Home Artists Posts Import Register

Content

Hogfather is not something I am willing to entertain critical discussion on.

It is one of my all time top 20ish books.

It is beautiful and perfect.

I literally spend money to celebrate the fake holiday in it every year.

So I have nothing constructive to say about the book, audiobook, or miniseries. No deep dive into the physics or worldbuilding. I simply love it, and like some other things I love very very much, whatever weaknesses there may be in there ARE NONE OF MY BUSINESS.

So I’m just warning you that this may not be very insightful, because quality is quality and brooks no nitpicking. This book made me give a shit about Christmas again so I won’t hear any one single naughty word about it.

I came to Discworld fairly late in life. I quite literally never heard the word Discworld growing up, despite being a perfect age to have imprinted on it. I don’t really know why, I came across most of the Geek Canon organically enough, and was way into British comedy, but Pratchett just never came up, and my adolescence proceeded through the Before Times when the internet didn’t serve up every remotely popular cultural icon to your eyeballs in an easy-to-guzzle squirt bottle.

By the time I did hear about the books, I was living in the UK, and the very misguided person who tried to sell me on them bizarrely assured me Eric was the correct book to start the series with, a choice I cannot begin to comprehend with both hands and a microscope. Seriously, that man cost me years of fangirling, get your head on straight, my good sir. I was entirely lost and decided I did not like Discworld. My stepfather, a British maleperson who needed his head re-attached his own self, years later talked me into trying again, and again, FUCKING BAFFLINGLY, chose Going Postal as the ideal entry point to the series.

THESE ARE BAD CHOICES. YOU WOULD THINK AT SOME POINT SOMEBODY WOULD TRY ME ON THE FIRST GODDAMN BOOK.

Ultimately, I started listening to the audiobooks on the long roadtrips of my mid-late twenties because most audiobooks were quite rhythmic and thus put me to sleep, and my ex-husband suggested I try these as the dude narrating Discworld never let his voice fall into that soothing cadence so it passed the time wonderfully. That dude being Nigel Planer, British comedy legend, though I didn’t place the name at the time. He started me on The Colour of Magic, and the Luggage got me right in the delight forever.

And I fell in love, for all the reasons you fall in love with Pratchett.

I listened to Hogfather while driving a massive U-Haul truck from Ohio to Maine twelve years ago through the most perfect autumnal countryside you can possibly imagine, and by the time I pulled into the ferry terminal I now know so well, I was sobbing.

And when I walked into my new house for the first time, having just finished the book, it was all dark and spooky and lonely in there, except for the slightly bent poker lying in front of the fireplace like it knew I was coming.

Most Discworld books are funny and charming and have a few cool things to say in all the wackiness and puns. But only a few of them are what you would call deep. And deepest of those is Hogfather, which I had avoided for a long time, assuming it was another dud like Eric, with the endlessly repeated joke being Santa Claus instead of Phantom of the Opera.

But it’s not that. It’s so not. It’s the loveliest, kindest book about the power of folklore and why we need it, really and truly about he spirit of Christmas (tm), not in the religious sense but in the mythological deep brain sense (and also kind of in the hardcore class issues sense that so many Christmas properties scoot cutely around but never directly address), and low-key kind of also about why fantasy as a genre is actually important and why those of us who write it do what we do.

It’s very weird to me that a movie came out this year called Fatman in which the basic premise of Hogfather (a mysterious group is trying to assassinate Santa) is used to make a Mel Gibson vehicle, partly because Mel Gibson shouldn’t get vehicles anymore of any kind. Who wants Mr. Sugar Tits up in their Christmas? Nobody. I’m pretty sure the Assassins’ Guilds even uses “the Fat Man” as the code word for the Hogfather. But it’s 2020 so fuck all that’s sacred, I guess.

