Category Archives: what I’m reading

Fair warning: the following post includes mild spoilers.

If you haven’t yet read anything by Michael Crummey, you need to correct that ASAP. Not because his books are capital-G, capital-L Great Literature (though they are), but because in not reading his work you are denying yourself a great pleasure. I’d rank him as one of the best prose stylists currently writing, but never does his talented wordsmithing distract from his stable of vibrant, humorous, tragic characters or his superb storytelling. Reading a Michael Crummey novel is a balancing act between wanting to read slowly to savor the prose and race ahead to see what happens next.

And because you can’t swing a dead cat in St. John’s without hitting a great writer, I can also personally attest to the fact that he is one of the nicest people you could ever meet (he didn’t even get upset with me for hitting him with a dead cat).

Sweetland is his fourth novel, and like the three previous, it is about Newfoundland’s fraught relationship with its  history. In River Thieves (2001) he tells the story of the extinction of the Beothuk as seen from the perspective of British naval officer; in The Wreckage (2005), he depicts a romance between a Catholic young man and a Protestant girl, and the intrusion of the Second World War into Newfoundland in the form of the recruitment of its young men and the presence of American military bases. Both novels are solid pieces of storytelling, beautifully written; but it was his third novel Galore (2009) that truly blew me away. Set in the fictional outport of Paradise Deep, it is a multi-generational narrative (I hesitate to use the word “epic,” though it comes close to being appropriate in this case) that tells the story of a community and their struggles: with each other, with their own selves, but especially with this hostile geography to which they have been brought by hope, misfortune, or happenstance. Galore is a magical realist novel whose most obvious influence (or at least precursor) is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel, Galore is about a small village beyond the fringes of civilization, in which anything can happen and indeed often does. Crummey employs a combination of harsh realism to describe the hardships endured by the community, and a host of legends and folklore from Newfoundland’s past; the result is a narrative that pivots between a painfully tactile sense of reality and outsized events and circumstances.

Sweetland, by contrast, is set in the present day in the midst of what has become the most recent wave of Resettlement. If you wonder why that word deserves a capital R, you need to know that in the aftermath of Newfoundland joining Confederation in 1949, premier Joey Smallwood embarked on a project of modernization. He had been able to sway the province’s opinion to his side on the Confederation issue by making lavish promises to rural Newfoundland about the financial benefits that would accrue by joining Canada. Part of fulfilling those promises entailed resettling huge swaths of outport populations to more central locations, where they would have access to both the promised financial benefits and such infrastructure as roads and electricity, health care, and education. Huge amounts of money were spent in payouts to those being relocated, and in literally uprooting entire villages.

One of the many bewildering images from Resettlement: a house being towed across the water to its new home.

Resettlement remains a painful wound in Newfoundland’s modern history, as it was carried out more or less by fiat and destroyed countless communities with, in many cases, hundreds of years of history.

Today, there is a similar move (this time termed “Relocation,” presumably to avoid the painful connotations of “Resettlement”) as Newfoundland’s economy, largely buoyed by oil revenues, booms; outports, many whose only connection to the rest of the province is by ferry, find their populations shrinking and aging as the young move to St. John’s or farther afield to Alberta. The government is again offering money to those wishing to relocate—and in the process leaving behind villages that will no longer need ferry service or electricity. But with Smallwood’s high-handedness and the resentment it incurred (and still incurs) ever in mind, the deal now is that Relocation can only happen if a community votes unanimously for it.

Which brings us to Sweetland, which is about a fictional island outport called Sweetland and the argument about Relocation. The village is mostly on board, but for one or two holdouts—among whom is Moses Sweetland, a stubborn old bachelor who refuses to sign on even as his few allies fall away and leave him standing alone. He resists the blandishments of his neighbours, which eventually come to comprise threatening notes, vandalism, and a few gruesome messages in the form of mutilated rabbits.

When a certain tragedy befalls the village, however, particularly affecting Moses, he finally agrees to sign the papers. Perhaps predictably, he does not leave with the rest but effectively fakes his own death by setting his boat adrift and hiding until the village has emptied.

