93. ‘The Colour of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett

I find that readers of Terry Pratchett either really like him and have every one of his books proudly displayed on their bookshelves at home, in hardback. Or, they have read one, didn’t really enjoy and haven’t read another since.

Until this book I fell into neither camp as I’d never read any Pratchett. Fantasy novels don’t really do it for me (more on that later) and so I’d never felt the urge to pick one up. Saying that, I do quite like him as a person in interviews and have heard that the humour is quite good and so was slightly intrigued and ready to see what I was missing.

                                                    This is the cover of my first copy which I left on a Virgin Pendolino to London. Doh.

The Colour of Magic is the first book in the Discworld series. Set in a paradoxical universe not too dissimilar from the world in which we live, the novel follows the wizard Rincewind -who knows just the one spell - as he is tasked with looking after Twoflower, the Discworld’s first tourist from another world. Twoflower wants to experience and is excited by everything in this new world, which leads to him often acting like a fool and getting them into all sorts of trouble and misadventures. He finds the good in everything, even when faced with death (as they often are), and rather than see the danger, gets excited about everything much to Rincewind’s annoyance. The two characters end up on a fantastical adventure to the end of the universe, quite accidentally, and encounter everything from men made of water, dragons, barbarians, Fate and Death.

The book is quite funny and Pratchett clearly has a dry sense of humour which I enjoyed, however I just didn’t really ever connect to the narrative or the characters. I liked some of the aspects of the world in which they live, like Twoflower’s ‘picturebox’ acting with the same principals of a camera, only images are painted by a little tiny man who lives inside of the box and who happens to run out of pink meaning all pictures there on in to be in black and white. So it offers a different look at the world. But the novel doesn’t actually offer many resolutions - we don’t know what happens to Twoflower in the end, and the characters seem to move from place to place and dimension to dimension without you really actually caring….or maybe that’s just me!

And this is the problem I mostly have with fantasy novels - they are pretty easy. I don’t mean this in the sense that they are easy reading, I mean that without the restraints of the actualities of the world in which we live, the author is able to make anything up in order to aid their narrative or get the characters out of a tight spot. Rincewind and Twoflower at one point are facing certain death (well this happens a lot actually) and are free falling off the back of a dragon, plummeting to their death from space, when without warning they find themselves inexplicably on an aeroplane in the real world and on their way to America. Then, just like that they are back and then they happen to be out of their little predicament….!

I just it frustrating that anything can be changed or happen at any time. It’s just unrealistic….’Well obviously,’ I hear you cry,’ its fantasy, that’s the point!’ and I know, I know but it just doesn’t float my reading boat. Just as well there aren’t loads of Pratchett on this list eh?....oh…wait…there are….maybe they get better as we move on!