And Hogfather is sacred to me. It is. I think about the speech Death gives at the end about the why of a fat man in red bringing gifts in the winter every time I get annoyed by Christmas carols or aggressive holiday advertizing. Hogfather does that thing I love so much and try to do in my own lighter writing: set up silliness and cleverness and craziness and then stop it all cold and look directly into the audience’s heart and say: this is important, this is why, I need you to hear me, it’s very, very serious and you’re going to remember it forever. Pratchett obviously loved this trick, too. It’s usually Granny Weatherwax or Sam Vimes that gets to land the punch, but in the case of Hogfather it’s really nearly everyone, from Susan to Death to Albert to Mr. Teatime even all the way down to the mall security guards and poor Banjo and the first Discworld computer. Everyone gets to say something truly important and real at some point, and there is a LOT going on in Hogfather but it never feels cluttered. (Look at that second to last sentence. It’s hard to even remember that this book not only handles Santa Claus and the natures of Death, sociopathy, faith, and folklore, but the birth of true AI in a fantasy world and it is not a particularly long book, my friends.)

I used to tell people to read a few Discworld books before Hogfather, because I don’t want people to bounce of the series like I did—starting with one of the high-concept standalone Discworld books is difficult, because we feel like we’re obviously missing something. And that whiplash of silly to extremely deep is all the more satisfying if you go in expecting another romp through some corner of Ankh-Morpork with a lot of jokes about Australians or something. I do think a little context helps a lot. But if you don’t want to commit, Hogfather is Hogfather and it’s fine on its own.

Nowadays I amfar more often asked whether you can watch the BBC miniseries without reading the book, a more complicated question.

And I do think you can.

If you already like and understand fantasy and its tropes.

If you are aware that Discworld is A Thing That Exists and this is Part of It.

If you like British comedy as a whole.

I have tried to show the miniseries to a number of parents, both mine and others’ and it does NOT go well if they aren’t already down to clown with the elves and dwarves set. Pratchett’s work has always been fundamentally a profoundly loving pastiche of the whole genre, and if you don’t like the foundation, you’re really going to hate the roof, you know? Fantasy is a genre full of assumptions, tropes, protocols, and standard set pieces most of us who are fans don’t even think of as being any of those things because they are so deeply embedded in our brains’ structures by the time we reach adulthood that we don’t think of them as coming from an unholy union of Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, actual folklore, medieval history, and the desperate wish fulfullment of millions of lonely kids who needed somewhere grand to escape to. Discworld hits the cobblestones running assuming you’re on board with virtually every aspect of fantasy literature and ready to fuck it right up. If you’re not, it’s simply baffling. Why is Santa a pig what the fuck.

But if you’re reading this, the chances that you don’t rock with fantasy are VERY slim indeed, so you’re probably okay. The miniseries is really quite lovely. The cast is quite literally crammed with legends, you’ll recognize virtually everyone if you’ve watched anything filmed in the UK in the last 15 years. (PS Death’s voice is Ian Richardson, the OG House of Cards star and, oddly enough for my Americans, the Grey Poupon guy from the 80s ads.) For the most part, it includes almost all the book material, even plotlines that it could easily have cut. It’s slick and pretty and the effects hold up.

Is it missing some of the magic? Of course it is. Books are always going to feel more personal and richer, we create them in our minds as we read to be just as we like them. In some ways, it’s almost too faithful an adaptation, it sometimes feels a little flat and rushes through the jokes. It do sag a bit in the middle. There is certainly nothing new added if you have read the book—but perhaps in this fallen age we can be grateful for a production that doesn’t feel the need to scaffold some weird New Coke crap onto a classic. But in other ways it makes the fairly complex plot easier to follow and visualize (I just could not figure out what the child’s drawing world was supposed to look like until I saw the movie). A quite young Michelle Dockery looks spectacular as Susan, Death’s granddaughter, but it’s only her second role, and she occasionally rushes through emotional moments or delivers lines in the same repetitive tones trying to get up to Richardson’s immense gravitas. It’s not overly diverse in the sense that any modern show would be, and Susan is the only woman around for just…almost the entire thing. The only other female characters are a child and a minor Tooth Fairy intended to be annoying. But that’s kind of a thing with classic Pratchett. If it’s not the Witches’ arc, he tended to fall into the One Cool Girl thing that so many writers of the 80s and 90s did. It is what it is. At least Susan is, in fact, a historically great character.

