November 6, 2008
By Theresa Smith
Doubleday R195
Reviewed by Theresa Smith
Considering his penchant for the multiple universe theory, it is not surprising that Terry Pratchett has shied away from the Discworld with his latest book.
This time around he places his story in a world suspiciously like our own, but with a few twists that sets it apart from our reality or that on the disc that swims through the universe on the back of a turtle, supported by four elephants.
Pratchett stopped being ha ha funny around the time he wrote Fifth Elephant and when his Discworld stories took on a darker tone. He'd always been a great proponent of irony up until that point, but that was when the sarcasm became more pointed and by the time Monstrous Regiment rolled around, his social commentary about the nature of wars was quite critical.
With Nation he's aiming somewhere between Tiffany Aching and the more adult Discworld, which marks a return to the teenage market.
The story starts off on a suspiciously Pacific-like island where a young boy, Mau, has just completed a rite of passage into adulthood. As he goes back to his own island a tsunami strikes and he returns to a home completely destroyed, now minus people.
The only other occupant wandering around the island is a shipwrecked girl. They don't speak the same language or know anything about each other's cultures, but the voices in Mau's head are telling him that it is up to the two of them to restore the nation.
Pratchett is at his best when he takes what seems to be a familiar story or plot and tears it apart to mix it up with some not so well-known legends, a dash of urban myth and lots of common sense.
While Nation could at worst be described as "Blue Lagoon meets Captain James Cook", Pratchett's spin on it elevates it to something a little better than a six-word pitch for a film.
He's off auto pilot, turning in an at times sad, sometimes even bitter story about looking for a reason for loss
. Who knows whether the railing against the powers-that-be is a reflection of Pratchett's own frame of mind, what with his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
While the Victorian setting is rich with vintage Pratchett detail like the parrot with the foul mouth or the tree-climbing octopus that can count, the plot is fairly straight-forward when compared to something like Good Omens.
Pratchett bends his universe around his story, so that introducing an ancient civilisation that doesn't fit into the commonly accepted way of thinking is his way of saying: Pay attention."
For him, writing fantasy is more than just telling stories about wizards waving their wands around, it is about seeing the world from new directions. With this story he is trying to make a statement about how whoever controls the flow of information, controls how people think.
The easy way he can take various seemingly incompatible stories, mythologies and ways of thinking to create something coherent feeds into that very concept. If you know nothing about ancient Polynesian cultures or Victorian-era exploration, this story becomes a touchstone against which you measure everything you find out about the subjects from now on.
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