“The Colour of Magic” by Terry Pratchett (Published June 21st 2012 by Corgi (first published 1983)). Image via Goodreads.
On my second reading (as part of this project) of The Colour of Magic, I read the book more slowly, and even took notes – which awoke one of the beasts in my head to whisper “Research project?” all too enticingly, but for now I’m managing to keep said beast dormant. But this gave me the opportunity to really luxuriate in Pratchett’s language – it’s so rich and witty – and to see the jokes I missed before. This is one of the joys of this book; it’s great as a quick, entertaining read, and also incredibly rewarding if you read it more slowly, contemplatively. So this post will definitely be full of spoilers, if you’ve not yet read the book. If such is the case, I’ll say goodbye to you here, but you should read The Colour of Magic as soon as you can; it really is a great introduction to a marvellous world.
The book begins at a great distance from the story proper, establishing the fundamental construction of the Discworld, notably the fact that it is carried through space on the backs of four elephants, who themselves stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, a turtle. The first sentence is quite wonderful:
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…
(p.11)
Pratchett thus creates a theatre, a stage on which the Discworld will be enacted, albeit a theatre which has apparently seen better days, with faded curtains being drawn back to set the scene. It’s a very neat way of establishing the geography of the planet, which, as becomes apparent, is crucial to the story. Pratchett’s love of language, and the ways in which he plays with it, are similarly evident from the start. My favourite example at this early stage is the anecdote about the cosmochelonian trying out his new telescope. “Chelonian” is an adjective meaning “Of or belonging to the order of Reptiles called Chelonia, distinguished by having the body enclosed in a double shell, and comprising the various species of tortoises and turtles”, from the Latin “chelonia” (Oxford English Dictionary online); I must now thank the friend who explained this to me. Thus a cosmochelonian studies space turtles, like A’Tuin. I would recommend having a dictionary to hand to get the most out of the book, but that depends on how much you enjoy words in and of themselves; I can’t get enough of them. The cosmochelonian anecdote also taught me a bit more about science, as I looked up the word albedo (the focus of the young scientist’s research on that evening), but I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to look that up should it so appeal. I particularly enjoyed this prologue because it started very large, and became gradually smaller and smaller, focusing more and more closely upon the story at the heart of the book, the story which will take us through the Discworld. From A’Tuin, we move slowly to the spiral of smoke coming from Ankh-Morpork, a particularly colourful city state which features heavily in the Discworld books.
Even then, we are still kept at a distance, albeit a distance of mere minutes/seconds, depending on your reading speed, from the two central protagonists (given that the book considers in some detail what, exactly, a hero is, I don’t want to use that word), as Ankh Morpork, a character, or possibly several characters, in its (their) own right, takes centre stage, as The Colour of Magic proper begins. Pratchett uses fire as our guide to the cityscape; we first see the Wizards’ Quarter, where we are introduced to the titular colour of magic, albeit under its proper name, octarine, before moving through the various industries and their locations within the city. It also gives a brief but telling indication of the nature of the city’s people, as the rich nobles try to break the bridges down to stop the fire from reaching them. Yet we still don’t meet the aforementioned protagonists, instead joining two definitely shady individuals who are watching the fire from the hills. I was particularly entertained by Pratchett’s treatment throughout the book (and, I think, the series) of the brawny, probably brainless hero figure, who carries more arms than he wears clothing, like our world’s Conan the Barbarian (the film version, at least) and He-Man; said treatment begins here, with the character of Bravd the Hublander, of whom Pratchett says “[i]f it wasn’t for the air of wary intelligence about him it might have been supposed that he was a barbarian from the Hubland wastes” (p.16). I also like Bravd for being one unfortunate letter off being named “Brave”, yet still making a go of it as, in fact, a barbarian from the Hubland wastes, as we soon discover.
