A review of "I Shall Wear Midnight," a YA Fantasy/humor book by Terry Pratchett.
After three fairly major conversations, a long day of work and then socializing (in which I was sleepy in a meeting, trounced at Risk, and fed tasty noodle dishes), I don't have the energy to really do a step-by-step, prepared blog post (starting with the research/brainstorming phase, moving to the drafting phase, then rereading and recasting and rewriting, and finally getting to the blog). So instead, I'm going to limit myself to three bullet points (which I shall, just because, represent with numbers).
1) Pratchett's moral philosophy is a curious combination of exciting and infuriating to me. On the one hand, I adore his Tiffany Aching series (of which this is the fourth, and possibly the final book) for presenting the witch/magician as a public servant - someone who has special powers which not only do not make her special, but actually one who serves others without much reward. Unlike Star Wars or Harry Potter (the former I like, the latter I don't), Tiffany Aching is not an elite Jedi or wizard who looks down on the Muggles of the world who can't become invisible or hear what people are thinking. Instead, she tirelessly (but realistically - often feeling quite grumpy or complaining or making mistakes) tries to make peoples' lives just a little better. And here we get to a niggling moral problem I have with the book. Because Tiffany does not merely make peoples' lives minutely better, she also makes their deaths minutely less worse. Which I am all for - I am incredibly grateful for the grace of anesthetic. However (and here I may be reading into the series based on outside knowledge), I feel like Pratchett is here using a YA book to lay emotional groundwork for the legitimacy of euthenasia, which is a cause he has celebrated in the past two years since being diagnosed with Alzheimers. My own complicated feelings on his personal position leading to moral positions I cannot sympathize with lead me to a complicated feeling on the book. He paints real pictures, yes, but is he being fair? My own reaction is that no, he is not, but how much can I blame him? This lack of condoning or condemning does not lead to my appreciating the book as appropriate for recommendation, however.
2) Tiffany's series, being about a witch, naturally deals with Pratchett's own take on witchcraft in history. Being a staunch atheistic humanist, he a) does not believe that witches ever really existed as people who used demonic power; b) thinks that anyone who did so was evil; c) nonetheless likes using ancient tropes and figures to construct his fantasy/science fiction satires. As a result, he presents witches as scientists - people of extraordinary common sense who see what others cannot because they are too busy living. But since he believes that witches never existed, he uses the witches of his series (who really do use magic, though not evil) to lambast people who represent religion, without seeming to realize that he is being contradictory by presenting a the figure of a witch as a critique to their persecutors, gifting the witch with the very powers which would be the ultimate proof of those persecutors' beliefs, and assuming that such powers never exist in our own "real" world all simultaneously.
3) As Abigail Nussanbaum noted in her review of the last book in the series, "Wintersmith" (http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2006/11/wintersmith-by-terry-pratchett.html), the plots of Pratchett's novels have been growing steadily more and more recycled. While I was not nearly as critical of "Winstersmith" as she was, I do think the critique is fairly aimed at "I Shall Wear Midnight," who features a villain being a historical story/person being animated by collective belief into a force of pure evil (naturally connected to religion) which tries to possess people and make them hurt each other. Which is exactly the same as not only "Thud!" (one of my very favorite Discworld novels ever), "Men At Arms," "Moving Pictures," "Soul Music," and a few other books in the 30-plus series, but also the second book in the Tiffany Aching sub-series. When you start recycling plots from books in the very same-subseries (which is only four books long), I think that even my tolerance for non-originality is starting to fray.
Overall rating: decent but disappointing. Combines the annoying thinness and arbitrariness of the early books with the philosophical/political moral hammers of the later books without the freshness of the former or the depth of the latter.
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