It’s time to face the Great Attractor and ask for a little more time. Let’s finish Reaper Man.
Summary
The Fresh Start crew make their way through the shopping mall that’s sprung up as the next phase of the parasite that has infested Ankh-Morpork, getting menaced by shopping carts. Bill Door runs from the new Death, finds that his scythe has not been destroyed as he requested, and ducks the new reaper (who takes up that scythe), telling Miss Flitworth to take Sal on Binky and make a run for it. He goes to the farm in hopes that he can take up his farming scythe, but his hands pass through it. The new Death emerges to take his life, a figure of smoke wearing a crown. Death is bothered by this rendering—he never wore a crown—but the new Death wants to rule and he attacks. The scythe doesn’t work; Miss Flitworth appears and she’s giving some of her life away to Bill, allowing him to take up the farming scythe and cut the new Death down. Now he is Death once more.
The Fresh Start crew find the wizards frozen in place inside the mall, and they find a disk that they think might be powering the whole center, so Arthur pries it off while in bat form and suddenly the whole place begins to collapse. Ludmilla suggests that they load up the unmoving wizards into the suddenly docile shopping carts and wheel them out. Windle Poons decides that he might be the city’s best defense mechanism against the parasite in that moment and decides to fight the creature using the mall as its disguise. Death faces down the Combination Harvester, which falls apart because he removed an essential piece. He tells Miss Flitworth that he has a lot of work to do, but promises he will see her soon. Ridcully awakens, and the Fresh Start group insist that he and the other wizards go to rescue Poons from the shopping center. Ridcully takes the Dean, Reg Shoe, and the Librarian back in to find him. Death goes to a mountaintop and the Auditors tell him he has not won, but he’s unbothered and frightens them away. Then he summons all the smaller Deaths that cropped up while he was gone and absorbs them back into himself—all except the Death of Rats.
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The wizards make it to Poons, and the Dean fires up several spells at once and puts them on a delay so they can escape before the parasite is destroyed, but it’s not quite enough of a delay. Schleppel shows up in the nick of time and stops hiding behind things so he can save the group. The skeletal horse that the crowned Death was riding shows up in Miss Flitworth’s barn, and she suggests it be kept. The Fresh Starters are invited to a meal at the University and while everyone’s talking, Poons asks that Ludmilla and Mrs. Cake take care of Lupine, effectively setting them up. Then he leaves the table to find his end. Death is back in his study, then gets up and travels to Miss Flitworth’s house; he finds the chests of gold the villagers always assumed she had tucked away, but one of the trunks has a wedding dress, letters, and a music box with two figures dancing. He goes to confront Azrael, the great Death under which all other Deaths are ordered. Discworld’s Death is met by him, and by the Auditors who would see him punished, and he tells Azrael that they must care about what they do or there is nothing but oblivion—and even oblivion will end. He asks for time, and Azrael grants it. Then he goes to shops and buys all the most beautiful and expensive flowers and chocolates, and tries to find a “friendly” enough diamond (because the lady at the chocolate shop said “diamonds are a girl’s best friend”), but can’t manage it. So he takes the largest, which is the Tear of Offler (the crocodile god).
Death shows up at Miss Flitworth’s house and hands over all these items, then tells her he means to take her away from all this. Miss Flitworth wants to go to the Harvest Dance, and will hear no other options. Death puts her in a diamond encrusted dress and they go to the dance, but she’s wise to his plan—she saw her hourglass and knows she is running low on time. She appreciates the effort, though, and tells him he should call her Renata. They dance their way through the night, and Renata realizes once it’s over that she was already dead. Death puts her on Binky and then travels through time back to when her fiancé, Rufus, did in fact die, so that they can be together in their afterlife. Windle Poons heads to the Brass Bridge, briefly sees Sergeant Colon, then Death finds him and he’s finally truly dead. Death creates a new large field of corn in his domain, and the Death of Rats shows up, along with the Death of Fleas, the only ones he missed. He thinks of absorbing them too, but remembers the loneliness and Azrael and decides he won’t. They have a talk about what the Death of Rats should ride.
Commentary
I’m just saying that there’s a hefty side plot to this book with the Fresh Starters being an allegory for minority rights groups, and the whole thing starts off as purely comical aside, but by the end we’ve got the lot of them doing all this work to save the city and this group of wayward wizards and… it’s sort of extremely on the nose in terms of how people treat minority groups. Sure, you’ve got struggles informed by systemic oppression, but what are you doing for me today? Oh, you saved our lives, guess we should give to access to the cellar. It’s all very humorous in a groan-help-me-make-it-stop sort of way.
