Josh Kirby, late great cover artist extraordinaire, is to be thanked for awakening in me a need I never knew I had. A need to read as many stories by one Terry Pratchett as I possibly could. The book was The Light Fantastic and the cover was a chest of the kind you might expect a pirate to keep his booty in. The chest had legs, actual cute little pink legs, but it wasn't using them, for it was flying through the air, and holding on to the chest, in various states of excitement/terror were wizards, warriors and strange looking little men. They say never to judge a book by it's cover but had I not done so here I would have never known the delights and wonders of a little place called the Discworld.
That was 20some years ago now. Terry Pratchett is still writing Discworld books (the latest is no. 38, not counting short stories and narrative inserts in non-fiction books) and I am still reading them. Sadly Josh Kirby is not still illustrating the covers, having passed away several years ago. I say sadly, and I mean it, because while the man currently tasked with providing cover art (Paul Kidby) is a fine artist, and his work could even be said to suit the slightly more serious tone of the later books better than Kirby's cartoony (but insanely detailed and intricate) style might have, I still can't help but think that a new Pratchett just doesn't look right without a new Kirby on the jacket.
So yes, the Discworld series. The series as a whole comprises, as I've said, 38 books so far, but these can be split, roughly, into subsets. There are Rincewind (failed wizard) books, the Witches (pretty self explanatory), the City Watch (police procedurals in Discworlds largest city) and numerous others.
I Shall Wear Midnight stars one Tiffany Aching, a character who has been the lead now in 4 novels, beginning with Wee Free Men, and continuing through A Hat Full Of Sky, Wintersmith, and now ...Midnight. Tiffany is a witch, and seems to have cornered the market in Witch stories set on the Discworld, as the previous 'star' witch, one Granny Weatherwax, and her established supporting cast, have not had a book of their own since Tiffany came on the scene, although they have made cameos in her stories.
The Tiffany Aching stories were originally marketed as Young Adult novels set in Discworld, somehow seperate from the 'grown up' books, but in truth there was little to seperate them, other than the lead characters young age (and even in that the main series had form, with early book Equal Rites having a child protagonist) and the conceit has been dropped now, possibly due to Tiffany herself having grown up (9 in her first book, she is almost 16 in her latest).
Did I enjoy ...Midnight? Indeed I did. Pratchett is one of the best in the world at what he does so compared with the rest of the overcrowded marketplace this book is right up there with the best of them. On a sliding scale of Discworld though, I'm afraid it's only middle ground for me. The reason is that the whole Witches subset has never been my favourite aspect of the series, so any book in that setting is going to be a minor dissapointment, if for no other reason than it's not a City Watch book, or a Rincewind book. This is purely my own prejudice talking though. As a Tiffany Aching/Witches story it's a belter so those for whom those stories are favourites, this will be a welcome addition.
It is quite dark in places though, touching on teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse and suicide, being sympathetic to everyone involved and allowing no easy answers to be found. All of the other usual Pratchett ingredients can be found here as well; real world folklore given just a hint of a twist to fit Discworld, wry and insightful commentary on human nature (good and bad), and of course an ancient supernatural threat that has to be defeated with good old fashioned common sense.
It also has jokes though, and will make you laugh. It is not the riotous, laugh out loud at every second line, eyewateringly hilarious stuff of the early Discworld books but it is still funny. Oh, yes.
If I have one problem with this series it would be this : because Discworld is a fantasy setting, every book seems to have a supernatural antagonist and they can sometimes feel shoehorned in. Quite often, I will be engrossed in the story of the hero or heroine as they go about whatever their agenda is and then boom, suddenly there is a demon or a ghost or an ancient prophecy to deal with. Human antaganists can be scary too. Indeed, the evil entity Tiffany faces in this book is a reincarnated witchfinder from the past who corrupts people with his old 'witches are evil' spiel. In flashback we see him as a human, before his death. He was far from pleasant then. A modern (at least to Tiffany) version of that character would have sufficed for me, and might perhaps have been more chilling, if he was shown to be corrupting with his prejudices through sheer charisma and force of personality, like a cult leader, rather than being able to 'posess' people.
That is just a pet peeve of mine and is the only one I have regarding Pratchetts books, which are, to my mind at least, nigh on perfect in every other respect.
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