Just don’t let anyone hand you a pearl that might erupt into a universe, okay? We’re back to complete the end of our journey with Mort.
Summary
Albert dons his wizard gear, recites a spell, and vanishes from Death’s domain. Mort and Ysabell head to the Agatean Empire to collect their first soul, the Vizier to the Emperor, which takes longer than Mort would prefer as it’s a failed poisoning. Albert has appeared in the Unseen University on the spot where he left, blows up the statue of himself, and runs into Rincewind (who is assistant to the librarian now). He tells him to gather the senior wizards and equipment to perform the Rite of AshkEnte again and find Death, then sets about getting a drink at the Drum, where he ends up having to turn the landlord into a frog over the subject of a 2000-year-old bar tab. Once he’s back, he tells all the wizards that it’s time to shape up, much to their chagrin. Mort and Ysabell head to the Pyramids of Tsort, and cross over a young woman who is meant to be a concubine in the heavenly court of Zetesphut after taking poison to join to him. Ysabell seems displeased with her choice, but Mort is changing, becoming Death.
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Ysabell tries to snap him out of it, but the Rite of AshkEnte is being performed, and Mort thinks he is being summoned. Ysabell kneels on him to stop him from going, and Mort screams, insisting that he has to go. Ysabell knows that isn’t true—he’s not Death, he is what she thinks he is. They are almost summoned, but Ysabell clocks Mort in the jaw and Death finally shows up in the spell octogram. It takes him a moment, but he finally recognizes what’s happened, woes to himself for his foolishness, and vanishes with Albert to set about making things right. Meanwhile, Mort comes to and thanks Ysabell for stopping him. It’s midnight, which means he’s too late to save the princess, until he realizes that he might not be… and he and Ysabell set off on Binky. Meanwhile, the coronation of Princess Keli is going poorly, there’s an elephant, nothing goes right, and the Duke of Sto Helit is there to kill the princess. Cutwell sees the bubble of reality converging on them anyhow.
Mort and Ysabell arrive just in time, but Mort has no plan. Thankfully, Cutwell hits the duke over the head with a candlestick so he can’t menace anyone else. Mort still doesn’t have a plan, but Keli insists on being coronated, so Cutwell does the honors. Eventually, Mort decides that they should all climb on Binky and head to Death’s Domain. The reality bubble converges as they escape. They head into Death’s study, unsure of how to fix the issue, but Death is already there, and furious. He asks why Ysabell helped Mort and she admits that she loves him. Mort challenges Death for Cutwell and Keli’s existence, to prevent them from being consigned to oblivion. Death accepts the challenge. Albert retrieves both of their hourglasses and blades. Mort realizes he has an advantage in this; he has been Death, but Death has never been him. (Also, Death does want him to win.)
The fight knocks over a fair share of hourglasses leading to surprising deaths and various miraculous escapes. Mort manages to get the upper hand briefly, and pins Death down, but he refuses to strike a killing blow. Death knocks him to the ground and is about to end his life, when Ysabell stops him. She notes that Death has claimed meddling with an individual’s fate could destroy the world, but Death has done that already; her fate, Mort’s fate, the fate of the hourglasses that have shattered in this fight. Death points out that this doesn’t matter because the gods can demand nothing of him, which Ysabell doesn’t think is very fair. She takes up Mort’s sword, determined to fight. Death tells her to do as she’s told, but she won’t. Death disarms her and casts her aside, approaches Mort with his hourglass in hand, its sand running out. Death says that Mort doesn’t know how sorry this makes him, but Mort replies that he might. Death laughs. And once the last grain of sand and run through Mort’s hourglass, he turns it over.
Death winds up having a word with the gods; Keli is allowed to live with Cutwell as her paramour, and Mort and Ysabell are set up as the duke and duchess of Sto Helit now that Keli’s uncle is dead. They still have to unite the kingdoms as he would have done, but the gods were sentimental to give them this life. Mort and Ysabell have just gotten married and Death shows up at the reception—he hadn’t thought it was appropriate to attend the ceremony. Death gives Mort their wedding present, a giant pearl made of the actualities Mort created; Death tells him that one day this pearl will be the seed of a new universe. Then he gives Mort a personal gift: his book, which is still being written. Mort asks Death how he feels about christenings, which Death isn’t too keen on. They say their goodbyes.
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Rincewind! It’s Rincewind, everybody. Say hi to Rincewind, he seems to be doing quite well. My favorite thing about this is how he seems to take all of this in stride because, honestly, given everything that he’s already been through, why would this bother him. Gee, there’s the university’s founder, back after two millennia and telling me to wake everyone up to summon Death. This might as well happen. For anyone who has dealt with Twoflower, this can’t be that big of an ask, really.
