My Favourite Reads: Mort - Terry Pratchett

Representations of death are fascinating to me. As a theme, as an event, and as a character. And no book represents death as a character more wonderfully than this book. In Mort, Death is clever, intimidating smarty-pants who loves cats. He's wonderful.

“He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.” 

― Terry Pratchett, Mort

Terry Pratchett is perhaps comparable to Douglas Adams in many ways. They share a particular kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy and a flippancy towards quite serious life subjects, and they also have a real talent for creating characters who are ostensibly simplistic yet ultimately have quite a depth of character. Perhaps Discworld is to fantasy what The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is to sci-fi. Pratchett has such a flourish to his worlds. I feel like he could've written endlessly and I could have read Discworld novels endlessly, the both of us turning in a circle of literary production and greedy consumption for eternity. I find it hard picking out details of individual Discworld books just because its universe is so real and all-encompassing in my head, but Mort remains a very special book to me in that it introduces Death.

There is rarely a character that I feel as close to as Discworld's Death. His very existence is funny. To the core of his conception rest a thousand giggles, and I refuse to stop laughing. His resolute presence in the jumbled, chaotic universe of the Discworld novels is in itself deeply amusing, and I love that he acts as this matter-of-fact foil to the abject silliness that the much more supposedly 'normal' characters get carried away with. Death is the voice of reason, but he could also murder a curry, apparently.

Brilliant.