We discover the Discworld in the company of two specific characters. As Rincewind is native to the continent where the bulk of the action takes place, he is our guide as much as he is Twoflower’s. Twoflower is the Discworld’s first tourist, having come from the Counterweight Continent to Ankh-Morpork, where he fell in with Rincewind, employing him as a guide. It’s an interesting balance to see the Discworld for the first time through the eyes of the experienced, jaded, and mostly terrified Rincewind and the naive, enthusiastic, and always adventurous Twoflower. We meet them as they flee the fire first spotted by the cosmochelonian, but this fire occurs some way into their story. Twoflower is protected, as Rincewind explains to the aforementioned shady individuals, by “reflected-sound-as-of-underground-spirits“, which took me a while to decipher, the process going something like this: “reflected sound”, ok, that means an echo, so … echo-dwarves? echo-orks? echo-gnomes?”. As Pratchett explains later in the book, the correct translation is “echo-gnomics”. See what I mean about his wonderful use of language? At this stage, as the fire is slowly extinguished, we also meet the Luggage, Twoflower’s trunk, made of sapient pear wood, and with feet allowing it to follow behind its owner and avoiding the horrors of said owner having to carry heavy suitcases/rucksacks; yes, I am jealous, but onwards we will move.
“Onwards” at first actually means backwards in time, to the moment of Twoflower’s arrival, as seen by Blind Hugh the beggar. Yes, “seen”. As Pratchett puts it,
[i]t was the man who engaged the attention of Blind Hugh, one of the beggars on early duty at Pearl Dock. He nudged Cripple Wa in the ribs, and pointed wordlessly. (p.23)
I loved this little throwaway moment; it’s one of the wonderful things about reading Pratchett, finding the beauty in the details. Twoflower’s wealth (mostly carried in his luggage), and the passionate relationship of Ankh-Morporkians with gold, are established together, but as a linguist, and after a lifetime travelling to non-English speaking countries, Twoflower’s attempts to communicate are perfect, as he depends on his dictionary to help him find “an hotel, tavern, lodging house, inn, hospice, caravanserai” (p.25). It unnerves the locals, who have never met a tourist before, and they believe it to be some form of magic. Nonetheless, Hugh escorts Twoflower, for renumeration in pure gold, to what will become the reader’s local throughout the series, the Broken Drum.
Rincewind or Strider? (Image via LOTR wiki)
Scrawny, like most wizards, and clad in a dark red robe on which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, fear, boredom, and a lingering taste for heterosexuality. (p.30)
There is nonetheless a certain sense of mystery to this unsuccessful student of magic – how did he only learn one spell, and under what circumstances? Rincewind has managed to survive despite this setback, trading on his wits, his languages (yay! says this linguist. NO I WILL NOT SAY “CUNNING”.), and his apparent ability to assess wealth, value, and, it seems likely, people, with a high degree of accuracy. Twoflower, on the other hand, speaks to everyone he encounters as a friend, and enthusiastically views the world as an adventure to be had. He both participates in and precipitates the action, in addition to functioning as a bystander; he is both a representation of the reader and a character in his own right. Somehow this enthusiasm protects him and makes possible events that Rincewind is frequently at a loss to understand, such as when they survive a bar brawl and end up having their photo taken with the terrified Men of the Watch. This brings me onto my second point about Twoflower, which is that he introduces a variety of new technologies and concepts into Discworld, one of which is photography. The camera is called an iconograph or, as Rincewind describes it, “a box with a demon in it that draws pictures” (p.52).
I’ve been dipping in and out of the Discworld series since I was a teenager, so I do know quite a few of the recurring characters; in The Colour of Magic, I loved seeing the first appearances of several people (and places, for that matter) who (which) are almost as familiar to me as my own family and friends. The Patrician, of course, is enviably self-possessed; the best way I can think of at present to describe him is “blithely threatening”. His habit of eating a variety of sugared sea creatures, beginning with crystallised jellyfish during his first meeting with Rincewind was a small detail that I enjoyed at its first mention, and still more so when he offered his advisor Gorphal a candied starfish. Gorphal’s Jeeves-esque response (for all that his master is decidedly un-Woosterian) is perfect: “I am yours to command, master …. [s]ave perhaps in the matter of preserved echinoderms” (p.62). It is also in the first scene in the Patrician’s chambers that we first meet Death, another of my most beloved Discworld characters, and it is there that we learn something of the relationship between Death and wizards, as Death comes personally to take wizards when they die; thus as the Patrician threatens Rincewind, a black shadow flickers in the corner of the room, but never quite materialises. Death’s subsequent pursuit of Rincewind becomes particularly infuriating to Death, but is a delightfully screwball subplot for me. Pratchett’s use of capitalisation to represent Death’s speech is a beautiful illustration of words being given texture, layers, which for this student of medieval books, with their rubrication, historiated initials, and miniatures, has always been a stylistic high point of the Discworld series.
