Source of book: Audiobook borrowed from my brother.
This book is the fourth in the Rincewind series. Previous
installments:
See the end of this post for other Terry Pratchett books we
have experienced.
***
So, here is the basic plot. As you may (or not) recall, the
world’s most incompetent wizard, Rincewind, managed to get himself stuck in the
Dungeon Dimensions at the end of Sourcery. His faithful servant and
hatchet...well, chest… The Luggage, has followed him there. But how to get
back?
[Side note here: in Diskworld cosmology, the Dungeon
Dimensions are essentially the Underworld, more or less. Hell is part of the Dungeon Dimensions, but
exists solely because some people believe they deserve to go there. So they
do.]
As usual, Rincewind doesn’t make things happen; they just
tend to happen to him.
Enter Eric Thursley, a 13 year old self-absorbed
demonologist (imagine Trump’s ego married to Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris, and add
some pimples…) who is trying to follow his grandfather’s footsteps and summon a
demon from the underworld. Things go wrong, however, because Eric ends up
summoning Rincewind instead.
Rincewind may not be good at magic, but he has a great
self-preservation instinct. He sees through Eric’s disguise (as an old man) and
tries to explain. The problem is, for some reason, Rincewind turns out to have
provisional powers related to the laws of the universe that allowed him to be
summoned.
Eric, being both a selfish and egotistical ass and having
studied up a bit too much on the usual stuff to do when you summon a powerful
supernatural being, demands that Rincewind grant him three wishes. (No points
for guessing…) These are, naturally, (1) to be ruler of the world, (2) to meet
the most beautiful woman in all history, and (3) to live forever. As everyone
from Faust on down has discovered: be careful what you wish for - you might get
it.
Rincewind protests, of course, that he cannot grant wishes
by snapping his fingers - except that when he does, things happen. Eric gets
his three wishes, and these form the three major episodes of the book.
First, he gets to be ruler of the world. Except, well, he
experiences this through finding himself captured by a tribal society modeled
more or less on the Aztecs. The problem is, their approach to the Ruler of the
World(™) is kind of like the general approach to the gods in Discworld, where
the gods are not so much worshipped, as blamed.
So, when Eric is recognized as the Ruler, his fate is to be sacrificed to their
god as punishment for basically fucking the world up badly. The god,
Quezovercoatl, is a parody of Quetzalcoatl - look
closely at the name for the bad pun… This goes awry, though, because the demon
who is Quezovercoatl actually makes an appearance, and turns out to be all of
six inches tall. (Which is why he has better success appearing to his followers
in visions.) The Luggage accidentally squashes Quezovercoatl, which sets the
Tezumen on the path to rejection of religion. I must say, this was a freaking
hilarious sendup of religion - particularly the “The Gods Demand the Sacrifice
of Someone Other Than Me” variety.
The second wish is, naturally, fulfilled when Eric gets to
meet the Discworld equivalent of Helen of Troy. This is, of course, a central
part of the Faust legend, and has been dealt with in interesting ways by other
authors. Marlowe, for example, paraphrases Lucian with the immortal lines,
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless
towers of Ilium?" This is, of course,
ambiguous. Is Faust marveling at Helen’s beauty? Or disillusioned at how it has
faded? Goethe makes the whole thing into a complex allegory of the meeting of
classical idea and modernity. Perhaps one of the most intriguing - to me at
least - is a fragment by C. S. Lewis, entitled After Ten Years. This was apparently a novel in progress that he
died before finishing - and I wonder if it would have been an incredible remix
of a classical legend along the lines of Till
We Have Faces. (You can find this fragment in the collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories.)
From what we have, it appears that Lewis envisioned Menelaus having to choose
between the real-life Helen, her beauty faded after ten years - she is now
middle aged - and a magical simulacrum created by the magicians. It is an
interesting choice, to say the least.
Pratchett takes the same basic approach as Lewis, but,
naturally, plays things for satire rather than philosophy. Eric gets to meet
Helen - but she has decided to make the best of a bad situation, and has had several
kids with Paris, is decidedly middle aged and chubby, and has the hint of a
mustache. In addition to this idea, the best parts of this section include the
utter failure of the Trojan Horse (except The Luggage saves history, so to
speak…) and the scenes with the Discworld version of Odysseus, named
“Lavaeolus,” that is, “rinser of winds” and thus a likely ancestor of
Rincewind.
The third episode finds Rincewind and Eric at the dawn of
time, where they meet The Creator (a parody of Pratchett himself), who is the
subcontractor working on fabricating the Discworld. It dawns on Rincewind
before it dawns on Eric: to “live forever” means to exist for all of the
space-time continuum for Discworld. So Eric will need to wait for billions of
years before life even comes into existence. It’s a lonely wait, particularly
if you forgot to bring a book…
At this point, Rincewind convinces Eric to reverse the spell
and send them both back to hell. Where a modern reformer has decided to put
into practice the truth that even eternal torment is better than eternal
boredom. The jokes in this section are funnier if you are familiar with Inferno, but are still pretty dang funny
if you aren’t. (By the way, I could get a job in Pratchett’s hell easily - I’d
be the guy showing the endless vacation photos…)
That’s your basic plot, and an overview of the fun. Except
my version isn’t half as good as the original. You really should read it. Some
have complained about this book as being boring. I found it to be the opposite
- it really was funny. But then again, I rather enjoy Homer and Dante, so your
mileage may vary.
***
The Terry Pratchett list:
Rincewind:
Tiffany Aching:
Witches:
Watch:
Guards!
Guards! (Stupid abridged edition, which is an abomination.)
Non-Discworld:
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