Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett
I'm reading all of the Discworld novels in order. Use the tags to find the rest of the posts.
One of the first Discworld books I ever owned was the 'Death Trilogy' hardback containing the first three Death books (Mort, Reaper Man, and Soul Music) and of the three, Reaper Man is the one that I had the least clear memory of. I remembered the basic plot - Death is made mortal due to having developed too much of a personality and too many feelings for humans and goes to work on a farm - but I didn't remember much of the rest of the events (though who can ever forget the Death Of Rats?).
This was a bit of a frustrating book, because it really feels like two novels that have been stapled together. The first, concerning Death and the consequences of people no longer properly dying in the Discworld, and everything Death learns about what it means to be human, is easily the best book in the series by this point. It's funny, it's touching, it's philosophical, and structurally it feels like a proper novel in a way that a lot of the books that precede it don't.
The second, dealing with the wizards and their attempt to stop the weirdness in Ankh Morpork that starts with snowglobes and ends in a giant shopping centre via hundreds of runaway trolleys, feels really weird and like it doesn't fit with the rest of the book. It's never really made clear why the weird stuff is appearing in the city or what connection it has to the overabundance of life energy caused by a lack of dying. It just happens, and Windle and the other wizards deal with it while Death is off dealing with his business, and then it's done and everyone gets to die at the end.
I think I've firmly established in my reviews of these books that I don't really care for the sorts of stories that Pratchett uses his wizards for, so it was disappointing to find this very good Death novel being constantly interrupted by what felt like a second novel that I really didn't like. I think there was room here for some really interesting, fun stuff to happen with Windle and the wizards and the other undead denizens of Ankh Morpork - it just wasn't this.
I've noted a few times in these reviews that Pratchett often revisits ideas, usually in the form of taking a second run at a basic plot. In the case of Reaper Man we actually see some seeds of later books, which is fun. The first is that The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents are mentioned a couple of times here. I've never read that book, but based on the way that character is referred to I expect that it will be Pratchett's version of the pied piper of Hamelin. I'll be interested to see what that looks like.
The second is buried right at the end of the novel in a small chunk of description, and it immediately jumped out at me as being the seed from which Soul Music will be born:
He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren't playing it. It was playing them.
Soul Music is among my favourite Discworld novels, so it was very fun to see this pop up here.
I'm really struggling to figure out where Reaper Man sits in my informal, in-my-brain-only ranking of these books. It definitely contains the best book in the series thus far, but it's let down by the nonsense with the shopping mall that I really didn't care for at all. I find it hard to say it's better than Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! - it is better than them, but it's also much more flawed than them because of that section. And that frustrates me.
It's definitely good though.