Friday Five: Discworld's 5 Best Supporting Characters
Friday, March 27, 2015
Graeme Neill is a journalist who has been blogging his complete Discworld read at the brilliantly named Pratchett Job. He can also be found tweeting geek ephemera @gnei11. With no further ado, here's Graeme and five of his friends...
The warmth of tributes to Terry Pratchett’s passing - from Neil Gaiman’s sadness at the death of a friend to Nick Harkaway’s exploration of his comedic chops - showed just how loved he was. Broadly ignored by critics and awards, Pratchett was content to write deeply intelligent, complex and hilarious novels that sold and were adored in their millions. I’m sure he coped.
I loved Pratchett as a teen before stupidly putting him to one side for ‘Grown Up’ books. For the past six months I have been making up for my teenage idiocy by reading the Discworld from the start and writing about each book in publication order here. Because Pratchett was the line that links my childhood reading with what I love as an adult. It was time I started looking at that.
There is a myriad of things to love about Discworld but among the best is how it feels like a real place. Even his supporting characters are written with a care and attention that demonstrates his strength as a writer. By way of tribute to Pratchett and his Discworld, I want to put the spotlight on my favourite background players.
1. Cheery Littlebottom
First on the list is easy. It’s CSI: Ankh-Morpork. Cheery is a dwarven forensic expert first seen in Feet of Clay, a character we quickly learn is a woman. Female dwarves have beards and adhere to masculine cultural rules. Sex is, well, confusing. Cheery’s exploration of her femininity, experimenting with heels, make-up and jewellery, could be played for quite offensive laughs.
Pratchett is much better than that. Why Feet of Clay is an amazing book, one of his best, is that it’s about acts of rebellion, from the golem who cannot cope with gaining its own agency and murders as a result, to Vimes, Captain of the City Watch, who refuses to let his butler shave him. Through Cheery looking to break the gender roles dictated to her and the emotional and societal difficulties she faces in doing so, Pratchett humanises the golem’s own struggle and makes the book that much more complex and better as a consequence.
2. Jason Ogg
One of Pratchett’s more understated themes is the love of craftmanship. It shows in his writing - his early publication schedule of two Discworld books per year is insane - and he fills his books with a union worth of modest tradesmen. Doing a good job is a brilliant thing for Pratchett, whether it’s the architect Ptaclusp in Pyramids or Jason Ogg.
I love Jason because he is in one of my favourite Discworld scenes. At the beginning of Lords and Ladies, he blindfolds himself and awaits the arrival of Death, because Jason is the best smith in the Discworld and only he can shoe Death’s horse Binky. Lords and Ladies has a really eerie feel, something that might have been due to him working with Neil Gaiman a few years previously for Good Omens.
Jason methodically lays out his tools and treats the work with importance and respect. He serves Death good biscuits. The Grim Reaper praises him ‘AS ONE CRAFTSMAN TO ANOTHER’. Pratchett at his best writes rollicking plots but every so often he slams on the brakes and lets a scene breathe. He does so here to brilliant effect.
3. Magrat Garlick
One of Pratchett’s many strengths is in writing excellent female characters. Not idealised wonder women, just people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are among my favourite literary characters ever but I’d be terrified of actually meeting them. They can be cruel, crude and seem to take a little bit too much enjoyment in causing trouble. They’re brilliant but are nightmares.
Stitched into the early Witches novels is a wonderful character arc featuring Magrat, the wet witch who seems solely to exist to make tea and have Granny and Nanny be nasty to her. But she’s not a weak wallflower. Lords and Ladies, one of Pratchett’s best, belongs to her as she starts the book as a thoroughly bored queen. But it is down to her to save the kingdom of Lancre from the threat of the multi-dimensional elves. She dons the garb of the Thor-like Queen Ynci and tears a swathe through the castle to rescue her friends. But in a wonderful Pratchettian twist about the power of stories, we find Queen Ynci never existed. She was invented to give the kingdom a romantic history.
4. The Librarian
Above all, Pratchett’s Discworld series is a love letter to books, the power of reading and danger of living too much in stories. So who better to typify this than a magician turned orangutan who runs the library at the Unseen University?
Like Jason Ogg, the orangutan is another great craftsperson, taking pride in a job well done. He also has the one good scene in the largely terrible Sourcery. A book that ends before it ever really gets started, it’s only Pratchett’s homage to Alien that stood out. When a team of evil magicians decide to loot the library, the Librarian becomes the Discworldian xenomorph, raining acidic hell upon these utter fools. Because there is no crime worse than ruining a library, is there?
5. Pteppic
Yep, so if you are a Discworld fan, you may be saying ‘Graeme, you filthy cheat’ right about now. But, in a series where Tiffany Aching, The Witches, The Watch, The Wizards and Death (among others) make regular appearances, Pteppic is a one book man. So I’m calling him as a supporting character. He’s in one book out of 40. Even Jason Ogg is in more.
Pyramids is the standout book among Pratchett’s early career. A wonderful look at religion and the dangers of fundamentalism, it’s a delightful testing of your preconceptions about faith. Pteppic is the reluctant king returning to the kingdom of Djelibeybi after his father dies. His frustrations about how he has had to abandon his career as an assassin and go back home resonate with us all (maybe not the assassin part).
The book ends with a neat sign of how Pratchett developed as a writer. Our shared sense of stories would suggest Pteppic would be installed as the ruler of Djelibeybi at the book’s end. But he’s not that person, he’s an assassin, and leaves the country in the safe hands of his half-sister Ptraci. And Pratchett only got better at messing with our expectations.
Who are your favourite bit characters of the Discworld universe?