All that being said, I do like Windle’s arc in the story, and the idea that a person might find their “people” and purpose even after their life has ended. We really can’t know when things will find us, the defining moments, actions, and people who will make them up. And sometimes it happens after you’d prefer it—I remember feeling unbearably lonely while studying abroad and suddenly finding a great group of friends in my last few weeks there, while doing an archaeological dig. Was it sad that it happened so late in the game? Of course. Would I have traded those weeks for anything? Absolutely not. Sometimes the important bits are fleeting, or come in right at the end, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a weird facet of life and time.
I think a lot, as a reader and a writer, about how time affects story. People have said that “happily ever after” is all about when you end a tale, and that’s certainly true, but there’s a bigger issue at work here—that when you widen your scope (whether through distance or time), you can see how small any given story really is. It’s a drop in the bucket, every time, no matter how dire the stakes, no matter how many fates held in the balance. Sometimes expanding that scope too far can make the smaller stories feel… not necessarily meaningless so much as baffling. You get the reminder that you’ve invested a great deal of brainspace, energy, even love, into something quite tiny. This is true in plenty of SFF narratives, including the big banner ones; Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Star Trek, all of these stories have histories and futures that get plotted out and rendered in such detail that their starting points can become too distant, almost fragile-seeming. It can make you feel lost, even as a devotee.
I’d argue that Death speaking to Azrael is somehow an all-encompassing reversal of this conundrum. In the space of a few pages, Pratchett proves to us that the universe is infinite and unending—the acknowledgement that the Clock of the universe’s existence goes around once, but said clockwork can be wound up again is a particularly beautiful touch—and also that every little thing within it matters. Every moment, every story, every ending, and every aspect of Death, who has to care because the caring creates being. And being matters more than anything.
We’ve been given the macro-view of the universe and it makes the small story more immediate, more important. Death goes to Azrael to argue for his existence, but also to ask for a little time to make up for what Renata gave him, a gift before her passing. He gives her physical gifts, too, that she hasn’t much use for (though “here is a diamond to be friends with you” is forever engraved on my heart), and then something far better, a night out where she can dance the way she remembers being able to when she was young.
In the last story we watched Death fumble in his understandings of romance and affection as he tried to set up his daughter with Mort. But Discworld’s Death is different from other Deaths, and now the experience of being Bill Door has also changed him. It would seem he fell a little bit in love with Renata Flitworth (platonically or not, it makes little difference), and he shows that in the only way he truly can—a little more time, and an end that reunites her with the man whom she never got to marry. But it starts with this plea to a much greater entity that himself, and a hope for understanding.
FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST.
As the precept to a certain manner of faith, I can think of very little more compelling than that. And as Pratchett continues to construct and build out the Discworld—his own corner of being—I think we learn far more about what he wishes for us through the reaper that watches his realm.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Tons of references in here, from Alien to Indiana Jones to It’s a Wonderful Life. They’re fun little bits to pick out. The use of the color pink for the alien parasite also put me in mind of the slime from Ghostbusters II.
- Ridcully says that saving the undead Windle is a “miracle of existence” to which the Bursar replies “Like pickles,” and this confuses everyone except me. I’m with the Bursar. Like pickles, miracle of existence that they are.
- The Lecturer of Ancient Runes arguing that shouting “bonsai” (like the warriors of the Counterweight Continent) isn’t a good idea because “We’ve got a totally different cultural background. It’d be useless,” is actually a fair start at having a conversation about cultural appropriation, though they don’t quite get there.
- “Mrs. Cake always assumed that an invitation to Ludmilla was an invitation to Ludmilla’s mother as well. Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them.” That would be my mother. The only thing that can be done is not letting her know about the invitations.
- After doing a little ruminating last week on Death and gender, a weird implosion occurred online where TERFs tried to insist that Pratchett held with their transphobic views, and his daughter weighed in firmly negative to that, and then some very shoddy thinkpieces about what his work meant and how we should handle subjects like “Death of the Author” popped up. And… nevermind the fact that the internet is full of stories from fans who will talk of how warm and accepting and hilarious and lovely Sir Terry was in person, I’m just exhausted and flabbergasted that people can read these books and think that an author who devotes so much page-space to the idea that perception and belief create reality would ever hold with the idea that “too bad, your private bits determined your gender.” And that’s without even bringing up Cheery Littlebottom (who we haven’t gotten to yet), or the fact that good satire doesn’t punch down. And Pratchett is, in addition to many things, a superb satirist.
Pratchettisms:
It was, as he was wonderfully well placed to know, merely putting off the inevitable. But wasn’t that what living was all about?
The writing on them hadn’t fully ripened yet, but Windle would have bet his afterlife that it would eventually say something like SALE!!!!
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Change the perspective. The furrowed landscape falls away into immense distances, curves at the edges, becomes a fingertip.
And, with great relief, and general optimism, and a feeling that on the whole everything could have been much worse, Windle Poons died.
I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.
