Weatherwax is determined to see that Nanny gets paid royalties for her book:
'Can't have witches being done down, Gytha...You've been exploited,' said Granny firmly. 'No, I ain't.'
'Yes, you have. You're a downtrodden mass...you've been swindled out of your life savings,' ... 'Two dollars?' 'Well, it's all you'd actually saved,' said Granny, accurately.
They get several thousand dollars out of the publisher, which Granny then proceeds to spend on their opera investigations, much to Nanny's annoyance.
'We witches have always held everything in common, you know that,' said Granny. 'Well, yes,' said Nanny, and once again cut to the heart of the sociopolitical debate. 'It's easy to hold everything in common when no one's got anything."
But it doesn't always fit smoothly with the rest of the story. There are also a lot of fat jokes. These are not so much directed at Agnes - her weight comes up a lot, but mostly to point out how the way she is treated because of it is unfair. For instance, she ends up singing for the thin sparkly ingénue Christine, throwing her voice from the chorus. But the large tenor Enrique Basilica is basically eating constantly, and that gets a bit tiresome after a while. Still, the book has a lot of good moments.
Carpe Jugulum: A family of "modern" vampires take up residence in Lancre after King Verence unwisely invites them to his daughter's naming ceremony, and Granny Weatherwax has vanished. Will Nanny Ogg, Agnes, Magrat, and a dithering priest be enough to defeat them? This book plays around with all the vampire tropes9, and also explores ideas of self-identity and the nature of good and evil.
The Count de Magpyr is very much into self-improvement. He has trained his family to resist 'sacrephobia' (fear of religious images), holy water, garlic, etc. and seems to have demonstrated that such weaknesses are psychological. Only two characters are immune to the vampires' mind-control powers: Agnes, because of her increasingly strong second personality "Perdita"10, and a constantly self-doubting priest named Mightily Oates11. As is often the case in vampire stories, the handsome younger vampire Vlad finds Agnes' ability to resist intriguing. Nanny, in her Oggish way, suggests Agnes might play along: "This is Lancre we're talkin' about. If we was men we'd be talking about layin' down our lives for the country. As women, we can talk about laying down". Perdita is tempted, but Agnes tends to be better at remembering what he is. Magrat, for her part, straps baby Esme to her back and rejoins the witches for the duration.
This book introduces the Nac Mac Feegle, AKA "pictsies", who play a larger role in the Tiffany Aching books. The Nac Mac Feegle are basically tiny little Scottish caricatures here, but they are always entertaining. They also draw on the Smurfs, except that they are blue from woad tattoos, and the one female, the Kelda, looks like a stone-age fertility figure and is sort of like the queen bee of their clan. Another interesting character is Igor. All the vampires and werewolves and mad scientists in Uberwald employ and Igor, of course, but this Igor is feeling very put out that his efforts are not being appreciated by the Magpyrs:
'Igor, Mother told you. We don't want dust. We don't want huge candlesticks. We don't want eyeholes cut in all the pictures, and we certainly don't want your wretched box of damn spiders and your stupid little whip!'...'The old Count liked my thpiderth,' said Igor, his voice like some little insect that would nevertheless not be squashed.
Igor also has a Frankenstein dog, appropriately named 'Scraps'. Death makes an appearance here too, and is delightful as always.
We get to see a lot of Granny's take on morality, which is very centered on choice and on judgment when things are clearly wrong. This is because Granny Weatherwax is the type of character who, if a villain gave the "We're not so different, you and I," speech would reply: "Yeah, I know. I'm actively choosing not to be you. In fact, I'd probably be way better at being evil than you are!" She has no patience with those who, in an effort to be nice, try not to choose. This doesn't always make her friends. At one point early in the book she essentially performs a magical late-term abortion to save a pregnant woman who was kicked by a cow. The midwife disapproves of the fact that Granny made the decision, but Granny knew she could only save one and didn't want to force the woman's husband into a 'Sophie's Choice' situation. Some of the other characters wonder if too much being on the edge of things, of being treated with a certain respect but not really trust or warmth would eventually turn her to the dark.
The main thing Granny, and Agnes, object to in these 'new' vampires is that they won't admit to being monsters. Like kings claiming divine appointment, these vampires want to say it is right that they should exercise power over others. Vampires, of course, have long been metaphors for parasitic landowners or capitalists, and that idea definitely used here is used here. For instance, the 'model town' the Magpyrs show Agnes is called Escrow, and the humans there are free to go about without garlic or barred windows...so long as they line up to be bled on demand. Vlad argues:
'It's not much different from the lives they would have had in any case. Better, in fact. They are well fed, sheltered...so many people lead little lives, always under the whip of some king or ruler or master who won't hesitate to sacrifice them in battle or turn them out when they can't work anymore.' But they can run away, Perdita prompted...'Really? On foot? With a family? And no money? Mostly they never even try. Most people put up with most things, Agnes.'
They do, don't they? Until, of course, they see an actual chance to overthrow their oppressor.
9 - Well, the traditional ones. Not so much the 'Twilight'-type tropes that came later.
10 - "Agnes disliked Perdita, who was vain, selfish, and vicious, and Perdita hated going around inside Agnes, whom she regarded as a fat, pathetic, weak-willed blob that people would walk all over were she not so steep...Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like 'Don't fall into this huge pit of spikes' were there for a purpose."
11 - Technically, the Quite Reverent Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oates.
Overall recommendation: If you are looking for an entry point to Discworld, and you like magic and varied female protagonists, these five books may be for you.
