Snuff - review

In a way, impossibility has never been a problem for Terry Pratchett. He started the Discworld books with impossibility and went on from there. Nobody knew till he did it that you could take an affectionate satire of the conventions of fantasy novels and expand it, and expand it, until it worked as a warm, silly, compulsively readable, fantastically inventive, surprisingly serious exploration in story form of just about any aspect of our world that fell beneath his greedy eye.

It was an incremental process. One idea led to another. He'd begin with a Tolkien-related in-joke about the dwarves in the Discworld baking rock-hard bread. Then the bread would become a weapon for hand-to-hand combat. Then there'd be a murder mystery set in a museum of warrior patisserie. Then it would turn out that dwarf kings were crowned on a scone of stone. He kept opportunistically adding the joke next door, wherever there seemed to be a bit more comic life to be had, and since he was doing this simultaneously with about a million strands of invention, it produced a kind of Darwinian explosion of story.

He was the warm nutrient-rich sea, and he was the natural selector, too. Or rather the tireless logic of his storytelling was. Some early inventions turned out not to be viable. Others faded as the environment of the Discworld changed. Others again flourished mightily and filled their whole niche in the story-ecology but were too limited to grow beyond it. And some just grew, and grew, and grew.

This was true of places, it was true of preoccupations, and most of all it was true of people. Watching Pratchett grow his characters, over 39 novels, has been like seeing recombinant narrative genetics running with almost magical efficiency at almost magical speed. Where other writers are delighted if they come up with just a handful of comic figures with self-sustaining life in them - Don Quixote and Sancho, the three men in the boat, Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore - Pratchett breeds them by the score. All those who live, he adds to the permanent cast. There's never been anything quite like it. Even Dickens didn't keep carrying forward his successes till Edwin Drood was rubbing shoulders with Oliver Twist and Mr Pickwick. Terry Pratchett does.

By now he has a whole population of people his readers are glad to see whenever they recur, inexhaustibly being themselves. Most are ensemble players but a few have proved to have so much expandable life in them that they demand their own sub-series of novels to be the heroes of: Death with four books to his name, Granny Weatherwax with 10, Sam Vimes with eight.

Here in all the abundantly recognisable human biology of the series is the reason we love them. But here, too, is where impossibility begins to bite after all, even for Pratchett, because the further he takes the principal characters, the more detailed and abundant the life he pours into them, the harder he makes his own task of keeping them viable. Which in the Discworld means keeping them unpredictable; keeping them from being exaggerated; keeping them adapted to the world's precise degree of unreality; keeping them from being so omnipotently successful that the environment bends compliantly to accommodate them.

Snuff is a Vimes novel. Reviewerly protocol demands that I not give away any of its contents in detail, so I'll just say that it features the countryside, Jane Austen, slavery, river boats, snot, tobacco and a lot of fisticuffs. It also features a Vimes who, for the first time, feels as if he has acquired more indestructibility, more elaborated superlative Vimes-ish-ness, than can be kept in harmoniously plausible balance with his setting.

The incidental pleasures are as magnificent as ever, and there is no sign at all of the threatened arrival of Mr Pratchett's private version of the Chicxulub impactor. On the contrary, the species of his imagination continue to multiply. But it might be time to give Commander Vimes a genuine holiday.