I mentioned at the start of this post that on my second reading of The Colour of Magic I made notes as I read. Well, I made a lot of notes, and this post is already ridiculously long. I’m going to point out just one more of the small details that I loved in this book, and one change that puzzled me, before writing two final paragraphs to discuss the dragons and the structure of the book, and a wee conclusion. Then – finally – my Discworld Reading Challenge will finally be underway.
Who here has read any of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books? Each book in the collection is a compilation of fairy stories, and each book is known by a colour, e.g. The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on. The colour of magic in the title of the first Discworld volume is octarine: “the basic colour of which all colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow purple” (p.41). I was delighted when there was reference made to Twoflower reading The Octarine Fairy Book when he was a toddler.
I became an avid reader of fantasy by different paths, by reading books such as, on the first path, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge (1946), and, on a second path, the series of Dragonlance books. Pratchett’s parody of such books as Dragonlance was very funny, and Liessa’s rise through the ranks of the Wyrmlords greatly resembled the story of Kitiara Uth Matar. I’m sure that Pratchett would have had several such works, of varying quality, of dragon-based fantasy fiction, in mind when he wrote this section; please leave a comment if you want to suggest some titles.
Finally, the structure of the book was in itself quite interesting. It read as a series of different stories, with prologues, which eventually come together. The first prologue is our first introduction to the Discworld, moving closer and closer, from an astral plane to an individual on a planet in said plane. The Colour of Magic proper begins similarly at a distance from the action, but on this occasion the action comes to those watching from this distance, as Rincewind and Twoflower ride towards, and are stopped by, the bandits Bravd and Weasel. Rincewind then tells them the story up to the point where they four meet, before they split up again, to end the story. The prologue to the next story, The Sending of Eight, initially reads like a travel guide, and explains a great deal about the makeup of the Discworld, and about its gods, and their attitude to the world and its inhabitants. Some of their names and characteristics are particularly interesting, such as Blind Io, with his several pairs of eyes floating around him. My knowledge of Io from Greek mythology is that she (not he, unlike here) was one of Zeus’ many conquests; he turned her into a heifer to hide her from his furious wife, Hera. But she realised who the cow was, and sent the hundred-eyed giant Argus to watch over her. Does anybody have any thoughts on their conflation here? The Sending of Eight proper focuses again on Rincewind and Twoflower, whose differing perceptions of what they are seeing increasingly seems necessary to give us a more rounded view of the reality of Ankh-Morpork. The two stories, of the gods playing with people’s lives, and of Rincewind’s and Twoflower’s travels, become alternating scenes in a single story, and it is the survival of tourist and wizard, that ends the story. There is no prologue to the third story, in which the travellers come to the Wyrmberg, or to the fourth story. I think that once the gods have finished their game, the attention focuses entirely on the main storyline; we no longer see the Discworld from a distance. I would suggest that the last story, Close to the Edge, functions as an epilogue to the whole story, because as the opening story moves gradually into the Discworld, into Krull, where the first voyages over the Edge took place, the final story similarly moves to Krull, where it is Rincewind’s turn to go over the Edge, the last we shall see of him until the next book, as it is here that the book ends. Thus as the first prologue moves gradually inwards, the last story moves outwards, taking a similar path, travelling off the Discworld and into the unknown, back down towards the elephants and the Great A’Tuin.
I love The Colour of Magic; there is so much going on, not just in terms of the plot, introducing us to some of the main characters and to the world. I could have written so much more in this post, about the language, the humour, the magic, and (even as far as my non-science brain can see) the science, and so many other influences and ideas expressed in the book. I have read the book three times since the start of the year, and find something new with each reading. I hope and expect that the series will continue in similar fashion.
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