I’m not exactly sure what I’d cut, but I’d cut something. They feel longer, but they don’t feel bigger. There’s nothing inherently wrong with longer novels – I love longer novels! But the longer novels at the end of Pratchett’s career feel longer in only one way, and it’s not the way that matters. Let’s put it this way: of the first 28 novels, none were longer than 110k (most were under 100k) of the novels from #33-#39, only one ( Wintersmith) is shorter than 110k (two are over 130k). But it’s about 50% longer than the first two Tiffany novels – only slightly shorter than Night Watch, and longer than any Discworld novel up to Night Watch. It’s not even the longest Discworld novel. By the standards of epic fantasy, this is a short novel. Many of the problems of the other novels are still here.
My problems, unfortunately, are with what he could write…įirst, though, let’s reintroduce some caveats – because given the context of his other late novels, the quality of I Shall Wear Midnight may stand out, but it is not, quite clearly, some novel written years earlier and locked in a drawer. In his ingenuity, his acuity, his observational humour, Pratchett here is as good as ever. Indeed, I’d tentatively suggest that, on a technical level, this is better-written than the previous three Tiffany novels, which were themselves well-written.
Reading this, it’s immediately clear that Pratchett, at least in 2010, could still do it when he felt inspired. Here, Pterry is sharp, energised, eager to take on more complex themes. The tiredness of those novels, the bluntness of the wit, the familiarity – that’s not here. Well, within just a page or two of I Shall Wear Midnight, the answer seemed clear to me: whatever perhaps went wrong in Making Money, and certainly went wrong in Unseen Academicals, and was arguably about to go wrong in Snuff, it wasn’t a problem with Pterry’s brain. There’s an inevitable though morbid game that Pratchett fans are playing somewhere in the back of their heads, willingly or unwillingly, when they read his later novels: we can’t but wonder, “how much of the decline is due to the Alzheimer’s?” Almost at the end of my Complete Discworld Re-Read Project
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