The transformation with Albert is really enjoyably because we get to see the difference two thousand years being Death’s butler makes on a person. Albert the wizard is an utterly different person, and frankly not a very nice one. Death is good for him.
Yet again, we come back to the concept belief shapes reality. And this is ultimately why I am all for the Great Expectations redux that is Ysabell and Mort, because of this moment. Pratchett is so exceptional at taking these incredibly profound actions and bits of dialogue and just dropping them into the text and walking away from them, which I love because it forces the reader to really mark them and imbue them with meaning. He’s trusting us to be smart and get it.
So when Ysabell sits on Mort and tells him that he’s not Death because he is what she believes him to be, my face screws up, I get all teary, and it’s time to close the book and walk away for a little while. That’s it—a distillation of what the book is saying about belief shaping reality and people, but also this perfectly laid out map of how love exerts pressure over our lives. Belief is reality, and Mort is saved because someone who loves him sees him, and believes him to be simply who he is. And then there’s a tangent here that you can extrapolate from, about how our love for the people in our lives shapes and changes them, how we make each other day in and day out through our belief in people. Pratchett doesn’t spend a lot of time on the concept of romance, but he doesn’t really have to because it’s right there.
The fight between Death and Mort is so damn good because there’s a special kind of dramatic tension that you get from an action sequence where the stakes are truly unknown. Sure, we’re aware of the fact that Mort is fighting for Keli and Cutwell’s lives (as well as his own), but we don’t really know the possibilities inherent in this fight until Ysabell calls Death out for his meddling. And the moment when Death turns Mort’s hourglass over is this perfect ah-ha, where you think oh of course he can do that, how did I not see that coming. Frightfully clever and satisfying stuff.
You have to love a story that gets rolling because a young man becomes besotted with a princess, and then neglects to do many of the things that you are trained to expect from that story. Mort does not win Keli over, but also Keli is not revealed to be unworthy of his affections by being a monstrous shrew of some sort. And the fact that Mort was wrong to save Keli’s life over a crush doesn’t mean that she winds up punished by having to die as dictated either, which is great. Also, there’s something wonderfully subversive about the concept of Keli and Cutwell, mainly for the fact that Cutwell is smart, but also largely average overall as a person. (So is Keli, honestly, but narrative tropes always insist that princess = special in that aggravating way.) They just work somehow. The same way that Mort and Ysabell work somehow. None of them are overthinking it, so why should we?
Of course, it ends on the thought that Death doesn’t believe he’s cut out to be a grandfather. Which is hilarious because, oh, he is. And he has no idea what’s coming.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Mort makes the comment that the Pyramids of Tsort are “mortared with the blood of thousands of slaves”, presumably meant to reflect the Egyptian pyramids on Earth, which were long-believed to have been built by slaves. In more recent years, however, tombs of builders were discovered close to the pyramids—it is now largely believed that the pyramids were built by employed workers, and that this would have been a pretty solid job at the time too. It’s one of those weird places where satire stops working because context has changed entirely. (The first builder tombs were found in 1990, so Pratchett was just a few years off from this being more common knowledge, unfortunately.)
- I do love the combo superstition of “walking under a mirror” (walking under a ladder and breaking a mirror). Now I’m trying to think of other weird superstitions to combine. Like… throw a black cat over your left shoulder if you cross its path.
- The drunk elephant is supposed to “see pink people”, which automatically makes me think of Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade”, right?
Pratchettisms:
The assembled mages watched the big double doors as if they were about to explode, which shows how prescient they were, because they exploded.
Like a reluctant cork from a bottle, like a dollop of fiery ketchup from the upturned sauce bottle of Infinity, Death landed in the octogram and swore.
THE PRESSURE OF THIS REALITY KEEPS IT COMPRESSED. THERE MAY COME A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE ENDS AND REALITY DIES, AND THEN THIS ONE WILL EXPLODE AND… WHO KNOWS? IT’S A FUTURE AS WELL AS A PRESENT.
And it was good to see Rincewind because we’re heading back to his neck of the Disc next week with the first part of Sourcery. We’ll be reading up to “…and none of them knew what was about to hit them.”
The drunk elephant is supposed to “see pink people”, which automatically makes me think of Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade”, right?
Inasmuch as that sequence is a riff on the term “seeing pink elephants” which has been a euphemism for “so drunk they’re hallucinating” since the early twentieth century, and still used today (Delerium Tremens beer has pink elephants on the label).
It’s a classic Pratchettian reversal: if a drunk person sees pink elephants, what does a drunk elephant see?
Mort was my first Discworld novel and is still by far my favorite of the early* Discworld books. At 15 years old I believe Mort is the first time I truly understood what a master of the English language could do with 26 letters, a wicked sense of humor and a pitcher of banana daiquiris (if you know, you know.) Mort (the book and the character) will always hold a special place in my heart. Thank you Emmet for this wonderful recap and this reread series. Can’t wait for the rest of them.