The novel’s first half—which is all about Moses’ relationships with his friends and neighbours, and in particular his autistic nephew Jesse—is a wonderfully nuanced and textured depiction of Moses’ life in his village, and dramatizes the political context to great effect. But it is the second half of the novel, when Moses is left alone on the island without power or any means of contacting the outside world, that Crummey’s narrative reaches virtuosic levels. For one thing, it leaves the political argument behind and becomes the story of a man very slowly losing his mind as solitude and winter implacably close in on him. But it is also where the political argument of the first half opens up into symbolic and indeed allegorical dimensions. Left alone with only the ghosts of the past—and his neighbour’s mutt—for company, there is nothing to mediate between the two Sweetlands, the man and the outport with which he shares a name.

The more I reflect on Sweetland, the more I find it functions as a companion piece to Galore. Where the former is a sweeping story in the mold of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Sweetland is a minutely observed story about a single person in a narrow corridor of time. And yet what they have in common is the vivid sense of the mystery of place, the invidious way in which geography conflates with history in ways that are by turns comforting and pernicious. Galore, by its nature as magical realism, romanticizes a certain dimension of Newfoundland history, but it most emphatically does not sentimentalize it. It is romantic in the true sense of the word, in that it depicts a space outside the settled, domesticated world. If not literal wilderness, Paradise Deep is nevertheless as close as one can be to it while still being inhabited: a marginal space that, in the tradition of romance, is also a mythic space home to the embellishments of reality that extreme geographies spawn.

The first half of Sweetland is neither sentimental nor romantic; the romance of Galore does burble up in the second half however, but only in suggestive, fleeting ways, and only at the fringes of Moses’ decaying sanity. His explicit connection to the village, made first by their common nomenclature, develops allegorically as he erodes along with its structures, as he cannibalizes the village for supplies. Seeking toilet paper (which he kicks himself for not having stockpiled), he plunders his neighbour’s collection of Harlequin romances. Among the pulp novels are a handful of “literary” texts the woman’s daughter had attempted to get her to read, one of which has the bookmark at the halfway point. It is a novel about Newfoundland, he sees, and as a means of passing the time decides that he will finish what she had started:

Half an hour later he was ready to throw the bloody thing in the stove. Three afternoons in a row he sat in the day’s last light with the book, feeling like a man sentenced to dragging beach stones up the face of the Mackerel cliffs. He looked at the cover each time he quit reading, flipped it to inspect the back. A quote from a Toronto paper about “authentic Newfoundland.” Whoever wrote the book didn’t know his arse from a dory, Sweetland figured, and had never caught or cleaned a fish in his life. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

This comic reaction to a novel about “authentic” Newfoundland (my money is on The Bird Artist) speaks to one of Sweetland’s subtle themes, which is the fallacy of authenticity. Though Sweetland is adamant in his refusal to abandon his home, even in the face of overwhelming opposition and threats, he cannot articulate his reasoning to himself. He offers no speeches, articulated either internally or externally, about history or community roots, about the depredation of traditional Newfoundland, about the need to hold fast to one’s principles in the face of nefarious societal change. He is no sentimentalist, and in the final stages of his life bears little in the way of affection for any of his neighbours (with the exceptions of Jesse and his longtime friend Duke).

So why does he reject Relocation for so long, and after capitulating, go to the extreme of faking his own death in order to stay behind? Crummey leaves that questions unanswered, and it is in the very lack of articulation of Sweetland’s motives that the novel ultimately rests. As mentioned above, it is in part the mystery of history and geography: Sweetland’s home as both a lived reality but also an imaginary space, which functions as a representation of Newfoundland more broadly. The fallacy of authenticity on display in the nameless novel he reads finds a somewhat more symbolic articulation in the final few pages of the novel. Not long after winter starts to set in, Sweetland takes refuge from a snowstorm in a cabin once owned by the thuggish Priddle brothers. In a delirium of near-hypothermia (as well as the alcohol and stale pot he finds stashed there), he annotates a map of Newfoundland tacked to one of the walls. He takes the map with him when he escapes back to the village, but forgets about it until the final pages, when he looks at what he has written:

Noticed the map there, spread across the table’s surface, the paper kinked along the rough creases where it had been folded in his knapsack. Stay Home Year scrawled across the top. Sweetland shook his head at that now, at the long list of fanciful harbours and coves and islands and straits he’d pencilled around the coast. Along the entire length of Newfoundland’s south coast were the words Here Be Monsters with a shaky emoticon happy face drawn beside it. His handwriting, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember settling them there.

