discworld

Book title: Mort
Author: Terry Pratchett
Originally published: 1987

I finished reading Mort a couple of days ago, and perhaps the way to best indicate how much I enjoyed it is to say that I’ve already requested Reaper Man, book 2 in the Death series. I had a lot of fun reading this one.

The book focuses in on the Death character of Discworld, who looks like your basic Grim Reaper - skeleton, black hooded robe, scythe and sword. At the beginning of the book, Mort is “all elbows and knees”, and his father believes that he thinks too much. For this reason, his father ends up taking Mort to the village, in the hopes of Mort finding an apprenticeship. Death obliges, and takes Mort under his wing - or robe, as it were. When Death takes a day off and gives Mort a couple of jobs, Mort of course makes a mess of things. He has a crush on the young princess he’s supposed to be “ushering into the next world”, and so instead he kills the princess’s assassin. The rest of the book deals with how Mort tries to “fix” history, which continues to trundle along as if the princess were dead, and how Death tries to get in touch with his, er, human side.

While I enjoyed Mort’s character, what really made this book for me was the character of Death. There were some scenes in the book that literally had me laughing out loud, something I don’t do that often when reading a book. Many of the scenes that made me laugh were ones which dealt with Death’s peculiar character. He’s a mix between a humorless, all-work-and-no-play god, and a small child who is clueless of how the world works, due to his rather abnormal working conditions. This becomes readily apparent when he tries to do things that humans do, like going to the bar:

“I don’t see the point,” the stranger said. [Death]
“Sorry?”
“What is supposed to happen?”
“How many drinks have you had?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Just about anything, then,” said the barman. . . .

I burst out laughing at “Forty-seven.” In the book, Death also has a soft spot for kittens - go figure.

I loved this book, but a word of caution to those who might be inclined to read it after reading my post here: if you don’t like silliness mixed in with your fantasy, don’t read this. I’ve read that the Discworld series has developed over the years to not have such large amounts of gag humor in it, but this being one of the early Discworld novels, it runneth over with silliness. There’s a lot of stuff that just makes no sense, and if you’re someone who’s going to get caught up going “that’s silly” or “that wouldn’t work like that”, you probably won’t enjoy this.

However, if you think you’d like a kitten-loving Death, or a world that is held up by four giant elephants riding a 10,000 mile long turtle who’s floating through space, you’ll love this. Read it.