Snuff

Snuff was the annual Pratchett novel last year; I enjoy most of Pratchett’s voluminous body of work, and after some wobbles with Thud I had been feeling like he was back in fine form with The Truth, Going Postal, and Making Money¹. I really enjoyed Unseen Academicals despite it enjoying only an ambivalent welcome from some fans. So on the whole I was pleased that I got given Snuff.

Unfortunately it turned out to be one of my less favourite Discworld novels. Why? Well, one part of the problem is Vimes, which leads to a more general set of problems with Pratchett’s least good writing tics. It’s probably co-equal, or maybe even below, Jingo in where I rate his Watch novels.

I’ll start with the problem of Vimes, because Vimes wasn’t a problem, once upon a time, and Vimes has become a problem for the same reason I’ve always found Granny Weatherwax a problem in novels where she’s the principal character, and for the same reason I found Vetinari a problem in Jingo, but a delight everywhere else. Vimes has ascended into the place of a super-hero, and Pratchett does not do super-heroes well. It’s one of his charms as a writer, in fact.

Vimes has been on a steady upward arc across the Watch novels in general, of course; we found him in the gutter, and watched as he has had the crust of his alcoholism, misanthropy, and depression tripped away from him to leave his fundamental decency and the driving obsession with his sense of justice shining through; this has happened slowly, painstakingly, and in a very human fashion albeit amply assisted, it is implied, by the machinations of Vetinari, who needs such a man for his vision of Ankh-Morepork to come to fruition. All well and good, and Vimes is a wonderful character both in and of himself and for Pratchett to ruminate on monarchy, justice, law and order, relationships, racism, sexism, and fatherhood. And for most of his career Vimes has been a sufficiently good character and has been written well enough that this does not seem overly didactic, not least because he has been an imperfect enough character that he is easy to relate to, and flawed enough that it is possible to suspend disbelief long enough to feel his struggles and his fears of failure.

This started leaking for me a little around the time of The Fifth Elephant, and disintegrated completely in Thud: Vimes becomes super-Vimes, destroyer of gods (or things-which-are-not-gods-but-serve-the-same-function, if you prefer). Like Vetinari in Jingo there is no real sense of danger or failure. Vimes moves through the novel declaiming his views like a stock-standard 1950s sci-fi protagonist. If one of Pratchett’s strengths is writing everyman-ish characters² I find one of his biggest weaknesses is writing the high-powered ones. Vetinari, Weatherwax, the Vimes of Thud and Snuff, Susan… they’re all, sorry, a bit tedious. There’s no dramatic tension, and they expound and expound and expound. Vimes has a terrible case of this in Snuff; there’s no real serious question he’s going to crush his enemies and hear the lamentations of their women, and Vimes training up the local copper with long (so long) speeches about the right way to be a copper was done a lot better in Elephant (in particular).

I’d actually assumed, based on his appearance in The Truth and Unseen Academicals that Vimes was being retired to Vetinari’s normal state: a wonderful background character who pops up to provide appropriate exposition, to move the plot along, to act as an immovable object or an irresistible force, as required. But no. Alas, no.

The second element that bugged me was alluded to above: exposition. Characters expounding on topics, especially in-world topics that may be considered common knowledge, is a delicate art to handle. Doing it badly is one of the more mocked tropes of fantasy and sci-fi writing, and rightly so, and Pratchett is normally adroit at avoiding the lumbering, clunky, overwrought mess of it, while still managing to do it. That’s quite the writerly feat, even more so when you consider that much of the exposition that characters like Weatherwax, Vimes, and Vetinari perform is, to some degree or another, authorial insertion³; and yet Pratchett is no tedious Stephenson-esque bore.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that Snuff fell short of his normally high standards. The long periods of Vimes Telling Us Things, particularly things Vimes has Told Us before, at length, did not make the novel especially enjoyable, and the long discourse on Willikins was on the whole fairly tedious and, more importantly for me, unbalanced him as a character. I rather enjoyed the Willikins I didn’t know that much about, but who clearly had A Past which was hinted at by his actions, rather than spelled out in detail. Considerable detail.

The final aspect that stopped me from really getting into Snuff was the subject. The goblins appearing out of nowhere, felt like a bit of a retread of the hitherto unmentioned orcs that appeared out of nowhere in Academicals had mated with the golems and produced this. I’m afraid it felt like a Point in search of a Plot and a Race to make the Point with.

All of which makes me rather sad; it feels like a perfect storm of some of Pratchett’s less likeable tics have combined to make what is, by his high standards, a rather mediocre book. And I’ve ended putting more effort into explaining what I don’t like about it than I expected - less because I wanted to be comprehensively negative about Snuff, I think, and more because the things I don’t like about it are shared in common with the elements I least like in other Pratchetts I’m not fond of (the overly-didactic Interesting Times, the overpowered characters of Thud, Jingo, or anything with Susan, for example).

Still, all this makes me hope Raising Steam will be a return to form. I rather like Moist, and he’s at the same point in his character arc that I enjoyed so much with Vimes. Also, I greatly prefer enjoying things to not enjoying things.