*I consider early Discworld to be up until around The Hogfather and Jingo when his themes became grounded a lot more in real world events than specific tropes. Nightwatch is, of course, by far the best Discworld story and one of my favorite books of all time.
I too loved when he turned the hourglass over. Not least because I completely didn’t see it coming. I am nothing if not a sucker for a twist!
Mort wasn’t my first Pratchett, but it was the first in the chronological order in which I felt he had found his feet and was enjoying his world and where it could go.
This is a personal favorite among the Discworld books.
Even on a first read, the inverted hourglass left me wondering, “How old is Mort again?” A happy ending, but with bittersweet accents. Cheating Death (or Death cheating?), even divine intervention goes only so far. This round of damage control has a price… but that is another story.
I believe this is where Death gives Mort’s face the proverbial “slap so hard your children will feel it.”
I don’t remember if Cutwell stayed in his home or went to live in the palace. If the latter, I wonder if he was able to keep leaving partly-eaten food all over the place.
Keli insists on being coronated
Not in my edition (1st Signet, April 1989) — she’s crowned. Please tell me that somebody didn’t “update” a reprint.
We don’t just see Rincewind — we see him making a sensible decision that doesn’t involve running away very quickly. Note that we’re still not in the UU of most of the stories, because the bursar has it together.
It’s interesting which emotions Death doesn’t do (e.g. sentiment — he says) and which he does (e.g. self-righteous fury) despite the overall impression of someone who doesn’t get 99.44% of what might be considered human experience. (Some of the 0.56% is how he feels about kittens.) Definitely a character Pratchett was developing, like Granny Weatherwax; I’m going to have to watch through this reread and see whether Death is consistent.
Were the tombs by the pyramids of all the laborers, or just of the overseers? (Although they may not have been Simon Legrees; I have vague recollections of reading that pyramid workers weren’t slaves, but I can’t remember where.) OTOH, this scene seems a bit more historical, where the previous death’s setting is even more a Mikado-esque Anglo-read of someone’s unreliable story of a distant country.
@@.-@: note that a couple of pages later Death tells us math is unreliable.
@5: ISTM that the Master of the Queen’s Bedchamber (even if he’s not actually a paramour as Emmet argues) is unlikely to live off-site — but likely to have people scurrying after him picking up the pieces.
“A hole full of blackness rushed out of the sky and caught them. The interface bobbed uncertainly, empty as a pauper’s pocket, and carried on shrinking.”
And then the characters are at Death’s house. What’s going on here? Did the reality bubble catching up change anything? The whole description of the reality bubble approaching was cool, but failed to live up to the buildup here.
Why did Death feel it inappropriate to attend the wedding ceremony? People can’t see him for who he is anyway.
@7: Maybe he doesn’t go to weddings because he doesn’t want to test the vow, “till Death do you part”?
I love the Discworld books that DON’T involve Rincewind or where he has only a small cameo, as he does here. I don’t quite get the love for Rincewind, but then, I generally love the Spock and Rupert Giles sorts of characters, and Rincewind is so very far from that. :-)
Can somebody who DOES love Rincewind explain what they see in him?
I think the reason so many people love Rincewind is because he’s basically us. He’s the person who knows the tropes and refuses to play. He won’t go into the empty house, he won’t hang around to save someone, and he most certainly WILL run away at the first sign of trouble. He does what we always think the antagonist in a movie should do, rather than what they actually do. It fails of course, he’s the pawn of Lady Luck so he is always unlucky enough that it’s just the wrong thing to do each time and only makes things worse, but also lucky enough that it ends up generally working out for the best. He always tries to do the sensible and pragmatic thing, but fails miserably.
@9 Rincewind is a character who reacts to adventure the way most of us would. Sir Pterry, after the first few books about him, admitted, though, that it was hard to write about him because he worked incredibly hard at staying out of trouble and avoiding conflict and that made him a difficult character to enjoy. However, I don’t think we’re supposed to like him, any more than we’re supposed to like Lear or Scarlett O’Hara. He’s a protagonist rather than a hero and often only does the right thing – or the plot-appropriate thing – because he’s been coerced or shamed (usually by himself) into it, as opposed to other characters who have the mindset, courage and skills to see it through. Mort, for example, tries to fix the problems he’s created but only succeeds in making them worse, which doesn’t make him any better than Rincewind aside from the fact that he sticks around to fix his mess. In another interview Pratchett said that Rincewind and Twoflower were written as a response to H2G2’s Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, which is terrific when they’re together, but perhaps not as effective when they’re apart: I mean, Bert and Ernie are hilarious together but not so funny on their own
As TV Tropes puts it, Rincewind is Unluckily Lucky. His good luck doesn’t prevent bad things from happening to him; it lets or makes countless bad things happen to him but prevents them from (permanently) killing him.
