Diary of an Autodidact: Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

We have been listening to Discworld (and other Terry Pratchett books) during our road trips for a solid decade. For the most part, these have been the classic recordings by Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs, with a few by Celia Imrie.

More recently, the Discworld novels are being re-done with an ensemble cast. This is the first of those that we have experienced, and I will say, they are well done. In this case, the three readers are: Sian Clifford (main narrator), Bill Nighy (footnotes), and Peter Serafinowicz (Death).

For this one, I would say all three of the narrators sound great, with Clifford doing most of the work. In addition to the fine narration, the audio quality and balance is excellent - it avoids the insufficient compression that many of the older recordings have, so it is perfect for a road trip.

Reaper Man is one of the “Death” books within the Discworld universe. Death is, as one might imagine, a hooded figure with a scythe. But, unlike in our world, Death is actually a good person, just doing his job, and feeling sympathy for humans (and others) along the way.

But, there is trouble in Discworld again. And, unsurprisingly, it involves the Auditors of Reality, who, like the Revenuers they are compared to in this book, are terrible about dealing with the messiness of actual reality. They want it too neat, clean, and sanitary. Which humans and other sentient beings never are. They are too messy, complicated, and, well, dirty.

So, the Auditors decide Death is becoming too personal, when he should be impersonal, and force him into retirement. In other words, he has to surrender his position, and become mortal. Definitely an unpleasant and unfamiliar feeling for Death.

He dismisses his faithful domestic, Albert, and rides off on his horse, Binky, with his scythe by his side.

This thread in the plot is in many ways a parody of the old Western novels by, say, Owen Wister, or Louie L’Amour. The handsome stranger rides up to the widow woman’s farm, and is taken in as a farm hand. He turns out to be outrageously good at things, and eventually the widow falls in love with him.

Which, well, is kind of how it goes. Death takes on the name Bill Door, and hires himself out to Renata Flitworth, an old lady still sorrowing over the death of her fiancé in an avalanche years ago.

The other main thread of the plot involves the old and senile wizard, Windle Poons, who is scheduled to die at a ripe old age. (Wizards known when they will die, so everyone was expecting it.)

The problem is, Death has been laid off, and no replacement has (yet) been found, so….well, Poons dies but his soul is still rattling around in his body. So he becomes a zombie. Which is so inconvenient for everyone, Poons included.

While Death is learning what it is like to be mortal, the wizards are trying to figure out how to make Poons stay dead, which fails in hilarious manner.

There is more going wrong too. Without death, people and others still die, but are all too often stranded in limbo.

To fill the gap, various “deaths” appear, one for each species. Eventually, a human one does too, and it is terribly tasteless. Kind of it Trump had invented him.

All of these “deaths” are really just parts of Death. But the one that becomes the most important - and lives to star in other books - is the Death of Rats. (Kid #2 loves the Death of Rats, like all things rodent.)

And what ARE all those snow globes that suddenly appear everywhere, followed by trolleys (what we Yanks call “shopping carts.”?

How will things be put to right?

The list of cultural references in any Pratchett book are impossible to list completely, but Discworld Wiki does a pretty solid job. Let’s just say that only Pratchett could pull off a William Pitt the Younger joke. Or work the ancient Morris Dance into the same discussion as a Bee Gees song.

And then, there are the scenes involving the Fresh Start Club - a support and advocacy group for “Dead Rights.” Which Poons joins, and meets a host of hilarious characters ranging from nouveau riche vampires (when commoners inherit the castle and family trade…) to werewolves to zombies.

So yes, activism gets a bit of a gentle satire here, along with a dose of musings on mortality. Because Pratchett is always deeper than he seems on the surface.

As always, there are a whole bunch of great quotes.

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

"It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break...”

“ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY.”

“It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.”

“The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city. The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else. The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man. The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly. The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn’t put a tax on knowledge. The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, de-capita could be arranged…In the end it was agreed that while the wizards of course paid no taxes, they would nevertheless make an entirely voluntary donation of, oh, let's say two hundred dollars per head, without prejudice, mutatis mutandis, no strings attached, to be used strictly for non-militaristic and environmentally-acceptable purposes.”

“It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.”

“Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.”

“He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn’t happen to you every year.”

“Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.”

“The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.”

“Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out…”

“Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.”

“There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another--language was just there to hide their thoughts.”

“You can't be loony and rich. You've got to be eccentric if you're rich.”

“No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.”

“Something wonderful, if you look the long view, was about to happen. If you took the short or medium view, something horrible was about to happen.”

“People never told the Archchancellor to shut up. Shutting up was something that happened to other people.”

“This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs. Cake giving the chief priest what she calls "a piece of her mind".

There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left.”

“Priests!" said Mr. Shoe. "They're all the same. Always telling you that you're going to live again after you're dead, but you just try it and see the look on their faces!”

“What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?”

“I suppose there’s not some kind of magic you don’t know about?” “If there is, we don’t know about it.” “Fair enough,” the priest conceded.”

“How can you kill ghosts?' 'How should I know? The question doesn't usually arise!' 'You exorcise them, I think.' 'What? Jumpin' up and down? runnin' on the spot, that kind of thing?' The Dean had been ready for this. 'It's spelled with an "O", Archchancellor. I don't think one is expected to subject them to, er, physical exertion.' 'Should think not, man. We don't want a lot of healthy ghosts buzzin' around.”

I won’t spoil the rest of the plot, other than that it involves, among other things, shopping malls as parasites, an unusual pairing of creatures, and a few appearances by members of the Watch.

I definitely recommend this book, along with the rest of Discworld. And, I was pleased with the new audiobook series, which is a great addition to the classic versions, which are becoming harder to find.

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The complete Terry Pratchett list:

Rincewind:

Tiffany Aching: