#the clacks

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

* Separate bathrooms of course being the key to any happy marriage.

It happens every year. Today, as I was unlocking the door of the bookshop, a woman shouted from across the street:

"Terry Pratchett!"

I turned to face her. When I did not reply she shouted again: "Terry Pratchett!"

Annoyed, I said, "I'm not Terry Pratchett. I don't know who that is."

She put her hands on her hips and waited. Finally she said, "The clacks. You have to know. You of all people have to know." She gestured at me, turning her palm up and making a pulling motion, as if to say: Come on, it's your turn. I sighed. I really do not know who Terry Pratchett is. But people evidently think that I should, because they come into the store and shout or whisper or sing or chant: Terry Pratchett, Terry Pratchett, Terry Pratchett.

I do not understand it, but I know what I am supposed to do. Reluctantly, I answered, "Terry Pratchett."

She smiled broadly. "Terry Pratchett!" she shouted again, louder this time.

"Terry Pratchett!" I shouted. (I do not often shout.)

As always fairly late to the pop-culture party, it wasn’t until 2020 that I cracked the cover on my first ever Pratchett novel. Even though I’d known about Pratchett from a young age, I’d just never felt motivated to check him out, and an earlier, aborted, screening of the ‘Colour of Magic’ hadn’t done anything to change my mind. It wasn’t until much later, while watching Gaiman and Pratchett’s “Good Omens” that I decided to give him a gander.

Honestly, I think he’s a first rate writer, and funny as hell. Many of the quirky and humorous ideas he comes up with certainly prove him worthy of the “Douglas Adams of fantasy” moniker.

But unlike Adams, Pratchett seems to put a little more weight (at least with ‘Going Postal’) on story than he does on humor, and this made me appreciate Adams as a first-rate comedy writer all the more.

Clocking in at not quite 500 pages, ‘Going Postal’ feels like a bit of a leaden tome at times, especially given the lightness of its comedic material. It was only after getting about halfway through the book that I realized that very few of Adams fiction works (Hitchiker’s as well as Dirk Gently) ever surpass the 200 page mark, and I think this is telling.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Pratchett’s material, but it is, more or less, light comedy. And I just don’t know if light comedy is capable of serving as the necessarily firm foundation to such an extensively long story.

What I think helped make Adams such a great writer of humor was that he had a comic sensibility that seem to understand, at an innate level, when to move onto the next joke. Maybe it was his experience in the Cambridge Footlights, as well as writing comedy for BBC Radio that honed these instincts. But, either way, I always felt like he knew when to pare down the material in order to better serve the comedy, something I feel Pratchett is much less inclined to do.