Lots has happened this week, topped off by the fact that as usual, I am sitting watching Comic Relief and sobbing my eyes out as I always watch the documentary bits out of guilt. This is despite coming home so tired after work this evening that I was sobbing into the washing up as I felt too weary to even stand up. I couldn't do a proper job; how do surgeons do it? How do fire men and women? Police officers? Those poor factory workers who have to work nights? My friend who works for Coca Cola and does the same shifts as the factory workers? Hopeless. The last time I felt like this I was waking up 3 or 4 times a night to feed a crying baby and then getting up at 5 with a toddler and walking another one to school a couple of hours later.
I want to talk about divorce settlements; women being told to get a job or claiming their husband's post-divorce income, but yesterday Terry Pratchett died.
As a massively geeky teenager whose best friends were boys, I had to do something to fit in. It couldn't be computer games, although I spent a shameful number of Saturday afternoons watching my brother and my friends play Doom or Quake or possibly even the first GTA, I'm not sure, it was the late eighties, perhaps most of the time was spent waiting for the games to load. I watched (and loved) Alien and Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2, I saw Metallica in concert and owned an cd single by Joe Satriani, I attempted to play a game involving lots of talking and throwing multi coloured dice with an eccentric number of faces - that wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't quite bring myself to read Lord of the Rings so the compromise was Discworld.
I was resistant at first. This was taking the aspirational geekdom to a whole new level. Reading fantasy? Time to strap on a wooden sword and run through the woods in leather skirts? I was missing a trick actually, had I been able to overcome my crippling lack of self confidence I could have been a warrior goddess in an armour corset, a bosomy wench or a purple velvet-swathed sourcer-ductress and I would have had my pick of pale and hopeful unshaven-yet-strangely-smooth warriors. But I was wrong. This was fantasy, but not as I had previously perceived it through the lens of not actually having read it.
The Discworld is a wonderful place with fantastic characters. It's a parallel world which is flat, balanced on the back of four elephants, riding on the back of Great A'Tuin a giant turtle swimming through space. Ok, so far, so normal fantasy, but it is so much more, Over the series of thirty something / forty (?) books Pratchett wrote satire, parody, pastiche while simultaneously creating a unique cast of characters beautifully delineated and developed over the entire series. If you were fond of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg you could read the witches' books, if, like me, your favourite books were the detective style Guards! Guards! series with the hard drinking, seen it all Captain Vimes you could read those. And if you like Death - well - you could find him in every book, but the ones which explored his complicated relationship with his adopted daughter Susan were some of the best. I loved the satirical representation of the corrupt government of the Patrician and the insight into Macbeth that the witches' books suggested. Clever literary allusions were sprinkled throughout the books but not enough to spoil brilliantly crafted stories.
Of course, as the only girl in that group of tree huggers meant that I was, even then, rather taken by the female characters in the books. There were many strong male characters in the books, many of the main characters were men and when there were female characters they were often cast in conventional female roles - witches, dominant queens, daughters, supportive wives, but there are also many lead women with their personalities as carefully drawn as any of the male roles. In one of the very first books a girl tries to gain admission to the male enclave of the Unseen University - it's called "Equal Rites". I am quite keen on Angua, a great police officer brought in with the city's desire to recruit minorities, not because she's a woman - because she's a werewolf.
Granny and Nanny firmly operate within the roles ascribed to women, but they have no problem controlling the men, and Pratchett very consciously challenges the maiden, mother, crone / whore stereotypes perpetuated throughout literature. But Adora, Angua and most of all Susan take control in their own right and have their own place on the Discworld, it was certainly a place I wanted to be.
He aten't ded. Not while we have the books.
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