Next week we’re back with the coven as we begin Witches Abroad! We’ll read up to “She’d really seen it in a bowl of jambalaya she’d prepared earlier.”
“I also gave you a stop.”
This reread is so good… thanks Emmet!
Have we talked about the clear inspirations from They Might Be Giants’ song “Particle Man” yet?
I really wish we could know what Terry was thinking about when he conceived this book. It’s really two almost unrelated stories. The Death story would work fine without any mention of the wizards or the Fresh Start Club. At the same time, the wizards et al. only need Death as a deus ex machina to kick the whole thing off.
I suspect that Terry started it as the wizards’ story but got involved in the backstory of why Death was unavailable.
As far as the wizards’ story, the idea of malls (in Britain known as out-of-town shopping centres) sucking the life out of the urban area and into the suburbs (and, later, out of the suburbs into the exurbs) is all too real. And rarely for the good.
The wizards going back for Poons is truly heroic. And the mental image of them riding into battle on a shopping cart is sublime. BTW, IMHO, regarding the cultural appropriation of bonsai/banzai, it points out that cultural appropriation is fine, as long as it’s not mean spirited, which this wasn’t, and as long as it is done well, which this also wasn’t.
Moving on to the Death story, I loved, and somewhat identified with, Death’s concept of traditional human courtship rituals where more is never enough in theory but where it turns out that all Renata wanted was a last dance and, though she never said it, an eternity with her fiance.
The concept of giving time to someone else hit a chord with me. I’ve lived a full life and I’m old and decaying. If it was possible to transfer some of my lifetimer grains to my sons I’d do it.
The other concept that hits home is the idea of boredom that affects Azrael and Death’s recommendation that caring gives existence meaning.
That is all.
We never did find out what happened to the Death of Fleas.I don’t recall him from subsequent books.
@6 The Death of Fleas (and the dog) are never seen again. Perhaps they ran away together.
@1: “IT GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP.”
@5: Yes, that is one of my favorite lines too.
And I really love the disdain that Death shows when the new Death wears a crown. Death is a good servant, but a terrible master.
At the end of the Signet (US) pb, an odd glitch: the text refers to cornfields, but after chivvying Albert away Death watches “the wheat dance in the wind”. (I wonder if this is a fail in the conversion of UK to US English, e.g. different meanings of “corn”.)
ISTM this book takes longer to wrap up; OTOH, it’s got a lot to wrap up.
I am … fascinated … by the effort to claim Pratchett for the side of narrowmindedness.
Pratchettisms:
…extending a hand that would have been thin and pale if it were not pink and stubby. (To go along with the rest of the Notfaroutoe posing.)
One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow. Just in case we’d forgotten the opinion of The Sound of Music from Good Omens.
@@.-@:
Sometimes it just wipes the life, instead of moving it elsewhere; I was still living outside DC when many of the shops I had known were erased (not starved, outright erased) by the Rockville Mall. The city center was rebuilt after the mall failed, although it’s now rather bland and yuppy-oriented.
Also: my read would be that Death came first — ISTM it was his turn for a story, and the wizards were just side comedy — but in any case the two brace each other, where either alone would make a thin (or padded) book.
@@@@@ 9:
Yes–“corn” precedes Europeans encountering maize and its descendants, and in British English is a general term for grain.
@7 – Thank you. So we might say that the Death of Fleas hopped it.
And not just Cheery Littlebottom, but in fact, many…
But we’re not there yet.
Doubtless it’s me being idiotic, but I’ve never really understood what happens to the auditors at the end:
or to be more precise, why this happens. What have they realised?
The Auditors, as a group, survived and will be back.
I think their realization was that Azrael not only was siding with Death but also, and perhaps worse, had a bit of a personality of his own.
As to the blue flames, I assume that they were just popping back to whatever realm they exist in.
@13,
By becoming enraged, they became personalities, and therefore could not survive as Auditors. We see more of this in The Thief of Time.
As I recall, Pratchett once said that he wrote an extra thousand words just so that Azrael’s response (in 1000pt font) would appear on a new page. As in, turn the page to see the word.
It worked in the hardback edition, but re-paginating for the paperback…
@14 & 15
Thanks. That’s what I had assumed but I was always uncertain.
@13, @15: The reason I speculated that they returned to their realm is that when an Auditor develops a personality he is immediately replaced by another one. Since no others appeared I felt that my assumption made more sense.
To all and sundry.
About here in the timeline, Terry wrote a throwaway, very short story for a promo magazine which includes Corporal Carrot interviewing, and getting the better of, Death. If you want to take a few minutes it’s at:
https://www.lspace.org/books/toc/
Terry apparently doesn’t like Punch and Judy shows.
Much as I love the phenomenon of composting, the living, person-eating compost heap in the previous section is a nightmare. Like the polluted river spirit in Spirited Away — less toxic, but just as awful to get engulfed by. But it’s mitigated by the wizard shenanigans and jokes, along with inducing memories of this song. The living mall and the living, malevolent trolleys are even scarier, in multiple ways, and rather less mitigated.