In one way, Sweetland is a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel about Newfoundland—or rather, the impossibility of reaching an authentic understanding of what I’m calling the conflation of history and geography and its effects, of the representation of place as being at once a set of lived realities and necessarily imaginary. Moses’ literally ecstatic over-writing of the map, especially with the warning Here Be Monsters, evokes the medieval cartographic imagination and the long tradition of romance in which the spaces beyond the known are invariably filled with the stuff of legend. It also however evokes the geographies of Galore, which articulate the truths of story and myth and the unreality of history.

In the end, Moses Sweetland’s very name provides one of the novel’s central ironies: if his surname explicitly speaks to his apparently absolute connection to place, his first name is a cruel reminder that there is no Promised Land, and that the exodus his people undertake is a movement away from home. If there is an epiphany for Sweetland at all, it is at best an ambivalent one, which occurs as he nearly drowns trying to escape his self-imposed solitude:

This was the sway of things, Sweetland knew. There was fighting the sway of things or improvising some fashion of riding it out. And then there was the sway of things beyond fighting and improvisation. It was almost impossible to know the difference between one and the other.

I didn’t post that much this summer … I had all the best intentions, as exhibited in my folder of unfinished blog posts, some of which barely made it past a sentence or two. All of which speaks to the fact that I had a lot on my mind these past few months, but little in the way of closing. Always be closing! Dammit, now Alec Baldwin will deny me coffee …

I hope that will change in the coming months. I am now eleven days into my very first sabbatical, and while my favourite new pastime has been walking up and down my department hallways and making faces at my colleagues as they teach, I do mean for this to be a productive year. And given that being prolific on this blog tends to reflect being productive in other areas, I mean to be posting a lot more here.

I haven’t done a “What I’m Reading” post in a while … which, again, isn’t for a lack of fragmentary paragraphs in my work-in-progress folder. I read a lot this summer, though much of it was re-reading, as I was doing a directed reading course with one of our doctoral students. And there were some unfortunate reading choices (most notably, the Guillermo del Toro collaboration with Chuck Hogan on The Strain), but I also read some pretty extraordinary books. I’ll give you the highlights here.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby and Men Explain Things to Me

This was the summer when I discovered the writing of Rebecca Solnit and fell deeply in love with her gorgeous prose and genre-defying vaguely-autobiographical essays. I had read her without being aware of her for some time, as she is prolific and frequently turned up on online journals and magazines. But it was her now-famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) essay “Men Explain Things to Me” that stuck the landing for me and made me sit up and take notice whenever I saw her name on a byline.

I was in San Francisco for a few days in June and made the requisite pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore. And because I cannot enter a bookstore without giving them money, but also not wanting to be a cliché and buy something by the Beats, I picked up The Faraway Nearby. Next door to City Lights is the bar Vesuvio, made famous by a list of clientele in the 50s and 60s that reads like a who’s-who of San Francisco arts and letters: Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, among others … and the pictures crowding the walls show everyone from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan dropping in for a drink or three (or, presumably in Dylan Thomas’ case, a dozen). Because I’d been tramping all over the city, I had a pint there and started reading Solnit—which turned out to be serendipitous, as she lives in San Francisco. (Lest I felt like too much of a cliché, reading in a famous literary bar, I was out-cliched by a magnitude by a fellow in hipster glasses and big mutton-chop sideburns sitting in an alcove reading On the Road).

The view from my seat in Vesuvio.

Suffice to say, The Faraway Nearby is one of the most gorgeous collections of personal essays I’ve ever read, moving effortlessly between Solnit’s fraught relationship with her mother and her mother’s descent into dementia, through a dizzying series of meditations on winter, Iceland, adventuring, rafting, and the proper methods of preserving several bushels of apricots she finds herself with. The essays are deeply erudite without being esoteric, personal without being mawkish, and written in prose that I can only envy with the white-hot intensity of a thousand stars.

