Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

I’ve found it very difficult to work for the last couple of months, what with the COVID-19 pandemic and all. I gather this is a pretty common problem. I have done some tinkering, and some revisions, and slowly I’m making progress with my current book (part 4.2 or part 5 of Swords In Darkness, depending on how I’m currently counting them). But I decided I’d better get back to blogging or I’ll lose whatever focus I ever had.

Unfortunately, I’ve had a rather depressing experience with this. I just read Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam, which is I believe the second-to-last novel he wrote, and the last for adult readers. And I found it depressing.

I’m on thin ice here, so let me be careful.

First of all, I’m an unqualified Pratchett fan. I’ve read all the main Discworld novels, and some of the other works, and I’ve enjoyed them all and reread most of them. In some cases, I had to stop and lie down partway through because I was laughing so hard. (When I was reading Hogfather, my wife found me literally rolling on the floor helpless with the giggles.) Sure, he had his failings as an author, but who doesn’t? Mostly, though, the books have been a fairly unalloyed joy.

Second, I am well aware that Pratchett became dreadfully ill in the last years of his life. He was hit by an unusual form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, which he came to refer to as “the Embuggerage,” a Pratchett-ism that I admire. And so I am aware, too, that the last few books were written with immense assistance, as he could no longer read or write easily, and had to dictate. I get all that.

That’s why Raising Steam is so depressing. The author Terry Pratchett just isn’t there any more. It reads like the work of an imitator, and not a great one. The writing is, dare I say, dull. The jokes are flat. I find it depressing because I’m reading the work of a wonderful writer whose mind is being destroyed.

As I thought about what’s happened here—not what’s happened to Pratchett, but what specific effects the disease had in the writing—I noticed some things. For one, it all reads rather like a first draft, with some lumbering prose and clunky sentences. It needs careful editing to trim it up, make the writing light and sharp. If you’ve ever told a funny anecdote and let it run on too long, so that the punchline just fell down, you know what I mean. Again, the book is a string of incidents, and only occasionally does it weave into a total structure. Sure, there’s an overarching plot, but we know what it is fairly early on, and can guess pretty much exactly how it’s going to turn out. Otherwise, it’s just little incidents here and there.

Another problem is that there’s no real conflict. Sure, there are bad guys up to no good, but there’s no threat. We have no real sense, moment to moment, that things could not work out wonderfully. This is actually subtler than it seems. In a Discworld novel, as in a P.G. Wodehouse farce, there’s no way it’s not going to come out well. The trick, as in all farce, is that the stakes are high for the characters. In each little moment, there’s an up-or-down, a feeling of “is this when it goes pear-shaped?” And then the characters dodge their fate by means that are in themselves more or less funny, but what’s more raise the stakes for the next time. 

Example: Alice is despised by Bob’s parents but she’s caught going to visit him. Fortunately, the parents don’t know what she looks like, so she pretends to be Clara, whom they do like, and is (unbeknownst to them) away in France at the moment. Unfortunately, Clara comes back from France….

The crux of this Wodehouse-ian example isn’t that Alice and Bob won’t end up together. Of course they will! No, the point is that the characters are put under pressure and do things that maybe aren’t well-advised but at least get them out of the short-term difficulty, leading to it all coming back to haunt them later.

Now Pratchett wasn’t a full-on farceur like Wodehouse, but in his best novels you have a good deal of this same structure. Small things keep building up, funny in themselves at the time, but eventually you have a colossal and hilarious mess. But in Raising Steam, the incidents just don’t build.

Which all leads to the core problem: the characters. As one reviewer noted, they blend together a bit, and that’s unfortunate. Again, it’s quite moralizing, but Pratchett was always a somewhat heavy-handed moralizer. No, where this book goes really off the rails (as it were) is that the characters come in only three varieties: Good Guys, Bad Guys, and the occasional Walk-Ons, most of whom turn out to be Good Guys who don’t happen to be in a major plot position.

Consider The Fifth Elephant, which (if memory serves) is the first of Pratchett’s “culture and morals of the deeply screwed-up dwarfs” books. In that book, there’s this dwarf called Albrecht Albrechtsson, who’s a hard-line conservative like all the Bad Guys. But by the end, when it really matters, we’ve learned that Albrecht is also a deeply ethical person. He is not at all happy with some of what the current Low King is up to, and he’s not happy about the various changes in dwarf society… but he also believes that there are laws and rules that govern dwarf society, and he sees that the Bad Guys—also conservatives, with whom in many ways he agrees—have broken those laws and rules, while the Low King and his allies have not. And so at the crux, he sides with the Low King. The point being that what’s wrong with the Bad Guys isn’t that they’re conservative or old-fashioned, but that they’re basically selfish, willing to do wrong in order to achieve their ends. Albrecht is at least as conservative and old-fashioned as they are, but he won’t violate the code by which he believes all dwarfs should live, even when that means things don’t go his way.

When you read a lot of Pratchett, you find that there are a lot of characters like this. We may or may not like them, we may or may not agree with them, but ultimately we empathize and understand why they do what they do. In some cases, as with Albrecht, we even admire them for it. And so a really good Pratchett novel has this complex web of different people with different perspectives who get slammed into one another under bizarre conditions.

In Raising Steam, there’s none of this. The Good Guys all agree about pretty much everything, when push comes to shove, and the Bad Guys are so unrelievedly and uninterestingly Bad that a lot of them get killed off without even being named.

I could go on. I find the Patrician weirdly transparent, Moist von Lipwig suddenly a pretty straightforward and honest fellow, Commander Vimes tediously preachy…. As I say, it’s depressing.

I’m glad I read the book, certainly, and there are moments when the Terry Pratchett we came to know and love flashes through, but they’re all too rare. This is probably the only Pratchett book I’ll never reread.

And having said all that, I’m going to have a glass of something alcoholic, and raise a toast to the memory of the great and wonderful Sir Terry Pratchett.