Marc Burrows is a comedian, Terry Pratchett super-fan, author of the first biography on Sir Terry and will soon give The Magic of Terry Pratchett lecture here in Edinburgh.
It’s not all bad. For weeks now, I hope in Routinely Itemised and the Audio EXP podcast that I’ve been saying Geek Native will have a slow start to August as the team covers the Edinburgh Festivals. Sometimes that surfaces excellent opportunities for this blog, though, such as when a talent like Marc Burrows gets within range, and we can ask many questions about Terry Pratchett.
That’s the same Marc Burrows who writes on culture and social issues in the Big Issue, New Statesman and The Guardian, by the way!
What should I have asked? I asked whether there might be any undiscovered Pratchett to come and found out about a witch…
Why did a fantasy series that hid its jokes in awkward little footnotes do so well?
That’s a misconception in a few ways, I think. The jokes aren’t just in the footnotes, they’re woven into the DNA of the stories, and there’s plenty of them scattered throughout, either overtly or subtly in references and situations. The books are pretty thoroughly funny. I’d also disagree that the footnotes are “hidden” or “awkward” too – in fact, if anything they make jokes pop more. Terry uses them like a stand-up comic uses pauses: your eye is dragged out of the sentence, down to the bottom of the page and back up again. It’s a clever skill.
As for why they did so well, given they’re a fantasy series, there’s a couple of ways to look at that. For a start, fantasy does sell well. It’s another misconception that it’s a niche genre – Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, His Dark Materials – some of the best-selling book series of all time, and they’re all about magical worlds. Terry described fantasy as “Ur literature” – the original storytelling. The oldest stories are fantasy stories – it’s the base stuff from which all other stories are made. So I don’t think Terry’s work sold well despite being fantasy, I think it sold well because it was fantasy.
And, of course, while Terry always said his work was proudly fantasy and science fiction, it’s also so much more than that. He has more to say about people, human history, social structures, morality, religion and the fundamental principles of humanity than any book set in the “real” world you care to name. He understood our world and used a fantasy one to show it back to us. It was a “world and mirror of worlds”, as he said a few times, and mirrors show you your true self. It made his books fantastically accessible.
Why does Pratchett work for you?
Partly because I’m an utter nerd who loves the secret language of references and asides that pepper his books, partly because his morality is so complex and nuanced. Partly because his characters are so resonating. They’re us. I guarantee Terry has written about you, me, everybody (and as a Blues Brothers fan, he’d have enjoyed that sentence). Reading Terry’s work made me feel understood, and it made me understand. And, and I cannot emphasise this enough, it is really, really, really funny.
Have you met anyone who didn’t like Discworld or Terry, and if they offered any justification for this, what did they say?
Yep. And they’re always wrong. But I’ve never met anyone who had read an entire book (aside from The Colour of Magic, which isn’t a great place to start) and not been won over by it. People say they “don’t like that sort of thing,” and it’s because they’re distracted by the cover artwork or the idea of what they think a Pratchett book is, and they’ll still watch Game of Thrones. Ever since he poked his head above the parapet, Terry’s work was judged and ridiculed by people who hadn’t really understood what it was. They’d look on at his massively increasing, diverse fanbase and be baffled. And say so. It’s rare you find people who don’t like Pratchett and have actually read his stuff properly. He was a great observer and satirist of the human condition, and people get distracted by the fact that he does so with characters who are, technically, not human. There’s a clip of Allison Pearson on Newsnight Review, thirty years ago now, saying, “This is nerdy real ale stuff. I can’t imagine any woman reading this.” Terry’s readership skews about 55% female!
What do you think Discworld’s lasting legacy, if any, in fantasy will be?
That fantasy is a baseline, not the whole of the thing. Terry’s great trick, the thing that made his name, was taking fantasy scenarios and applying a reality filter to them. People in his books are dealing with dragons, goblins, dwarves, wizards and witches, but what they’re really dealing with is injustice, racism, class systems, gender, petty bureaucracy and power. And well, alright, on one occasion a bloody great flying lizard.
I have not dared to watch The Watch or even track down the BBC’s Discworld show as friends urged me off it. Should I ignore them?
Hmmm. Good question. It’s a weird show. It not necessarily a bad one, although it’s a terrible Discworld adaption. It could have stood on its own feet, at least, but it didn’t know what it was – sometimes it was Doctor Who, sometimes it was Game of Thrones and sometimes it was The Mighty Boosh – it couldn’t seem to find the middle ground that would give it an internal logic of its own. It threw a lot of the “Terry” out, and there was a great deal of baby in the bathwater. That said, the production design is amazing and there are some really good performances – Joni Ayton-Kent deserves to be a huge star for example. It’s a frustratingly botched experience that strayed so far from its origins as to be unrecognisable. If it had done well enough to get a second season, I’d have liked to have seen them tackle Men At Arms or Feet of Clay and do it properly, now that they’d established their world and characters, rather than weirdly trying to mash up Guards! Guards! and Night Watch and botching them both.
Do you think Terry’s training as a journalist greatly impacted his life views and writing?