I then read Men Explain Things to Me, a slim volume of essays on women and violence prefaced by the original essay that inadvertently gave rise to the concept of “mansplaining.” Solnit has expressed ambivalence about having become associated with the term, not because it is not a real thing (and as someone who has occasionally been guilty of it, there was a lot of internal cringing when I first read the essay), but because it is reductive. The essays grouped in this short but incredibly powerful book remind us—forecfully—of the original essay’s main thesis, which is that the phenomenon of men condescendingly explaining things to women (even, or especially, when they’re ignorant on the topic) is reflective of the gendered structures of power in the world today and systemic violence that proceeds from it.

Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography

I won’t say much about this book, as I’m slowly working on a blog post talking about it in greater detail. I will say this: it is a bracing and very concise read that manages to make the endless debates in and around the Continental Congresses, and all of the court rulings on the Second Amendment since, not merely not tedious but gripping. It is a persuasive and balanced discussion of the Second Amendment’s origins, interpretations, and evolution, but in some ways, the focus of the book isn’t really the right to bear arms at all: rather, it’s a polemic against constitutional originalism, the judicial philosophy holding that the Constitution must be interpreted in terms of what were the Framers’ original intentions. As it turns out, the Second Amendment (for a variety of reasons) is the perfect departure point for this argument.

As I said, I’ll have more to say about this book at a later time.

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

As I said in my post of July 5^th, I’ve been rationing the remaining Discworld novels against the unthinkable day when Sir Terry will not be around to write any more. Equal Rites has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, both because of my rationing but also because I don’t care as much for the earlier novels. Equal Rites was the third, after The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic; what’s slightly off-putting about the earliest novels (when you have, like me, initially entered Discworld with the more recent novels) is that everything still feels a little formless—as if the landmarks and characters still await greater definition, like rudely shaped clay. Granny Weatherwax makes her first appearance here, and while she is very identifiably Granny, she is also … not. Or not quite. Nevertheless, the novel is hilariously funny: a baby girl is accidentally chosen by a dying wizard to take his place, precipitating a protracted argument between Granny and the wizards of Unseen University about what defines magic, about what is specific to men and women—or wizards and witches—respectively, and how those definitions are arbitrary.

What I loved about this book, coming at it as I am from the far end of Discworld journeying, is how you can see Sir Terry’s shift from the overt parody of his first two novels (in which he’s just basically taking the piss of fantasy as a genre) to a more thoughtful use of fantasy and its conventions to offer a critique of “real world” social and societal mores—which in the end is what tends to define the Discworld novels overall.

Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

Speaking of parodic fantasy that isn’t really parody at all: if you haven’t yet read the first two installments of Grossman’s trilogy about a school of magic and a Narnia-like alternative world, you really must do so. Like, now. The Magician’s Land completes the story begun in The Magicians and carried on in The Magician King, the story of narcissistic and self-absorbed Quentin Coldwater, who is inducted into a secret school of magic called Brakebills at the age of seventeen. As critics have pointed out, it’s like Hogwarts for grownups.

Again, there will be a more in-depth blog post in the future on this book, and the trilogy as a whole. But for now, let me just say: this was about as perfect a conclusion to a fantasy series as has been written.

N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon

No, I didn’t read this because it shares a title with an Echo and the Bunnymen song. My broad research project of the moment is all about humanism and fantasy; one of the problems I have right now is one of representation. That is to say: my current list of authors on whom to focus is almost entirely male, and so I have been on the hunt for fantasy written by women that fits the criteria of the novels I want to look at. N.K. Jemisin was a repeated recommendation, and so I started on her Dreamblood trilogy, set in an alternative world modeled vaguely on Ancient Egypt. Reading fantasy that moves outside the medieval European model is wonderful in and of itself, but Jemisin is a very talented writer who renders her world with wonderful tactility and establishes its mythology with an enviable economy of storytelling. The overarching conceit is that in the city-state of Gujaareh, an elite priesthood exist to harvest “dreamblood,” the magic that exists in sleeping minds. Dreamblood is used for healing and other positive ends, but its reaping by the “Gatherers” kills … and so the Gatherers move at night across the rooftops to harvest it from those who have been judged corrupt.

For several reasons, The Killing Moon is not a novel I will be able to use to argue my broader thesis, but the second book of the trilogy (The Shadowed Sun) sits in the pile of my eagerly anticipated reading.

Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop

About three weeks ago I wrote a post about the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, the rise of police militarization, and The Wire. Largely due to the fact that a friend of mine posted it to Reddit, it received the most hits this blog has ever received, by a magnitude (my average post gets between sixty and seventy hits when it goes up; the most I’d ever had was just shy of three hundred, back when I posted on the whole David Gilmore and guy-guy Lit fiasco; the post on The Wire and Ferguson received twelve hundred, and a comment from David Simon himself. That’s not actually relevant, I just like reminding people of it). While reading the various news items and opinion pieces that ultimately informed the post, I kept hearing about Radley Balko’s book, conveniently just out in trade paperback. So I ordered it.

The book is … terrifying. It exposes in excruciating detail the violence done to the Fourth Amendment—for the rise of SWAT teams in towns with populations as low as fifteen thousand or less has not, ultimately, been about responding to well-armed criminals, but the use of the militarized groups to kick in doors for drug raids. And as the book chronicles, the sheer number of botched raids in which ridiculously armed and armored cops burst into the wrong house, terrorizing the inhabitants and destroying property (and, distressingly, shooting an awful lot of dogs in the process) is bewildering—especially considering how rarely the wronged citizens receive anything resembling remuneration.

Just today there was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the spread of military equipment and munitions to campus police at various universities in the U.S. Campus. Police. Armed with grenade launchers (seriously) and equipped with armoured vehicles. Even before reading that, I’d concluded that Balko’s book is required reading for the contemporary moment.

So as not to end on such a down note, here is “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen—which on reflection, is also kind of a downer, but would weirdly work as a not bad theme song for Jemisin’s novel.

There are a precious few of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels that I have not yet read, and I am clinging to them covetously, putting off reading them because all too soon there will be no more additions to the Discworld library. Sir Terry is still alive and kicking and churning out novels, but he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease—that he remains this prolific is nothing short of heroic. As much as we don’t want to acknowledge it, Discworld devotees know that sooner or later there will be no more novels forthcoming.

Raising Steam is the fortieth Discworld novel (the thirty-sixth if you don’t count the young adult novels), and is still currently in hardcover. I had been putting off buying it, waiting for the paperback but also possibly adding it to the small pile of Discworld novels I was resisting reading. But at Slayage I discovered a fellow Discworld devotee, my new friend Dale whose blog I quoted in my previous post. She had just finished Raising Steam and gifted me with her copy, on the condition that I told her what I thought of it when I was done.

Well … here I go. Fair warning: this post is not so much a review of Raising Steam as it is a working-through of thoughts I have had about Pratchett’s writing for some time, which his most recent novel has managed to bring into something resembling sharp relief.

Also fair warning: spoilers.

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Raising Steam brings the railway to Discworld: it begins as a young engineer named Dick Simnel continues with the experiments with steam that had killed his father, and ends with the new railway connecting the city of Ankh-Morpork—a center of Discworld commerce and culture—with far-flung Uberwald, in the process facilitating a mission of speedy diplomacy that restores the progressive Low King of the dwarfs to his usurped throne … which itself allows for a seismic change to dwarf society.

I’ve subtitled this review “Modernity Comes to Discworld,” but anyone who is more than just a casual reader of Sir Terry’s novels knows that that is more than just a little disingenuous. The Discworld is a fantasy world through and through, and as such displays all of the conventions of fantasy we have come to expect and then some: dwarfs, trolls, goblins, wizards, witches, gods, magic, castles, quests, prophecies, dragons, supernatural plots and conspiracies, and so forth. But in a variety of ways, Pratchett’s novels only present the façade of fantasy. If we define fantasy fiction as a genre that anchors its magical and supernatural elements in an identifiably medieval or at least premodern setting (as George R.R. Martin has said on several occasions, fantasy and historical fiction are “sisters beneath the skin”), Pratchett arguably performs a constant bait-and-switch insofar as that the Discworld and its denizens—or at least those denizens who star in the novels—don’t exactly embody a Tolkienesque sensibility. “Modernity” has been creeping into the Discworld landscape almost from the start.

Even so, the introduction of the steam engine and the railway is still somewhat jarring, for the simple reason that it is perhaps the single greatest symbol of modernity and industrialization. I have written elsewhere that, in the Harry Potter novels, the Hogwarts Express is a peculiarly potent presence in that it functions as a sort of representative time machine—a nineteenth-century bridge between postmodern London and medieval England. In Raising Steam that trajectory is reversed as Dick Simnel’s newfangled gadget hurtles, along with its many enthusiastic passengers, into Discworld’s uncharted future.

