There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.
I was sixteen when I first read that sentence. I was sitting in the back row of a French classroom, next to my friend Mathieu, and the teacher was explaining something important about a comma. The pocket edition was cheap, the cover was lurid, and Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not.
The sentence has been in my head ever since. It refuses to leave. Occasionally it kicks over the furniture.
The library at the back of the class
There is a kind of reading you only do at fifteen, and only really in places you are not supposed to be reading. The back of a classroom counts. So does the bottom of a sleeping bag, the wrong bus, and the ten minutes between someone announcing dinner and dinner actually arriving. The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
This is, I think, the secret nobody mentions about him: he wrote books that were the right size for hiding. A whole cosmology, a whole flat world balanced on a turtle, and you could slide it inside a maths textbook with a centimetre to spare.
A brief theory of why he worked on teenagers
Most fantasy, at the time, took itself extremely seriously. It had maps. It had appendices. It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves. Pratchett had a luggage with legs.
His thesis, more or less, was that the universe was very large and very ridiculous, and the two facts were related1. He also treated his readers as if they were intelligent, which, to a teenager being treated as anything else by almost everybody else, is the closest thing to a love letter you can buy in a train station.
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
I read that line at an age when adults were enthusiastically trying to put things in mine. It did not stop them. But it did mean that, from then on, I noticed them doing it, and noticing is half the trick.
Rincewind, and the City Watch, and the Witches I never quite got to
I loved Rincewind. Mathieu loved Rincewind. Rincewind, I should clarify, did not love anyone, including himself, and would have run away from the feeling if it had ever cornered him.
He was the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only on a technicality, and frequently the most powerful spell in the universe was lodged in his head against his will. This will be familiar to anyone who has been sixteen.
The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up. Vimes, who started as a drunk and became, slowly, painfully, and with a great deal of swearing, the moral spine of an entire city. Carrot, who was technically a king and decided, with some embarrassment, not to be one. Angua. Detritus. Reg Shoe, who had voted, and continued to vote, despite a number of inconvenient deaths.
I never quite found my way into the Witches. I think you need to have known a small village from the inside, and to have been afraid of an old woman who saw too much, and I had not yet been either. Granny Weatherwax is waiting for me. She is good at waiting. I will get there.
The embuggerance
He called it that, because he called everything what it was. The Alzheimer’s, the long fade, the slow theft. He gave a lecture called Shaking Hands With Death, which remains the best thing anyone has written about dying since several Stoics gave up trying.
He scripted his own ending, which is a Pratchettian act in itself. There was even a steamroller, and a hard drive, and instructions to be followed exactly. The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.
What we lost, and what teenagers lost
Terry Pratchett died in 2015. I was no longer sixteen. Mathieu was no longer sitting next to me. The classroom was somebody else’s now, and the comma had long since been explained.
What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t. The on-ramp to reading, for a kid who finds school boring and homework worse, used to be a small, fat, slightly battered book with a lurid cover and footnotes that talked back. I don’t see them, lately, in the back of any classroom I walk past. It is possible I am not walking past the right ones.
But somewhere, presumably, there is a sixteen-year-old who has just read a sentence that will not leave their head. It is kicking over the furniture even now. I hope they pass the book to the person sitting next to them.