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Jed Novick talks to the
best-selling author who spins a fantastic yarn about turtles,
elephants and rats
 What sort of person writes about
a circular world on the back of a giant star turtle supported by
four elephants? It's a question that sits proudly at the top of
one of the squillions of websites dedicated to the man described
by his publicist as "Britain's most fanatically followed
novelist", a man whose books have been translated into 27
languages and have sold over 22 million copies. Every time he
writes a new book it sells in excess of 400,000 paperbacks and
100,000 hardbacks in the UK alone. He is the only author to have
topped both the adult and children's best-seller lists
simultaneously. Looking back through the cuttings, it seems that
he's written close on 4,300 books. "Actually, I think it's
only about 3,200 or it could be round about 35. It depends what
you call a book - once you get into the cook books and things
like that." He was recently named as the best-selling
author of the last decade in the UK and - and I'm not quite sure
how this one is calibrated - he is reputed to be the most
shoplifted author in Britain.
"Ultimately it was Tolkien's
fault," says Terry Pratchett, creator of the ridiculously
successful Discworld series, the science fantasy that concerns
the giant turtle and, you know, the elephants. "Indirectly
it was Tolkein's fault. When Tolkien was really popular which I
suppose was in the mid-Seventies - when the media realised that
he was popular and therefore he became officially popular - the
market for heroic fantasy opened up hugely. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s you couldn't move in the bookshops for titles
like Volume 7 of The Chronicles Of... whatever it was, and some
of it was good and a lot of it was adequate, but not a lot
showed much originality. But a market had been identified and
basic economics was taking place."
Pratchett, 53, and a journalist
by trade, picked up on something that Douglas Adams had tapped
into and something that Wes Craven later exploited with his
Scream films: there comes a stage with every genre when it
becomes so popular that it's cliches become the subject in
themselves. Adams did it with sci-fi, Craven did it with horror
and Pratchett did it with heroic fantasy.
"There comes a point where
if you want to get a laugh, people have to know what it is
they're laughing about. So I wrote the Discworld series
initially as a kind of antidote to all those terrible books
where people said things like 'be like he will wax wrath'. It
was an antidote to the overly serious heroic fantasy sagas that
were around at that time. I chose a scenario straight out of
world mythology, a world where you go through space on the back
of a giant turtle. It didn't take me a long time to come up with
it - it's a genuinely mythological concept you can find in
various places in the world - I just chose it because it is
clearly a ridiculous place. Then I decided to make the people on
it as realistic as I could because that's where the humour would
be. The simple act of putting 20th century people with 20th
century reactions in this crazy medieval fantasy world created
humour. That's how it began. Since then, things have become a
little more complicated."
The reason we're here is to
discuss Terry's new book, The Amazing Maurice And His Educated
Rodents. Sharp eyed readers will notice that the D word doesn't
appear anywhere in the title. Although Maurice is "set in
the Discworld® universe" it is one of Terry's children's
books. The story concerns Maurice, a scruffy tomcat ("a bit
like Sergeant Bilko") who has his own gang of strangely
educated rats and they… Is it very diffferent, writing for
kids and adults? "Yes, but it's impossible to tell you what
it is, precisely because it's a matter of spin. The real reason
that Maurice is a children's book is that it's probably
impossible to write a book where all the major characters are
rats - the only major human characters are young teenagers -
it's impossible to write a book like that without it almost
gravitating to be a children's book. It's something that happens
in our market-led society. I suppose what also distinguishes it
as a children's book is that it's got lots of blood and murder
in it. You can always tell a good children's book that way. You
just think of the old fairy stories."
True enough. So listen. When
you're writing about rats, are you writing about rats, or is
this some sort of deep allegory for…? "It's an allegory
for rats. I don't think you want to get too deeply involved in
that kind of thing. The rats are as real as I can make them. And
they're intelligent. What you read into it is up to you. All I'm
going to hold my hand up to is the fact that they are
rats." Why Maurice's rats are like they are, what they do,
and what happens to them, that's the story.
In 1998, Pratchett was awarded an
OBE for services to literature and in 1999 was given an honorary
Doctorate of Literature from the University of Warwick. Does it
surprise you, how popular it all is? "Not now. There was a
period in the late 1980s, early 1990s where things were
happening so fast that by the time I realised what was
happening, it wasn't happening any more because something else
was happening." So now you're just famous. "We went to
Australia a couple of months ago and the lady who took our shoes
away to be cleaned because of all that foot and mouth stuff was
a Discworld fan, and on the way back, the lady at immigration
was a Discworld fan. I think that when you get recognised by the
people at immigration you're probably doing pretty well."
The Amazing Maurice And His
Educated Rodents (Doubleday) by Terry Pratchett is out now.
Terry will be signing copies
of his new book at Borders, Churchill Square on Nov 23.
copyright New Insight 2001
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