Considering Pratchett’s incremental modernization of Discworld, which I’ll discuss below, it is difficult not to read Raising Steam and the massive paradigm shift the locomotive represents as the culmination of a life’s work. As mentioned about, Sir Terry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2007. Mercifully, it has been a mild case, and he does not appear to have missed a step in his writing since then (though now he no longer types his own work, but has to dictate and otherwise work an assistant to get the words on the page). However, his fans wait in dread for the inevitable. Only a few days ago, a friend pointed me to an article in The Guardian, which reports that Sir Terry has had to cancel his appearance at the International Discworld Convention because of his Alzheimers, saying sadly that “the Embuggerance is finally catching up with me.”

Is the railway a parting gift to Discworld? Is he officially ushering it into the modern age while he still can? It might seem odd, in a fantasy series, to impose modern technology on the fantasy world: certainly, Tolkien would have been aghast to have steel rails and belching locomotives cutting a swath through the Shire (as indeed, the dystopian Shire to which the hobbits return was precisely an anti-industrial polemic). But Pratchett has a very different relationship to fantasy than did Tolkien, or really even most people writing fantasy today. The nostalgic quality that inflects much of the genre is largely absent in Discworld—rather, Sir Terry uses fantasy as a comedic means to explore the relationship between narrative’s folkloric tendencies and the exigencies of the modern world.

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The Discworld novels started in 1983 with The Colour of Magic, which was followed by The Light Fantastic. Both of these novels were essentially parodies of fantasy as a genre, with comically outsized heroes, improbable and illogical encounters, and bizarre plot twists as befit characters traveling across a magical landscape. But as Discworld evolved and Sir Terry added more and more stories to the series (he published fifteen Discworld novels between 1983 and 1993), Discworld and its inhabitants took on form and substance that, while unfailingly funny, became less about parodying fantasy and more about employing fantasy to articulate a markedly humanist and pragmatic world view.

Pratchett himself has always been an outspoken humanist, perhaps most famously in his oft-repeated pronouncement that “I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.” In that sentiment one glimpses something essential to the Discworld ethos: the valorization of human potential over divine intervention, and the figuration of people (which in the case of Discworld is not just humans but dwarfs, trolls, vampires, and so forth) as progressive and emergent rather than fallen, postlapsarian beings. Pratchett’s sensibility, not to put too fine a point on it, is an eminently sensible one, which sees more wonder in the simple fact that beings evolved from monkeys invented streetlamps than in any ostensible divine origin:

I find it far more interesting … that a bunch of monkeys got down off the trees and stopped arguing long enough to build this … to build that, to build everything. And we’re monkeys—our heritage is, in times of difficulty, climb a tree and throw shit at other trees. That’s so much more interesting than being fallen angels … Within the story of evolution is a story far more interesting than any in the Bible. It teaches us amazing things. That stars are not important. There’s nothing interesting about stars. Streetlamps are very important, because they’re so rare … as far as we know, there’s only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys! Who came up with philosophy, and gods! And this is so much more interesting, it is so much more right. Admittedly, we err, such as when we made Tony Blair prime minister. But given where we started from … we actually haven’t done that badly. And I would much rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.

I disagree with him on the unimportance or tedium of stars, but his point is well taken (and, really, is just a rhetorical flourish). The above is from a talk he gave for The Guardian, the relevant part of which can be viewed on YouTube:

The Discworld novels articulate and expand on the various facets and implications of such sentiments. His assertion that “In my religion, the building of a telescope is the building of a cathedral” finds numerous corollaries, as he introduces various modern phenomena into Discworld in parodic fashion—though not to parody fantasy as in his first two novels, but rather to use fantasy as a means to parody our own real-world foibles. In Moving Pictures (1990) and Soul Music (1994), cinema and rock and roll, respectively, make appearances on the Discworld scene, in both cases facilitated by quasi-magical circumstances to emerge and reach critical mass before disappearing as the magical framework collapses. But where these end up as one-offs in Discworld, the last fifteen years or so (or, to measure time in Pratchett productivity, sixteen Discworld novels) has seen a number of modern incursions into Sir Terry’s fantasy world taking root and expanding.

Perhaps first and foremost among these is the network of “clacks towers,” which first appears in The Fifth Elephant (1999). The clacks towers are the Discworld analogue to the telegraph: lines of towers in visual range of each other, which relay messages through a series of semaphore-type codes, and which (by the time we get to Raising Steam) run the length and breadth of Discworld and have become integral to both politics and commerce. In The Truth (2000), the printing press arrives in the city of Ankh-Morpork, which gives rise to the invention of the newspaper and the profession of journalism. In Going Postal (2004), Ankh-Morpork establishes the modern postal system; and in Making Money (2007), modern banking and coinage.

It is important to note here that as our image of Discworld evolves over numerous novels, it becomes clear that the city of Ankh-Morpork—center of commerce, polyglot metropolis, and emigration destination for pretty much all races and species in Discworld—comes to emblematize Sir Terry’s humanistic ethos. It is a place where peoples from all over Discworld, both humans of all stripes and species such as dwarfs of trolls, come to make new lives, to earn money to send home, or to flee their homelands. It is not, to be clear, a nice place—it is dirty, overpopulated, violent, capricious, and fickle—but in being distinctively un-utopian (without being actually dystopian), it depicts the inescapable messiness of the humanist project. Some of the most profound conflicts in Sir Terry’s novels occur when individuals or groups of great power (magical or otherwise) attempt to clean up the messiness of humanity and impose a “clean,” neat utopian order—such as happens in Reaper Man (1991), Small Gods (1992), Hogfather (1996), The Truth (2000), Thief of Time (2001), and Night Watch (2002). “The moment you start measuring people,” reflects Sam Vimes in Night Watch, “sooner or later, people don’t measure up.” The imposition of an autocratic, absolute external logic is anathema to Sir Terry. One of his key recurring characters is the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Havelock Vetinari. Vetinari is, for all intents and purposes, the Platonic ideal of the benevolent dictator, a beautifully Machiavellian character in the truest sense of the word insofar as his primary concern is not the maintenance of his own power but the welfare of his city. Though he is a self-described tyrant and at times behaves in a tyrannical manner (certainly, his enemies never fare well), he proceeds from the foundational understanding that a healthy society is one in which individuals must have the freedom to make their own choices, and that the role of government was to make certain no one faction of society’s choices took precedence over any other’s.

(An attitude that pervades many parts of Discworld, even those more specifically medieval and premodern than Ankh-Morpork. The Kingdom of Lancre, for example, the most obviously medieval European region of Discworld, resists any attempt at democratization, but their attitude to kings is such that imposing an absolute monarchy would be monumentally difficult:

The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the king wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practice the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the plowing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them. (Carpe Jugulum)

The Discworld novels are marked by this sort of pragmatism, pragmatism that is both the commonsensical and quotidian variety, and the philosophical kind.)

Ankh-Morpork sits in the midst of an archipelago of fantasy analogues to different real-world premodern societies, from Lancre, to Uberwald’s gothic medieval, to Djelibeybi’s re-imagination of ancient Egypt, Klatch’s Middle-East, the Agatean Empire’s dynastic China, or the city-state of Ephebe’s version of ancient Athens. Ankh-Morpork exerts a gravitational pull on all these places and draws the denizens of otherwise isolated and xenophobic societies into direct and profitable contact with one another. And it is therefore unsurprising that all of the elements of modernity that Pratchett introduces into Discworld either emerge in Ankh-Morpork or are refined (and monetized) there.

The steam engine and railway in Raising Steam are no exception in this respect. The only real difference is that in this novel there is an awful lot more musing on the nature of progress and innovation. Moist von Lipwig, hero of Going Postal and Making Money, whom Vetinari once again ropes into managing a new phenomenon for the benefit of Ankh-Morpork, takes to the task with far less reluctance than with the city’s post office, bank, and mint. The former con man and scoundrel sees all too clearly the railway’s potential, and frequently pauses to reflect on the nature of progress, in both its destructive and beneficial effects in which old orders crumble but create new possibilities. Even Lord Vetinari is more given to philosophical reflection than usual, at first looking suspiciously at this new technology but quickly resigning himself to its inevitability (with Moist looking out for the city’s interests, however).

