Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
Rincewind tried to put the memory out of his mind, but he was enjoying himself there, terrorizing the other residents and kicking the furniture.
I was sixteen years old when I first read that sentence. I was sitting next to my friend Matthew in the back row of a French class, and the teacher was explaining something important about commas. The pocket edition was cheap, the cover ugly, and Matthew and I had read everything the school library would accept to stock, plus many it wouldn’t.
This sentence has stuck in my mind ever since. It refuses to go. Sometimes it kicks the furniture.
library behind the classroom
The kind of reading you only do when you’re fifteen, and really only in places where you’re not supposed to. The back of the class matters. So is the bottom of the sleeping bag, the wrong bus, and the ten minutes between the person announcing dinner and the time dinner actually arrives. The book should be so small that it disappears when the teacher looks at it. Pocket Editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. The Pratchetts were small, thick, slightly crumpled, and printed on a type of paper that already looked guilty.
I think this is the secret no one mentions about him: he wrote books like perfect size to hide. An entire cosmology, an entire flat world balanced on a turtle, and you can slide it inside a math textbook with a centimeter to spare.
A Brief Theory of Why They Worked on Teenagers
At the time, most fandom took itself extremely seriously. There were maps in it. It had appendices. In it, Heroes, with a capital H, were walking solemnly toward their destiny in a landscape that reeked of dwarves. Pratchett had stuff with legs.
His thesis, more or less, was that the universe was very big and very ridiculous, and the two facts were related.1. He also treated his readers as if they were intelligent, which, as a teenager being treated like anything else by almost everyone, is the closest to a love letter you can buy in a train station.
“There was nothing in the beginning that exploded.”
Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would agree to this.
“Of course, the problem with being open-minded is that people will insist on coming along and trying to stuff things in.”
I read that line at the age when adults were enthusiastically trying to put things in my place. This did not stop them. But that means that, since then, I’ve seen them do it, and paying attention is half the trick.
Rincewind, City Watch and the witches I never got to
I loved Rincewind. Matthew loved Rincewind. I should clarify that Rincewind loved no one, not even himself, and he would have run away from this feeling if it had ever engulfed him.
He was the ideal hero for a teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only technically, and often having the most powerful magic in the universe lodged in his head against his will. This would be known to anyone who has turned sixteen.
City Watch came later, just as the Watch books always come a little later than the Rincewind books, on the same shelf but slightly above. Vimes, who started out as an alcoholic and slowly, painfully and with a lot of abuse, becomes the moral backbone of the entire town. Carrot, who was technically a king and with some embarrassment decided not to be king. Angua. Detritus. Reg Shue, who voted and continued to vote despite several inconvenient deaths.
I never knew about witches. I think you need to know a small village inside out, and not be intimidated by an old woman who has seen a lot, and even I haven’t yet. Grandma Weatherwax is waiting for me. She is good at waiting. I will reach there.
bump
They called it that, because they called everything what it was. Alzheimer’s, long fade, slow theft. He gave a lecture called shake hands with deathWhich is the best thing anyone has written about dying because many Stoics have given up trying.
He scripted his own ending, which is a Pratchettian act in itself. Even a steamroller, a hard drive, and instructions had to be followed exactly. The author is refusing to free the narrator from bondage.
What we lost and what teenagers lost
Terry Pratchett died in 2015. I was no longer sixteen. Matthew was no longer sitting next to me. The class now belonged to someone else, and the comma had been interpreted long ago.
Selfishly, the one I remember is the next book. There were always going to be more.
What I miss, less selfishly, is that something the size of Pratchett is now reaching teenagers, and not reaching them. For a child who found school boring and homework worse, there was a small, thick, slightly worn book on the way to study, with an ugly cover and footnotes talking about it. Lately, I don’t see him walking past any of the classrooms. It’s possible that I’m not reaching out to the right people.
But somewhere, quite possibly, there is a sixteen-year-old who just read a sentence that they can’t get out of their head. It’s still kicking the furniture. I hope they pass the book to the person sitting next to them.
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