But these are minor nitpicks. The fact is I watch and love it every year. It is a Christmas movie with no romantic plotline, and that in and of itself is a small miracle. It allows me to experience a book I adore while baking and making things. And in fact, if you haven’t read the novel and you’re moved to by my rambling on about it without discussing the plot much in case someone DOES run off and read it for the first time, I highly recommend the audiobook.

Read by Nigel Planer, who I had no idea is in fact a British comedy legend until years after falling in love with his narration, the audiobooks are, to my mind and controversially, the best way of reading Discworld full stop. It’s more like a radio play than an audiobook, different accents and voices for every character, a nice fat sound effect on Death’s voice, and so much obvious love in the reading. He makes every pun sound cool. And I’ve always loved how he does women’s voices without making everyone high pitched and breathy and submissive-sounding. I am such a Discworld by Planer fan that the one time I accidentally fired up a book with another narrator I physically recoiled from his Death voice.

I celebrate his entire catalogue.

I realize this hasn’t been a really substantive review—I was never going to do some kind of deep dive into my own bloody holiday tradition. Sometimes love just smoothes over anything that’s not perfect and makes it perfect, at least, perfect for me—and I just love it. Simply and completely. It grabs something obviously ridiculous and takes it seriously, my favorite treat. It is a real honest-to-Hogswatch bit of magic that converts a holiday drowning in crass cynicism and a religion that hasn’t been on best behavior for the last millennia or two into something I can embrace with my whole heart. That is QUITE a trick, you know. But Pratchett was magical. Yes, even Eric.

Many years ago, I was the Guest of Honor at a convention in DC. Terry Pratchett was already sick by then and I had made my peace with knowing I’d come to love his work too late to ever meet him. Life is like that sometimes. But I was sitting in the green room and a little whisper of a rumor started going around: Terry Pratchett is here. No, really, he’s physically here in this hotel right now. He’s going to do a reading.

The other GOH and I immediately went to talk to someone because, you know, as GOHs surely this was the one time we could pull rank and get a privilege, and if we were ever going to cash in a GOH chip it was now. And so, I did get to meet him. He appeared ever so briefly in my life, unnannounced, unlooked for, not even considered a possibility. A miracle.

Magic.

Because he was always magic.

And I shook his hand and he told me my name was beautiful and I got to tell him, in what I am sure was the most awkward and ungraceful jumble of words, how much Hogfather has meant to me and how permanently it has taken up residence in my heart. I am so grateful for that moment, and so grateful for this book and everything it says and does for all of us, and so grateful for all of you who listen to the dumb things I say and buy the dumb books I write so that I could be where I was, in that moment, to tell a magic man that he made me believe in Santa Claus again.

In a world where it’s really fucking hard to believe in anything, the stories that bring us back to the actual brilliant, hard, bloody, kind magic of life are so needed, and this is that, and I hope against hope that one day I will write anything half as good, as funny and as real and as true, but until then, it’s pork pies and sherry and Death saying Ho Ho Ho until the new year turns and the sun comes back and we try to do it all over again, down through the summer to the endless sacrifice of winter, and there we will always find this story waiting to remind us why we should try in the first place.

Thank you, Uncle Terry. Forever.

Files

Comments

Mandy

* adds all 41 Discworld books to her reading list *

Garrett Wollman

I too came to Pratchett quite late, primarily through the series of omnibuses that SFBC put out in the late 1990s when his early 80s books had gone out of print, well before the transoceanic cultural convergence of these days. They are special books, and left me with a much greater appreciation for *silly* as a legitimate mode in fantasy.