Curious, the Patrician thought … that people in Ankh-Morpork professed not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new entertainment and diversion that came their way. There was nothing the mob liked better than novelty. Lord Vetinari sighed again. Did they actually think? These days everybody used the clacks, even little old ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about these newfangled ideas, totally missing the irony. And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay.

The conflict at the center of Raising Steam is not about the development of the railway per se, but with a power struggle occurring in dwarf society. Of all the races and species inhabiting Discworld, dwarfs are (after humans) the most complexly imagined. Two previous novels, The Fifth Elephant (1999) and Thud! (2007) looked closely at the history of dwarfish culture, its customs and traditions, and the faultlines that have always run through it. There has always been a divide among dwarfs between the forces of tradition and those of progress, between those purists who wish to hew to an authentic, ur-dwarfishness, and those who leave their homeland and its mines and (frequently) settle in Ankh-Morpork.

At its heart, Raising Steam is less about the modernizing force of technology than the confrontation between a fanatical devotion to tradition and the exigencies of a rapidly changing world. One thing we learned in The Fifth Elephant was that male and female dwarfs look more or less identical, and only acknowledge themselves as male outside the privacy of marriage (which, as Pratchett notes, makes courtship a delicate affair). But in The Fifth Elephant, female dwarfs in Ankh-Morpork have started to identify as female, something veritably heretical in their homeland of Uberwald. The Fifth Elephant was about the coronation of a progressive king; in Thud!, the dwarfs negotiate a peace treaty with their traditional enemies, the trolls. In both cases, these crucial events were quietly orchestrated by Lord Vetinari through his proxy Samuel Vimes, commander of the City Watch.

In Raising Steam, a schism among the absolutist dwarfs—the “grags” or “delvers” as they are known—leads not just to a coup d’etat, but also to terroristic attacks on the clacks network and the embryonic railway, symbols of change and progress that the purist delvers cannot abide. I won’t make any claim that the novel is subtle on this front: the delvers very obviously represent fundamentalist and evangelical factions in contemporary culture, something made painfully obvious by the fact that delvers will only emerge from below ground when clad in heavy black robes that hide their faces.

This lack of subtlety is part of the reason why this novel feels like Pratchett hurrying Discworld out of its medieval trappings and firmly into the modern world. The reinstated dwarfish king, Rhys Rhysson, lays it out for his fundamentalist foes in no uncertain terms:

[I]t is your kind that makes dwarfs small, wrapped up in themselves: declaring that any tiny change in what is thought to be a dwarf is somehow sacrilege. I can remember the days when even talking to a human was forbidden by idiots such as you. And now you have to understand it’s not about dwarfs, or the humans, or the trolls, it’s about the people, and that’s where the troublesome Lord Vetinari wins the game. In Ankh-Morpork you can be whatever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don’t really care.

Rhys then goes on to truly shake dwarf society to its core by revealing that he is not, in fact, their king at all but their queen—and defiantly rejects the title of king, saying that from that moment on, dwarfs will no longer be required to hide or deny their gender.

All of which was made possible, of course, by the construction of the railway: anticipating problems in Uberwald (where the dwarfs’ Low Kingdom resides), Vetinari orders Moist von Lipwig to make certain the railway will run the entire distance (which Moist protests is impossible in the allotted time—but Vetinari exercises the tyrant’s prerogative and demands that it be done). Of course, though it is touch and go, he succeeds—and the timely return of Queen Rhys allows her to reclaim the throne and make her game-changing announcement.

I can’t say that Raising Steam is among the best Discworld novels … though it avoids the narrative incoherence that marked Snuff (2012) and Unseen Academicals (2010), as I’ve observed, it is markedly unsubtle in its themes and execution—though thankfully in very interesting ways that have helped clarify some of my thinking about the Discworld series. There is an unmistakably wistful tone that makes me wonder if we’ll see Ankh-Morpork and the geopolitics of Discworld depicted again (Pratchett’s apology to the Discworld Convention states that he has a new Tiffany Aching novel in process, but I find that the YA Discworld novels lack the broader sense of the world at large). The novel’s final word is given to Lord Ventinari, who muses, “all that anyone can say now is: What next? What little thing will change the world because the tinkers carried on tinkering?”

What indeed.