Mark Reads commenters have pointed out the fact that this is “a story wherein a Good Zombie fights an Evil Shopping Mall,” a story where undead heroes save themselves and the living from “the Death of Cities.” That thematic fit makes it more satisfying to think about.
It couldn’t be alive, could it? Life was more rounded.’That reminds me of biomimicry speaker Jay Harmon saying “If people were meant to live in boxes, we would have corners.”
This book displays the popular and hilarious trope Gosh Dang It to Heck!
I like the wizards thinking a “dichotomy” is a type of surgery, and the clock in Death’s house killing time.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn on top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do. Why is it that some people can’t see a cairn without building another one? I’ve seen a wide creekbed covered with the things. And in a national park, where cairns are used as trail markers and visitors are thus forbidden to create more, I found a flat-topped boulder covered in mini cairns made of pebbles.
I’m amused that even priests in “Darkest Howondaland” are terrified of Mrs. Cake. Death might be a more frequent visitor to that particular temple, given its nature.
The dancing scene saddened me…because it reminded me how much I miss contra dances, a casualty of COVID.
Reaper Man was 126th in the Big Read.
Pratchett hasn’t always been perfect regarding gender identity in Discworld. I’m cis and haven’t been heavily impacted by it for better or worse, but I’ve increasingly noticed — and seen some trans readers call out — the many usually-irrelevant jokes about men in dresses, jokes about women with hairy faces, the joke about a princess “getting a prick,” and this upcoming description of a sex worker: Definitely a young woman. There was no way she could be mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. He listened and learned and, for many readers, drastically improved over time, and would certainly be in opposition to TERFs. But while his satire is at its best when he punches up (e.g. on classism and economic issues), he did sometimes punch down.
Pratchettism:
“Try telling your knees they’re as old as they think they are, and see what good it does you. Or them.”
Looking ahead:
Ludmilla says the mind-controlled wizards remind her of a golem she used to know. As far as I recall, this is the first mention of golems in Discworld.
When Death studies the lives of the Discworld’s greatest lovers, mention is made of Casanunder the dwarf.
Unfortunately for some people, Mr. Ixolite is not in fact the last surviving banshee.
Aside from Reg Shoe, the Fresh Starters will seldom-to-never get featured or even mentioned again. This disappointed me. I liked them.
This book involved entropy, chaos, time, chocolate, and Auditors, a combination we’ll see again.
It’s a good thing Death decided to let the Death of Rats continue existing. He’ll eventually be needed as a messenger (and entertaining to readers.)
…really, this book is teeming with plot bunnies.
I believe this is the second-to-last time a mysterious phenomen temporarily seizes the attention of Ankh-Morpork’s populace, before we move into an era of less-mysterious permanent changes.
Punching Down – Terry punches in every direction, iincluding down. To say that some groups are exempt from parody or jokes is in itself denigrating them. The pride rallying cry “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” is not a demand for special treatment but for acceptance and with acceptance comes humor. The question is whether the humor is mean spirited. When Terry punches down it is never mean spirited.
Composting – The heap makes me think less about composting and more about The Blob movie but I actually like the idea of human composting. Take a look at Becky Chambers Record of a Spaceborn Few for an excellent take on the spiritual aspect of it. IRL human composting (or the more friendly “natural organic reduction (NOR)”) is becoming a thing in deathcare.
Yes, Pratchett punches in every direction. I was countering Emmet’s claim that Pratchett doesn’t punch down. And he wasn’t mean-spirited but could be harmful nonetheless, to people who sometimes call him out on it even after his death, and I won’t say that we/they shouldn’t do so. Intent matters, especially as a factor in how we treat an author or make claims about their beliefs, but impact matters more in discussion of harmfulness.
I’m down with human composting, and would favor it (or the more widely-available “green burial”), though I’d most want a whole-body burial at aea. But I’d rather not get eaten alive by a stinky, mucky compost heap.
I don’t think I’ve read this many times since it was initially published. I forgot which book had the shopping mall! It was wild reading it now that many malls around here have died. Reading it since Pratchett’s death was rough as well.
Regarding gender issues, we also have the boogeyman coming out of the closet , with the quote “A bogeyman needs a door like a fish needs a bicycle! Say it now and say it loud, I’m—“
And later, “You’ve got every right to be alive or dead, just as you choose,” said Reg severely.
For 91, this is still VERY open minded. ACT-UP was still making waves. RENT was still a few years away. I was in college and hadn’t known any publicly out gay couples. I remember in the 80s, my mother having a magnet with the saying “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” and it was edgy.
It is wonderful to see significant and positive social change. And of course, Rihanna would know her father’s views.