Massively. That was his crash course in the minutiae of human life. He literally studied us up close like an anthropologist and he was taking notes all the time. As a young reporter he saw everything – births, deaths, marriages, humorously shaped vegetables, the lot. It was the greatest education you could have. It also gave him an iron discipline and astonishing work ethic in which writers block was for cowards. I think his work in PR was also really important too – that’s when he really started to understand the pettiness of pointless rule following and small-minded bureaucrats. More often than not, that’s who his villains were.
Are there any rumours of yet-to-be-discovered/announced Terry Pratchett or Discworld books that might see the light of day?
To my knowledge, nothing. There’s a book of short stories coming out for Christmas this year that were recently unearthed by some pretty thorough detective work by some very dedicated fans; they were written for newspapers in the 70s and 80s under a pseudonym, Patrick Kearns. No-one, not the estate, not his assistant, not his family knew about those stories until last year. That will be our last lot for “new” fiction though – the well really is dry. All of his pre-fame short stories are back in print now. Famously Terry hated the idea of any unfinished drafts coming out after he was gone, so he insisted that the hard drive containing all unpublished work should be crushed with a steamroller. He didn’t want his books treated like Douglas Adams’ had been, or – even worse – like Tolkien’s, whose unpublished notes formed a multi-volume series. He was very controlling and particular about his work. If it hadn’t had his final polish, it didn’t go out. And even then it had to be prised from his hands with a crowbar.
There is still “new” stuff to come though. Rhianna Pratchett, Terry’s daughter, has written a spin-off book called Tiffany Aching’s Guide To Being A Witch, which is apparently gorgeous, and of course Neil Gaiman has the full story for the unwritten Good Omens sequel in his head, plotted out by he and Terry many years ago, that will form the basis of a theoretical third season of the TV show. Who knows, maybe Neil will novelise seasons 2 & 3?
The only thing left in the tank after that is the satirical non-fiction he wrote for newspapers in the 70s, and I’d really like to see that get a proper sprucing up because some of those columns are wonderful. I have some ideas in that direction I’m quietly talking to the estate about – we’ve got three of them in a booklet I’m giving out in Edinburgh, which we’re calling Tales From Roundworld. There’s a few more pieces where those came from.
Could you unpack the Boots Theory for readers and explain why it is important?
I can’t unpack this better than Terry himself, so first of all, let’s enjoy it in full (I think this counts as fair use, don’t worry):
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes’ Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
This comes from a book called Men At Arms and is rightly one of Terry’s most lauded bits of writing because it boils down an insanely complicated economic idea into something fundamentally easy to understand: the reason that being poor is more expensive than being rich. The way poorer people are forced to stay in their lane and know their place, the way capitalism keeps rich and poor in their original positions and self-fulfils itself. Sometimes people say that you shouldn’t read too much into Pratchett’s work, that it’s “just a fun book”. A fun book that condenses an elegant criticism of the link between class and capitalism into a hundred words.
Terry actually pinched this, by the way. The idea was explored in a wordier but fairly similar way in Robert Tressell’s 1915 book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, which Terry would certainly have read. I know that’s true, because it’s on Wikipedia credited to a reliable source (um, me. It’s credited to me.)
You’re taking a lecture on Discworld and Terry Pratchett up to Geek Native’s home city and during the chaos of the Edinburgh Festivals. Why would you do that?
Certifiable insanity. Masochism. A death wish. Take your pick? It was always the plan to turn my biography of Terry into a stand-up show, because, well, because I can. I’ve done several Fringe shows before, and I always love the challenge of writing them and the process of bringing everything together. And I love performing. I love the Fringe. There’s nothing else like it. And I knew it was a good story. I wanted to really celebrate Terry, I wanted to give his best gags an airing, and I wanted to spend a month absolutely nerding out. I’m spreading the good word!
How do Geek Native readers get to your lecture?
Practice! (Sorry, it’s at the Gilded Balloon in the Teviot, Bristo Square from the 2nd to 28th of August at 5.30, with a bonus super-nerdy “Footnotes” show at 7pm. I’m also doing it at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre on October 12th, and we’re doing a proper tour next year).
Finally, do you think Good Omens might overshadow Discworld in the years to come?
I don’t think so. The show was a huge success and has its own fanbase, but Discworld was bedded in as something really special. Plus, there’s Discworld TV and movies to come! There’s potential to overtake Good Omens with that. Good Omens is an interesting corner of Terry’s work, but there’s far, far more to discover.
The Magic of Terry Pratchett will be performed at 5.30pm in Gilded Balloon Teviot (Dining Room) from 2nd – 28th August (not 14th).
And it wouldn’t be Terry Pratchett without footnotes, would it? Each performance will be followed by a separate interactive show, ‘The Magic of Terry Pratchett: The Footnotes’, featuring a Q&A, readings
from rare Pratchett work and interviews with special guests, including friends and colleagues of Sir Terry and Discworld fans from across the Fringe and beyond.
Quick Links
- It might still be possible to book tickets for The Magic of Terry Pratchett or the footnotes.
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