The Colour of Magic ★★★

Following on immediately from the previous instalment, in this volume Rincewind, the clumsy sort-of wizard, and Twoflower, the simple-minded tourist, meet with an array of colourful characters and quirky locations on their way to avert a looming apocalypse in the form of a star crashing into the Discworld.

Similarly to the first instalment, the style of storytelling is largely episodic, with a focus on humour and fun over narrative tension. There is an immense density of jokes populating the entire narrative, and this is obviously the strong point of the author’s narrative style, particularly at this stage in the series when he was still focused on pretty straightforward fantasy parody. The narration makes the whole experience more intimate and colloquial, combines a mixture of highbrow and lowbrow themes (all sorts of materials from the Bible to musicals to popular film are referenced), and like Douglas Adams the style is irreverent and distinctly ‘English’. The properties being parodied (Lovecraft, dragon riders, ‘Cohen’ the Barbarian in lieu of Conan — rather on the nose) overlap with The Colour of Magic, but are not such a dominant part of the narrative (and, on a minor note, he seems more willing to touch on an element of Tolkien parody in the talking trees, reminiscent of the Ents, though he apparently thought this ‘too obvious’ before). There are also quite a lot of atheistic themes, reminiscent of Douglas Adams.

However, there are hints of the Discworld’s future path now visible for a reader primed to spot them: there is more resembling an overarching plot than in the first book, what with the whole ‘saving the world’ cliché ripe for the satirist’s plucking; the world is much more fleshed-out; some of the Discworld’s signature characters are introduced for the first time; and some of the themes of the later books (e.g. the feminist examination of how witches are viewed vs. wizards) begin to emerge. There are also some sci-fi stuff that helps to rationalise the Discworld’s ‘rules’. There is a clear delineation from the first book suggesting that Pratchett knew that it would be a broader-spanning series and that it was therefore worth including more detail.

I also found Rincewind, the wizard who must wear a hat that says ‘wizzard’ on it in order to receive any recognition at all, a more endearing character here — perhaps a more complex narrative, combined with a closer relationship with Twoflower, makes him more sympathetic. After the ending I have higher expectations for the next instalment in the series, particularly since

Spoiler

it would seem that he can practice magic again after the Octavo’s spell departed from his mind

, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the Unseen Academy. In terms of other recurring characters, I’m not so keen on Death as some seem to be, but perhaps he will grow on me in his own series. Some of the more intimate details shared about his life took me by surprise, which I will discuss below.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s more of a focus on sex in this book, in both senses of the word. We get the introduction of sexism in magic as a theme: “Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing”, and some implicit criticism of how women’s clothing is depicted in more traditional fantasy narratives:

“Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialised buyer.”

At this point Pratchett is starting to find his stride, not only in terms of style, but in terms of the subject matter he wanted to explore as well. Nevertheless, the original cover still has/had a scantily-clad woman for some reason, but they also regularly depict Rincewind as an old man when he is more likely in his 30s, so it seems at least the cover artists were still mired in some dated fantasy tropes.

There’s also this astute observation from Herenna the Henna-Haired Harridan:

“Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn't take you seriously until you'd actually killed them, by which time it didn't really matter anyway.”

It’s not a huge aspect of the book, but one thing that really took me by surprise were the sexual references, which must have gone completely over my head as a kid since I had no recollection of them at all. One character is described as “grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue”, and Herenna considers herself “too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available”. According to the Wiki, the latter phrase refers to being a ‘seamstress’, which is apparently an in-world euphemism for the thing I assumed it meant. There seems to be the controversial implicit assertion here that prostitution is degrading or demeaning, as the wording seems to imply, but at the same time the views of the character are not necessarily those of the author (though she is pretty sympathetically portrayed).

There’s another more explicit moment when we are informed that “Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he'd had a few in his time, sometimes even in company”. This took me by surprise, since I didn’t think of the character in those terms at all until that point and it felt tonally dissonant with the more whimsical narrative, but I suppose it’s positive in a sense to know that he wasn’t confined to celibacy, especially since he failed at being a wizard anyway. I would have thought that wizards abstained from sex in order to focus on their craft (a bit like monks), but the narrative also suggests that the experience of doing magic is so exhilarating that everything else pales in comparison. All this hints that there may be some more suggestive themes and subject matter in later books as well.

Overall, this instalment is fun — not life-changing, but maniacally energetic, noticeably stronger than the first instalment, and more enjoyable and understandable to me as an adult than what I remembered reading as a kid. Where the stronger points lie, the potential is apparent. We start to see Pratchett’s inherent skill shine through, and I expect both the stronger and weaker aspects to get improve exponentially as I go on with the series.