Sometimes the whole coven has to go on a road trip. It’s time to accompany some Witches Abroad…
Summary
We have an opening that talks about how stories are not made by characters, but, in fact, work the other way around: Stories are parasites and character are drawn into them. Witches are meeting atop Bear Mountain at the same time that Desiderata Hollow is making her will. She’s not just a witch, but a fairy godmother, and paired to another fairy godmother called Lillith. Desiderata explains to Death when he comes to fetch her that she’s hoping to engineer a situation that gets all three witches (Weatherwax, Ogg, and Garlick) to Genua to see to a ward of hers that Lillith has been manipulating a little too hard. Desiderata goes to her rest while Lillith plots her happy ending in earnest now that the other fairy godmother is out of the way. At the sabbat, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Gammer Brevis and Mother Dismass are trying to figure out who will take over Desiderata’s territory now that she’s gone. Magrat is suggested, and Granny and Nanny argue about who will go to the late witch’s house to collect the wand.
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Battle of the Linguist Mages
The wand makes its way to Magrat regardless, due to the note left to the local poacher who buries Desiderata. Granny and Nanny enter Desiderata’s cottage and go through things in an attempt to find a wand that isn’t there, and it’s in the witch’s mirror that Granny sees Lillith; she promptly breaks the mirror. Nanny Ogg tries to find out why she would have done such a thing, but Granny’s not talking. Magrat eventually joins them with the wand and they find out that Desiderata bequeathed it to her. The wand also came with specific instructions: Go to Genua and stop a young woman from marrying a prince. It also contains a post-script telling Magrat not to let Granny and Nanny come along. (Unbeknownst to Magrat, this was to ensure they would, in fact, accompany her.) They are seen off by the town, with Nanny’s son Jason fretting over why his mother would deign to go on such a long trip. Granny finds herself dismayed over Magrat’s choice to wear trousers, and Nanny’s willow-reinforced witch hat and red boots (and her insistence on bringing Greebo the cat along).
They travel for a bit, but Granny won’t allow them to get high enough to see where they’re headed. They land for the night and it’s about to snow, so Granny and Nanny find a dwarf mine and demand to be let inside. This group’s king isn’t exactly happy to see witches, but figures it’s fate because their mine has had a cave-in. Magrat still doesn’t know how to use the wand, but she manages to transform the fallen rocks into pumpkins (everything turns into a pumpkin) by wishing, and the dwarfs are rescued. They give the witches a boat and provisions, and advise them to take the river through the mountains to Genua. As they’re heading down the stream, they find a lot of pumpkin packed for food, along with dwarf bread. A creature approaches them on the water claiming it’s its birthday, and Granny hits it over the head with an oar. Granny and Nanny starts arguing about Nanny’s propensity for singing inappropriate folk songs as Magrat notices that the water is getting choppy and they’re about to head over a waterfall. She tries to fix it with the wand and turns their boat into a pumpkin.
Lillith is using her mirrors to find out as much about the witches as possible while the Duc sulks nearby. She’s done something to him to help him keep up his appearance in front of people, and has promised him a kiss from a young woman. The witches get off the river and decide to follow it by flying. They arrive at a town for the night where the people seem generally dreary. There’s garlic in everything because unbeknownst to the trio, this village is being menaced by a vampire. This comes to an end when, after being foiled twice trying to get into the witches’ rooms, the vampire transforms into a bat and is promptly caught and eaten by Greebo. Lillith has the Duc sentencing citizens for not following “narrative expectation”; they imprison the local toymaker for not whistling or being jolly or telling stories to children. Mrs. Pleasant (a local cook), goes to tell Mrs. Gogol (a local voodoo woman) what Lillith is up to.
Commentary
We’ve arrived at the third Witches book, and it’s great to see our unintended coven thrust back together again. But before I get into that, I’ve got to go off on a tangent because it will not leave me alone:
Somehow I’d forgotten about the New Orleans angle with the city of Genua in this book, and now my brain is utterly melting over the fact that unless people are being extremely dishonest about its genesis (which, why), somehow both Pratchett and Disney decided to set their vaguely “Frog Prince” based stories in New Orleans (or the Discworld equivalent thereof).
