When I Am Old I Shall Wear Midnight

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm...

Terry Pratchett is unquestionably my favorite author. I have read and re-read all of his Discworld novels many times; a lot of the non-DW ones, as well.

I enjoyed this book, certainly. But I've been getting progressively frustrated with one characteristic of the DW novels that is steadily increasing; the closed universe scenario.

Any franchise with a great many fans runs into the inevitable problem that many readers want more of the same; that they want their favorite characters and storylines to feature in an endless number of stories and situations. I cheerfully count myself in this group; I'm a sucker for Pratchett's Watch stories or more novels about Jedi or James Bond.

But we ultimately rely on the author (or creator of any kind, as this problem is hardly singular to literature) to create the best tales in their own judgment. Just as a good parent must restrict a child's intake of candy, a good artist really should be the one to best know when what we want is not what we need.

The Star Wars universe is the best example of this situation. A seemingly inexhaustible demand for content has led to the license holders authorizing so many works that there appears to be no area uncovered. Every line of dialogue from the films has been spun off into a tale. There is ostensibly no event that has ever been referenced that has not had at least one author come in and paint in the remaining corners.

Pratchett has a long way to go before approaching anything close to this gridlock, but the DW novels have slowly introduced more and more connections and crossover with each release. What began as a loose sort of continuity of characters and storylines has begun to resemble a tidy Doonesbury existence where no character is more than one connection away and Sam Vimes will appear around every corner.

This phenomenon is almost always welcome at first. Spotting some familiar character or common link to another story makes the reader feel like an insider and gives the novel a sense that there is a larger world; that the author has crafted a whole new existence of which we are only seeing one part. This gives the setting of the book real weight and authenticity; as if the author is merely recording their observations of a true event.

But when fill in all the empty spaces to create a linear and definable reality, it only draws attention to how artificial this "reality" is. An inverse equation results, turning a three-dimensional fantasy into a two-dimensional textbook.

Again, wanting everything mapped out and explained is the province of the fan; leaving some mystery and room to breathe is the job of the author. Put another way, we should want a published chronology and dictionary and atlas - but you don't have to give them to us.

This is the first time that I truly felt that the tail was wagging the dog. When Vimes turns up in The Truth, it was an amazing device; we were given the opportunity to see how someone presented in all other tales as a hero might be viewed by a different protagonist. When Eskarina Smith turns up 35 books after appearing in 1987's Equal Rites, it seemed less kismet than collision.

I enjoyed this final (?) Tiffany Aching book, but I won't be sad to see the end of this series. If we hover over the same ground any longer, I'm afraid that we won't be able to see the grass for the dirt, much less than the forest for the trees.

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