Pratchett: an open book
With previously unseen pictures, Tristram Fane Saunders finds Salisbury Museum’s HisWorld to be a fascinating insight into the life of the late author
‘Tolkien’s dead. JK Rowling said no. Philip Pullman couldn’t make it. Hi, I’m Terry Pratchett.” As self-deprecating introductions go, it’s a good one; Pratchett had it printed on a T-shirt for book events. That shirt is currently on show at the Salisbury Museum, along with his hat, sword, paintings, typewriter, computer hard-drive (crushed by steamroller, in accordance with the late author’s wishes) and every part of his office that wasn’t nailed down.
Assembling all of this joyous clutter is a triumph for Pratchett’s local museum, a Grade I-listed gem not far from the Salisbury chalkland that inspired much of his finest writing. Before we dive in, though, a word about that T-shirt.
It’s a joke with a chip on its shoulder. Pratchett sold more than 85million books worldwide. He received a knighthood, won a Carnegie Medal and inspired a library’s worth of academic theses. And yet, for most of his life, he was always “genre fiction”, never “literature”. It rankled, a little.
Despite the optimism of a few prominent fans, no book set on a flat world carried through space by four elephants riding a giant turtle was ever likely to make the Man Booker shortlist. Two years on from his death, however, it’s increasingly clear that the Discworld author was his generation’s Dickens.
An unashamedly popular writer, he used humour to sweeten his satirical bite. His best novels were fuelled by a moral anger at hypocrisy, cruelty and smallmindedness, balanced by a wartsand-all love for human fallibility.
“I wanted to write, in effect, an antidote to fantasy,” he explains in the label to one exhibit; they’re all written in Pratchett’s own words, culled from decades of essays and interviews. It’s a splendid alternative to the stilted prose we usually expect from museum placards. “I thought, let’s take a ridiculously, self-evidently foolish world, but then put people on it and make them as real as possible.”
As EM Forster wrote of Dickens’s one-dimensional caricatures, “There may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.” Even Pratchett’s most cartoonish grotesques feel true to life. It’s not hard to imagine Dickens’s Bumble, Krook and Buzfuz rubbing shoulders with put-upon wizard Ponder Stibbons or the carbuncular Corporal Nobbs.
Where Dickens had the artists Phiz and Cruikshank to illustrate his world, Pratchett had two gifted interpreters of his own: Josh Kirby, whose knobbly homunculi leered out from countless paperback covers, and Paul Kidby, Discworld’s unofficial artist-inresidence since Kirby’s death in 2001.
Both have plenty of original pieces on display here, but Kidby’s are the real highlights. His map of the mountainous kingdom of Lancre may well give you vertigo. Like Pratchett’s novels, Kidby’s paintings begin with a simple idea – usually spoofing a famous work – and through their wry detail and sharp eye for character elevate parody into something more. The Science of Discworld is a witty
take on An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, replacing Wright’s 18th-century academics with the bungling wizards of Discworld’s Unseen University.
Kidby’s paintings will be familiar to many from Pratchett’s dust-jackets; the real surprises are the author’s own previously unseen pictures. He was a striking illustrator. In the most moving part of the exhibition, we see two sheets of paper side by side. To the left, a Aubrey Beardsley-esque horseman Pratchett sketched in 1971. To the right, the formless scrawls he produced after the onset of what he called “the Embuggerance” (Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of early Alzheimer’s that affected his visual processing ability).
Pratchett treated his writing as a craft, as handiwork. He loved the physical act of creation. In 1975, just for the hell of it, he taught himself to cast locusts and bees in gold. Meticulously crafted, their fragile wings still look ready to take flight.