I honestly don’t remember which of these I read/watched first, and I’m pretty sure my brain glossed over it by deciding that one was somehow inspired by the other, but this time I got stuck on it and realized that was probably unlikely. I went into some old articles online and found (according to interviews around the film’s development) that the New Orleans setting for The Princess and the Frog was chosen by the creative team because they felt the place had “magical” qualities and it was animation chief John Lasseter’s favorite city. And of course, truth is often stranger than fiction, so it’s entirely possible that this was just a weird fluke of similarity. But there’s also a quote from Pratchett on L-space that states that Genua “is a ‘sort of’ New Orleans with a ‘sort of’ Magic Kingdom grafted on top of it.” So Disney is written into the bones of this book too.
…The hell?
I dunno, I’m just saying, the fact that he starts off with this whole aside about stories being parasites that infect us and do what they’re going to do with people, makes this possibly random similarity feel far more… freaky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt something that could be described as the “heebie-jeebies,” but I’ve got them right now. Sort of comical terror that I wanna shake off my person.
There’s a lot of great stuff happening at the start of this book, including the play on how mirrors function in fairy tales, and the introduction of Lillith (who we don’t quite know the identity of yet, though Desiderata kind of gives it away in thinking of her and Granny Weatherwax together), and the problems with the fairy godmother wand. But really, it’s all about this lengthy Lord of the Rings parody, in which Pratchett seems to be saying “if the Fellowship had been a bunch of witches, this all would have gone much faster.”
You’ve got Granny shouting at the dwarfs to let them inside the mines instead of bothering with their invisible runes; the gifting of the dwarf version of lembas; then a version of Gollum shows up and is promptly whacked on the head with an oar and sent packing. The dwarf bread is actually my favorite of these details because what Pratchett describes is something closer to hardtack, which is what many fans have presumed as the basis of lembas for decades. (There are so many nice internet recipes out there suggesting that you flavor your “lembas” with almond or lemon or cinnamon, and every time I read them, I think nice try.)
But that’s only the first part of the journey. When the witches travel, they wind up having several books’ worth of adventures in one go. Comedy is one reason for this, of course—the more shenanigans you get up to in a small span of time, the funnier things are. But there’s a sort of understated feminism to the whole business as well because the witches can handle so much with so little fanfare. Which, of course they can, because that’s how being a woman works. You’re expected to juggle numerous aspects of life seamlessly because society dictates that it should be easy for you. It’s not, but plenty of women manage it anyhow.
And sometimes that ability to manage just comes down to pure eccentricity. If Gytha Ogg hadn’t insisted on bringing Greebo along, they likely wouldn’t have averted the whole vampire situation without even noticing that there was one. She’s more than earned her garlic sausages in bed, no matter what Granny says.
Asides and little thoughts:
- In the last book there was a mention of pickles and in this book there is too, and it’s from Magrat talking about pickling pumpkins and Granny Weatherwax being horrified at the mere idea of doing pickling for herself. Apparently witches love pickles, but Granny is sure to get them given to her.
- There’s that bit about Granny making her goose-grease-and-sage chest liniment, and how it keeps colds away because it smells so terrible that people don’t come near you, and my mind immediately supplied “witch products for social distancing.”
- TEMPERS FUGGIT. Nanny Ogg is a treasure.
- Another of Dibbler’s side-businesses—self-help ninja books? That definitely sounds like a thing he’d try to make money from. Wonder who publishes the books…
Pratchettisms:
This is a story about stories.
Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
Granny Weatherwax didn’t like maps. She felt instinctively that they sold the landscape short.
“We’ve got a lot of experience of not having any experience,” said Nanny Ogg happily.
“He’ll miss his mummy if he’s left behind, won’t he,” crooned Nanny Ogg, picking up Greebo. He hung limply, like a bag of water gripped around the middle.
Far more important, in Lillith’s book, were crimes against narrative expectation. People didn’t seem to know how they should behave.
Next week we’ll read up to “But the Assassins had all left years ago. Some things sicken even jackals.”
Nanny Ogg is indeed a treasure. I always picture her as my own maternal grandmother, who upon meeting my (5’11”) now wife for the first time twenty years ago exclaimed “good lord girl, if I had legs like that that all of my dresses would barely cover my peepee!”
Gramy was 4’10” and could also see the future in the foam atop a mug of beer. She’s gone now, but at least she got to meet her great-grandkids before she met Bill Door.
My favourite of all the Discworld novels. For me it manages to balance the “parodying round world stuff” better than some earlier novels.
Plus pTerry gave himself an out-clause in the first few paragraphs with the whole “stories are parasites and keep happening” thing.
