Book review: “Snuff” by Terry Pratchett

Snuff is one of Terry Pratchett’s best Discworld novels.  Which is saying a lot since the 41 books in the series have sold more than 80 million copies in 37 languages.

And Snuff was published in 2011.  Which is saying a lot more.

Four years earlier, in December, 2007, Pratchett announced, at the age of 59, that he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

There were five Discworld novels that followed: Unseen Academicals (the 37^th in the series, published in 2009), I Shall Wear Midnight (38, 2010), Snuff (39), Raising Steam (40, 2013) and The Shepherd’s Crown (41, published in August, 2015, five months after Pratchett’s death). And, with each book, dedicated Discworld fans couldn’t help but wonder if Pratchett’s disease had had an impact on his writing.

Such worries were in my head when I originally read Snuff in late October, 2011, and published my review two weeks after the book’s publication date.

Even more, they were on my mind this time around — I’ve been working my way chronologically through all of the Discworld books since Pratchett’s death — because, well, this time I knew that Alzheimer’s had killed him.

I knew what I didn’t know in 2011 that he had not been able to keep the illness at bay indefinitely which, I think, is what I innocently hoped for thirteen years ago.

 

“The complexities of personal relationships”

One key measure of the success of a Terry Pratchett novel is how silly it gets, and Snuff gets pretty silly at times, such as when Commander Sam Vimes, the head of the Ankh-Morpork city watch, is on vacation and sits down with a roomful of young upper-crust ladies, desperately in search of husband.

One of the girls, he decides, is a strange one, as demure as any of the others but with eyes that “gave the impression that she was seeing right through him, thoughts and all.”  Her name is Jane, and she asks Sam if being a writer is an acceptable career for a lady.

Vimes leaned back in his chair, a little defensively, and said, “Well, it can’t be a difficult job, given that all the words have probably been invented already, so there’s a saving in time right there, considering that you simply have to put them together in a different order.”

But what sort of book, Sam asks, is Jane thinking of writing?  Well, she’s started on a novel “about the complexities of personal relationships, with all their hopes and dreams and misunderstandings.”  (Which might lead certain readers to jump to the conclusion that this Jane’s book might be a lot like Pride and Prejudice and Emma and other novels by one of Pratchett’s forebears in the British authorial fraternity, er, family, another Jane, to wit, Jane Austen.)

Sam Vimes thinks Jane’s novel might benefit from “a lot of fighting, and dead bodies falling out of wardrobes…and maybe a war, perhaps, as a bit of background.”  All that action, however, would probably take the focus off the relationships, Jane points out.  Then, out of nowhere, Sam has this to say:

“I wonder if any author has thought about the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, the policeman and the mysterious killer, the lawman who must think like a criminal sometimes in order to do his job, and may be unpleasantly surprised at how good he is at such thinking.”

 

Commander, Duke and Blackboard Monitor

Here is one of those moments that happen often in a Pratchett novel when something silly is happening, and then suddenly it’s something serious.

In this case, it is Vimes contemplating, as he often does, how dark his soul must be — or, in other circumstances, would certainly have been — given his ability to think like a bad guy.

It’s a helpful tool for a copper, and Snuff is filled with bad guys, which is to say, with evil, banal, corrupt and corrupting, arrogant, violent, insensitive, merciless, disdainful and pompous women and men.

Vimes is also known as Sir Samuel Vimes and the Duke of Ankh, and he was given the highest honor that the King of the Dwarfs can bestow, Blackboard Monitor, “one who can erase the writings, somebody who can rub out what is there.”

Yet, as he thinks back on his life, Vimes recalls good old Mistress Slightly, his good old teacher who not only gave him a mint when he knew his alphabet and taught him how not to be afraid but who also gave him the job of classroom blackboard monitor, the first time anyone had entrusted him with anything.

Although neither Vimes nor Pratchett say, it certainly seems that Vimes with his complex mix of positive and negative qualities might have gone down a much different road in life if it hadn’t been for Mistress Slightly.

