captaind's Full Review: Terry Pratchett - Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld
The Hogfather
Every Hogswatch night, the Hogfather goes down chimneys leaving presents for all the good kids… etc etc… sound familiar? Well, this is Discworld, which means that everything we have in our world is there, only slightly warped. And the Hogfather has disappeared due to people stopping believing in him (or is there another reason?...)– and to fill the gap, up steps perhaps the least likely person for the job…
HO
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Yep, it’s Death. But how can he carry out his other… er… normal duties while carrying sacks of pressies around? His adopted granddaughter, Susan, takes a break from teaching children to bash monsters rather than be frightened of them, and teams up with his butler, Alfred, as they try to stop Death from causing havoc with his well-meaning behaviour…
Discworld
In case you’ve never read a Discworld novel before, Terry Pratchett’s marvellous creation is a world where just about anything that can happen does. Mythical beasts roam the Disc, Wizards and Witches practice their craft with various degrees of ineptitude, Death is a real person (or at least, an anthropomorphic representation, which is very nearly the same thing), and everything is portrayed from a skewed perspective. For instance, there are cameras, but rather than the way we know them to work, on Discworld they contain a tiny demon frantically painting. An ape for a librarian is perfectly normal. The Disc moves through space on the back of four elephants atop a giant turtle. Trolls are intelligent as long as their surroundings are cold enough. Zombies can earn a living. Plants can grow backwards – you can reap them one year and need to be planted the next. Magic shops appear one day, seem to have always been there, sell their goods, and disappear the next day, never to be seen again. It’s fantasy humour that will leave you helpless with laughter, while in its own way being as complex and detailed as Pern (McCaffery), Ringworld (Feist), or Middle Earth (Tolkein). You get the idea.
Or, if you don’t, then the Discworld novels probably aren’t for you.
The Hogfather (part 2)
The Hogfather is mainly a parody of Christmas in particular, and belief, tradition, and customs in general, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s full of rich detail, humour that runs all the way through the book, and wonderful characters.
Characters
Death is my favourite character (as most of you probably already know!), and he’s on fine form in this book, as usual attempting to do things that he has no way of knowing about right and of course failing, with hilarious results. Susan is a great character and possibly at her most cynical and exasperated by her Grandfather’s antics in this book. She’s not exactly normal, but then again with ancestry like that how could you be?
The Wizards are well represented too, with my favourite Ridicully doing his best to hold things together. We also meet Hex, Unseen University’s version of a computer. At the University we meet perhaps the most memorable peripheral characters in all Discworld history, The God of Hangovers. (Just don’t shout…) The other characters are fine and work well, but the main quartet of Death, Susan, Alfred, and Ridicully do most of the work. Since they’re four of the best characters in Discworld anyway, they manage it with ease.
The Hogfather (Part 3)
The plot is jolly, moves along swiftly, and has a few surprises in store. A battle scene in the tower in the land of make believe even has a certain amount of tension, which considering you’ll have already laughed yourself silly by the time you get to it is quite a feat.
As with most of the Discworld novels, reading others of the series is not necessary to enjoying it. In fact, this is probably one of the easiest novels to read if you have never even seen a Discworld novel before. The characterisation is so good in this book that the knowledge of the characters you may gain from reading other books in the series will be largely superfluous.
One of the best? Certainly. Yet another 5-star Discworld novel. Pratchett is assured of his place in the all-time fiction superstars league, I think.
Links
At the risk of upsetting certain people, I am including all my Discworld and Pratchett links as I feel they are all relevant. Not only that, but I make no apologies for doing so.
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