Wonder who publishes the books… Ankh-Morpork is such a mix of periods that I have no trouble seeing something of 18th-century Philadelphia; Dibbler might have found printing equipment that had just happened to fall off the back of a cart, or might have conned somebody with a press into printing this book, but he probably was his own publisher.
I had reread this relatively recently to remember the framework for the ending, but I’d forgotten how much Granny is still presented as a cartoon — ignorant, provincial, and easy to manipulate by contrariness — at least at the beginning; later she uses the image to con card sharps (and even with the dwarfs she expects her image to have preceded her), leading me to wonder how much she’s been conning people for decades vs how much Pratchett decided to put more depth in the character.
More good lines:
Magrat would be the first to admit she had an open mind. It was as open as a field, as open as the sky. No mind could be more open without special surgical implements.
The Oggs were what is known as an extended family — in fact, not only extended but elongated, protracted and persistent. No normal sheet of paper could possibly trace their family tree, which in any case was more like a mangrove thicket.
The witches flew along through a maze of twisty little canyons, all alike. [A token non-Tolkien reference…]
I see much of this book as the anti Disney fairy tales. Disney, in its movies and Disneyland attractions, takes Grimm’s Fairy Tales and sanitizes them. Terry proceeds to destroy them. The New Orleans connection is different from Disney’s. Disney used it for cinematic purposes. Terry used it to tap into American Fairy Tales and witches.
Pratchettisms
“Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in a purr.”
“It’s far too early in the morning to be early in the morning.” (Nanny Ogg)
“Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.”
One of my favourites. The story just wanders along taking its own time until you realise that it has been developing all the way through. The twist of the fairy tale scenarios that the witches keep wandering into being like “first drafts” for Lilith just makes them that much better.
First reading this, I was just…baffled at the lord of the ring references; that I just couldn’t comprehend it. I was like…wow, and I thought some of the conan references were bold. The vampire shennagins were straight out of a looney tune sketch, and I frigging loved it. Honestly, this book is just pure gold on the comedy.
This would probably be my favorite Discworld book if I had to choose one, though I love the three subsequent witch books just as much. It’s also one of my favorite fairytale mashups, a subgenre that I categorically love.
One reason I love the witch books so much is the diversity of the witches. There are unique Discworld wizards like Ridcully, Rincewind, and the Librarian, but most of the rest (before and after this point) come in a few basic types and tend to have shallow characterization; they mostly function as an ensemble cast. There are dozens* of witches in the Lancre and Tiffany subserieses collectively, and while some of them share one of the many specialties, nearly every one of them who we spend time with is a distinctive individual** with her own personality, strengths, flaws, interests, and approach to witchcraft. Even some of those who we only meet briefly (e.g. Desiderata) or only hear about (e.g. Goodie Whemper, Black Aliss, Mabel Peavey who’s reported here to have just died while mountain climbing at age 119) are vivid and interesting to me.
*The L-Space Wiki has a “directory” of Discworld witches, aspiring/apprentice witches, and people who are basically witches but don’t use the term. By my count, 33 are featured on-page and 22 more are mentioned. It excludes most men with “magical abilities like witches,” e.g. Jason Ogg.
**Including the witch who’s two people in one body and the witch who’s one person in two bodies.
It’s nice that some people profit from outsiders looking for bears on Bare Bear Mountain, but that kind of mixup isn’t fun for everyone. I used to be a ranger at Acadia National Park, which has locales with names like Seal Harbor, Otter Point, and Eagle Lake where those creatures are seldom in evidence, and had to deal with disappointment from people wanting to see them there (or see other famous Maine wildlife not common in this particular fragment of Maine, such as moose, bears, and puffins).
I have severely impaired vision, so I envy Desiderata’s use of second sight to bypass the eyes and see the present perfectly. (Also her ability to make her laundry do itself, though I’d rather have the Luggage for that.) Witches might find my current squint admirable if I was a witch, but not if it was because I couldn’t see well enough to do the job.
I like the pun of Magrat being accused of “currying favor” with Desiderata by visiting her and eating her foreign-style cooking. And an ogle being an “oggle” in the Ramtops. And Jason worrying about what might happen to any fierce wild endangered beasts that attacked Granny and Nanny.
The “mystic Horseman’s Word” is all very well, but I doubt all aggressive horses have the requisite “goolies.”