 

Death and Sam Vimes

Discworld is filled with wonderful characters.  The best is Death, the personification of the end of life, a seven-foot-tall talking skeleton who rides a horse called Binky, wears a black robe and hood and carries a scythe. He appears in all of the Discworld novels except The Wee Free Men (2003) and Snuff.

I wonder if Death doesn’t appear in Snuff because, at this point in his life, Pratchett couldn’t bring himself to joke about death.  He had been living with Alzheimer’s for four years, physically deteriorating, and — he may have guessed — he had less than four years to go before it killed him.

What’s certain is that Snuff is a novel that is centered on Sam Vimes who appears on nearly all of its 398 pages.

It is a novel about Sam doting on his well-born wife Sybil and their six-year-old son Young Sam.  It’s a novel in which Sam expounds on his faith in the law and in the police officer as an agent of the law, about the rule of law as the foundation of a just society.

 

White-hot anger

And, above all else, it is a novel about Sam going white hot with anger over the killing and kidnapping and enslavement of goblins — a species of talking, thinking and feeling humanoids — by human beings who look down on them as scum and vermin.

I have always felt that Sam Vimes is the Discworld character who most closely fits Terry Pratchett, that Pratchett most spoke his mind through Sam.

In Snuff, I got the impression that the anger that fills Sam is an existential rage at the injustice of being born to die and of spending a life learning only to lose it all in the end.  And a fury at the stupidity of humans who, in a world and life filled with pain, nonetheless, feel free to inflict pain on others.  Pain for profit or just for a whim.

Sam’s anger in Snuff, it seems to me, sums up all of Pratchett’s anger at all of the injustices of life, including the great injustice of getting early onset Alzheimer’s when he had so many more stories in his head to write and share with his readers.

 

“Her name”

The way most humans treat goblins in Snuff is the way the United States government and people used to treat Native Americans. (“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”)

And the way American and other entrepreneurs rounded up Black people in Africa to ship them to plantations where they were worked like animals, sometimes to death.

Indeed, goblins are treated so much like noxious pests that most of them believe that they are deeply inferior to humans — “so certain that they were irrevocably walking rubbish.”

Yet, when Vimes is investigating the particularly brutal murder of a goblin woman, he asks, in the usual way of a policeman, “What was her name?”

The old goblin looked at Vimes as if shocked, and after a moment said, “Her name was The Pleasant Contrast of the Orange and Yellow Petals in the Flower of the Gorse.  Thank you, Mr. Po-leess-maan of the dark.”

“I’m afraid I’m only just starting to investigate this crime,” said Vimes, feeling unusually embarrassed.

“I meant, Mr. Po-leess-maan, thank you for believing that goblins have names.  My name is Sound of the Rain on Hard Ground.  She was my second wife.”

 

“Lifted all hearts and forgave all sins”

And, later, Vimes and his family hear an adolescent female named Tears of a Mushroom play the harp with such beauty that Sybil is left in tears.

Even Young Sam was transfixed, standing there with his little mouth open, while the music rushed in and, for a moment upon the world, lifted all hearts and forgave all sins — not having its work cut out in the case of Young Sam, a part of Vimes managed to reflect, but doing a sterling and heavyweight job on his father.

 

An angry guy

There are times when Snuff is an exquisitely sad book.

And times when it is a rollicking adventure, such as when Sam helps to bring a runaway steamboat into port.  And times when it is charming, such as whenever Young Sam is gambolling across the pages in his pursuit of a new sort of animal poo for his collection.

And, as I’ve said, times when it is silly, such as when Miss Felicity Beedle, the author of one of Young Sam’s favorite books Geoffrey and the Land of Poo — leading Sam to think of her as “the poo lady” — explains to Vimes how she got into writing:

I thought, “How hard can writing be?  After all, most of the words are going to be and, the and I and it, and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has already been done for you.” That was fifty-seven books ago.  It seems to have worked.

But Snuff is always an angry book.

Sam Vimes is an angry character, and Terry Pratchett, somewhere in his rich and complicated personality, was an angry guy.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.9.25