But he hasn’t survived on his luck (and his Luggage) alone. Despite self-proclaimed cowardice and inability to do mgic, and occasional foolish deeds like drunken culinary experimentation (resulting in Vegemite), he’s rather impressively intelligent and resilient. Highly adaptable, quick-thinking, prodigiously gifted with languages, pragmatic in combat, experienced at recognizing and using psychological maniputation, and still somewhat capable of caring about other people, not to mention a champion runner and a fine snarker. There are many other Disworld characters who I would rather be, but even Rincewind is someone I can aspire to be.
I feel a special connection to this one because at the time it came out, my girlfriend ( now wife) was the “Popular Paperbacks Buyer” for the UK’s biggest bookselling chain. When Mort came out in paperback, she was the one who decided it should be the chain’s next “Hero” title – a designation that gave it prime position at the entrance to the book department in every store, and extra promotion in the media. At the time this was unheard-of for a fantasy novel. Of course the publishers (Corgi) were expected to pay for this privilege, but she and they agreed that this was the book that could take Pterry from cult author to mainstream bestseller. And so it was. I was a fan of the earlier books but I wouldn’t have tried to push them onto anyone who wasn’t an F/SF fan because they wouldn’t have got the in-jokes. Mort was the point where the plot and the characters became so good that it didn’t matter whether you spotted the satire – it was still a damn good story.
@6, the tombs of the pyramid workers seem to be of low level supervisors and craftsmen not the stone haulers. Said haulers were conscripted corvee workers but as far as we can tell their living conditions were excellent, with plentiful, good food and emergency medical care. The AE’s were very good at treating physical injuries. Graffiti on pyramid blocks suggests high morale with work Gangs calling themselves ‘Friends’ of the King or in one case The Drunkards of Menkaura.
While we have previous examples of H2G2 showing up in Discworld, here it is reversed. Adams borrowed Death’s diner job for a later Hitchhiker’s book (Mostly Harmless) where Arthur Dent became a Sandwich Maker on Lamuella. I think that Pratchett missed something that Adams captured. When Death is offered the opportunity to work in the palace kitchen anytime he wanted a break, that’s just offering him something he knows he’s skilled at but the true enjoyment of his job at the pub was the appreciation he got from the owner and clients, something that Arthur Dent recognized and Ford Prefect (and Mort) didn’t.
@6 @14 Current archeological studies tend toward the pyramids being built during the flooding of the Nile which allowed for easier transport of building materials. The workers low level workers were farmers who couldn’t farm during the flood. They were housed in dorms, fed, and paid (so their families wouldn’t go hungry).
There’s reason to believe that the corvee workers generally regarded their work as the adventure of a lifetime, something they’d boast about for the rest of their lives, meeting men from all over Egypt and forging a connection to Pharaoh himself that secured their own afterlife and maybe their families’ too.
Love this book. The first Discworld novel I’d say is excellent, not just very good. But certainly not the last!
I’d like to know what Mort’s plans for Keli were after taking her and Cutwell to Death’s domain. Obviously, at the end of the story Death fixes things so they turn out all right for everyone via deus ex machina, but what if that hadn’t happened? Would she have had to stay in Death’s domain for the rest of her life? She couldn’t go back to the Discworld, or she’d drop dead. Of course, I can’t fault a teenager in love for not planning ahead after “saving my beloved’s life.” That’s kind of how Mort got in this situation, after all.
Note that while Keli never gets any more on-page appearances (to my recollection), she is namedropped in a few books as Queen of Sto Lat.
The scene in the pyramid is one of the few outright continuity errors in Discworld (fortunately not one that affects the plot): in this book, the pyramids are in Tsort. Later, in Pyramids, we learn that the small kingdom of Djelibeybi is the Discworld’s Egypt equivalent; Tsort is a neighbouring country that shares much of its culture, but doesn’t do pyramids. I like to headcanon that the pyramid death was actually in Djelibeybi, Mort and Ysabell just assume it’s Tsort because they’re not that up on geography.
Tsort actually has very little presence in the series, compared to, say, Al-Khali or the Agatean Empire. The Tsortean War (the Discworld’s equivalent of the Trojan War) was fought there (and we will actually get to visit it at one point), and in Pyramids it shows up as an ally of Djelibeybi (which is still obsessed with re-fighting the Tsortean War). Oh, and in the third PC game, Discworld Noir, the initial macguffin (the Tsortese Falchion, I know, I know) is from there. But it never really gets a culture, even a stereotyped one.