“Yeah, it’s the slimy ones you have to watch out for.” Truth. I didn’t watch out for Gollum, and the little darling stole my heart in 2004 and never gave it back.
Nanny’s postcards are even funnier than most of Carrot’s letters.
I’m unsure which fairytale the toymaker is failing to conform to, but all I can think of is Pinocchio because I love that ridiculous book. Thus, in Lilith’s place, I would personally exempt a toymaker from whistling, singing, and storytelling if he promised to get swallowed by a sea monster or provided documentation of having done so. (The Swallowed Man was awesometastic, BTW. Thank you, Tor, for alerting me to its existence.)
I hate spicy food, and even I want to taste Mrs. Gogol’s gumbo.
Dwarf bread isn’t quite the same as hardtack (or cram, the non-Elven LOTR equivalent). It contains things like gravel and, when possible, used cat litter.
@3: I always assumed Dibbler used Goatberger Publishing or some similar engravers’ outfit, though Dibbler wouldn’t be above getting around the ban on movable type if he could. When we see a printing press on a cart collide with someone, it won’t be Dibbler.
Pratchettisms:
“You can’t trust folk songs. They always sneak up on you.”
Lilith held a mirror up to Life and chopped off all the bits of Life that didn’t fit.
Looking ahead:
The Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite is introduced here, as a footnote to this incisive Pratchettism: It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the farther away it is.
Most witches didn’t believe in gods […] It would be like believeing in the postman is funnier when we know that a postman will briefly be the avatar of a god, the god honored by postmen.
The Ramtops are the kind of mountains where winters went for their summer holidays. Now this only makes me think about the heart of Winter, and the more-terrifying heart of Summer.
@3: Who publishes the books is an interesting question that had not occurred to me.
In AM, at the time, Dibbler’s only option would be the Guild of Engravers which, contrary to his basic ethos, was expensive.
The printing press would not come to AM until years later. Dibbler will be involved in this, tangentially.
There are hints that the Agatean Empire or Omnia had printing presses. So perhaps he contacted one of his relatives like Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala (Agatean Empire) or Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah (Omnia).
There’s also a recollection I have (which I can’t narrow down) that Dibbler has worked with monks to produce a “green liquid” from their ancient recipe and to make souvenirs rapidly. They might have published this for him.
Just my speculations.
@7/@8:
Was movable type outright banned at this time, or just not known? I’ve forgotten that detail from IIRC The Truth.
Note that printing presses and movable type are credited to the same person in Wikipedia in our history, but the idea of something mechanical to speed up wood-block printing could have been around for some time on Discworld. It would have been worthwhile; per the docent of a tour of prints at the local art museum, wood blocks are good for a few thousand copies — and per observation, printing from engraving is slow until you have a fairly elaborate press. (I’m nowhere near an expert on printing, but I picked up bits and pieces because it was an interest of the artist whose set designs I built in high school.)
We’ve already seen that Dibbler can con on a large scale; I can easily see him presenting this book as get-rich-quick scheme to an apprentice wood-block carver, or even partnering with someone trying to start their own business, rather than going to whatever established service existed. He’s just the sort of I-have-the-idea-you-do-the-work-we-split-the-profits type that authors dread running into.
@9: Ah hah! Problem solved.
I hadn’t thought of woodcut pamphlets but they existed on Discworld. They are first mentioned as Constable Visit’s Omnian tracts in Feet of Clay which, according to L-space’s timeline is only two years from now. The publishing company of Toplis and Dibbler may have already existed.
BTW, movable type printing presses were definitely banned by Vetinari at the start of The Truth but there is no indication of how far back the ban or the presses existed.
Re: Disney’s The Princess and the Frog – the movie script is loosely based on the book series by E.B James, Tales of the Frog Princess. The New Orleans setting is not in the books, but when you think swamps, it’s gotta be in the top 3… I’d say coincidence. Genua has a darker vibe. Something about Pratchett’s take on voodoo reminds me a bit of the short story by Ellen Klages, Basement Magic.
According to the Annotated Pratchett Files, Pratchett explained this book’s setting thusly: “Genua is a ‘sort of’ New Orleans with a ‘sort of’ Magic Kingdom grafted on top of it. It had its genesis some years ago when I drove from Orlando to New Orleans and formed some opinions about both places: in one, you go there and Fun is manufactured and presented to you, in the other you just eat and drink a lot and fun happens.”