Q & A with Terry Pratchett

By Michael Levy, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 9/4/2008

Author or co-author of more than 50 books, which between them have sold more than 45 million copies, Terry Pratchett has won numerous awards including the Carnegie Medal, has been named an OBE, and is one of the bestselling writers in the United Kingdom. We spoke with the author about Nation (HarperCollins, Oct.), his latest YA novel.

Terry Pratchett. Photo: Robin Matthews.

Well, yes and no. It’s important for the hero to have tragic relief, the opposite of light relief. Let’s not forget that at the very beginning, the young hero has to bury everyone he’s known in his life and spends quite a lot of the book teetering on the edge of insanity. The book deals with issues that can’t be handled lightly.

Nation is being published for ages 12 and up. Are there differences between how you write a children’s, YA, or adult novel?

Yes, for this one I was assuming that the bulk of the readers’ ages would probably be into double figures so there was no reason to hold back on some of the horror. It’s not blood and guts horror or chainsaw horror, this is the kind of horror where you are the only survivor and everyone you know has been wiped out almost instantly while you’re somewhere else and you have to deal with it. I think kids can imagine that sort of thing. I have to pay attention, of course, to vocabulary and some of the ideas. And by that I mean not avoiding certain ideas or avoiding certain vocabulary but making sure that the readers can, if they aren’t familiar with what’s going on, work it out from the context. When I was a kid I read books well ahead of what my parents thought I read. It’s a wise child that doesn’t always let their parents know what they’re reading. I picked up quite an extensive vocabulary from reading although I must confess that for years I thought the word “ogre” was pronounced “ogrey.” I’d never actually heard it spoken, but I’d read it hundreds of times.

Many of the protagonists of your adult novels, like Sam Vimes or Moist von Lipwig, are fairly cynical, but your heroes in this book, well, can we call them charmingly naive?

There is naivety in Nation because what we’re dealing with a lot of the time is coming to terms with things that children shouldn’t have to come to terms with. They’re trying to make sense of what is happening in their world and they haven’t got the sophisticated way of talking about it that slightly older people would have. They’re not naive as such, but they have to make sense of a world that has almost literally been turned upside down. Consider, for example, the absolutely oscillating mindset of Mau, the hero, who says that he doesn’t believe the gods exist, but on the other hand almost unconsciously needs them to exist so that he can blame them for what is happening.

Is there any actual magic in the book? Mau sees things as magical.

That depends. There are a couple of occasions where both Daphne, the girl, and Mau, the boy, talk to Death and have what might be called fantasy experiences. Something happened, whether it’s magic or their overheated imaginations. This certainly isn’t a book about wizardry, let’s put it like that.

Mau absolutely does believe in Death. And again, since he’s a boy with huge responsibilities devolved on to him, who knows how his subconscious works? So I leave that open. It was very interesting to tell a story about this, but magic definitely doesn’t dominate the book. I know what we can call it: narrative realism! To prevent being tarred with the brush of fantasy. Narrative realism, we’ll cling on to that one like a lifebelt.

The humor in Nation often revolves around animals, those horrible trouser birds and the tree climbing octopi for example. Are they real or did you make them up?

Thank you for that! The strange animals and plants are all nonexistent, but they hover on the very edge of existence. The lonesome palm, I had a very good time with because it’s a cartoon idea; every small island has one palm tree on it in cartoons, just look at any of them. The tree-climbing octopus one feels should actually exist, and the paper vine very nearly does exist, but actually just fails to do so. Actually, I would have thought that an octopus that could live in trees would do incredibly well. Just dropping on people’s heads or invading birds’ nests. Safe from other predators. Wonderful.

What about milking the pig — is that possible?

Oh, yes! Well I’m not totally graphic about that. It was quite clear what was going on, but I had to fudge on that a bit. It’s very easy to milk a cow or a goat, but you’d need infinite patience, tiny fingers, and probably a suit of armor to milk a pig that doesn’t want you to do it. It helps to make sure that the pig is a little bit drunk. I never said in Nation exactly how he does it, but it is clear that the only way is for him to apply his own lips to the pig.

I had fun writing that scene, but of course Daphne admires Mau because this is really a terrible thing for anyone to have to do, but he’s done it because it’s the only way he can collect the milk and give it to a baby that would otherwise die. This is a catastrophe, this is an island where there’s not much food, there are more refugees turning up and people have got no one to turn to. These are desperate times and Mau is desperate enough to do what has to be done.

Did Nation and your new Discworld novel, Making Money, cross-pollinate or were they completely separate?

There are some people who research my work obsessively, who claim that they can follow the philosophy of my life by reading my books consecutively. I don’t really agree. Nation had its nascence, oh, quite a few years ago now. In fact I first discussed it with a third party about four months before the huge 2004 Asian tsunami, and I thought I’d better leave Nation for a year or two, just in case anyone thinks, oh gosh, you’re riding on the top of that misery. Then after a couple of years I thought, well, there was Krakatoa, and Krakatoa was what I had in mind because the wrecking of the Sweet Judy is a bit of a wave of the hand to the fact that a ship was driven about five kilometers inland by the tidal wave after Krakatoa. So, curiously enough, an awful lot of Nation actually preceded Making Money. But I wrote it in time to come out this fall because I couldn’t hold it in my brain any longer. It really was crying out to be written.

I did want to ask about the Alzheimer’s. You’ve been very open about your diagnosis. Has your illness caused you to rethink what you’re doing as a writer? 

Firstly, little of this book was written by a man with Alzheimer’s. I was actually diagnosed in November of last year. Everyone says I was diagnosed extremely early. Posterior Cortical Atrophy, they call it, a particular variant of Alzheimer’s. So far because of the peculiar nature of this variant there are very few changes in the way I talk—indeed, my use of vocabulary and the glibness of my speech is the same as its always been. I’ve even had one or two Alzheimer’s specialists say, “Are you sure you have Alzheimer’s?”

So the only real effect is that my typing is very slow. This is rather more of a drawback than people actually think because authors tend to rely on the rhythm of the typewriter to do their thinking for them. That’s possibly a strange way of putting it, but perhaps you know what I mean; it’s part of the whole creative process. It’s certainly intriguing, a very curious disease for a writer to get. But I don’t like people to talk about it in a hushed voice. One of the things from which I take a certain amount of satisfaction is that Alzheimer’s made a mistake, because it hit me with a variant that leaves me still more than capable of thinking and writing and speaking, and a lot of my time now is taken up with publicity for Alzheimer’s funding. While I can’t possibly be the sole reason for this here in the U.K., Alzheimer’s is receiving far more public recognition for the horrible disease that it is.

And receiving significant funding through the Match It for Pratchett campaign [in which Pratchett's fan are trying to match his $1 million donation for Alzheimer’s research].

That’s a very wonderful thing, I have to say. The fans have rallied round beautifully, but there’s just so much else going on and other societies are benefiting in various ways, and it’s very pleasing to hear.

Readers drawn to the setting of Pratchett’s Nation can get a digital look at the island via the online community Second Life. Beginning September 11, HarperCollins will launch a month-long promotion on the site, for which it has created The Nation, a digital version of the book’s South Pacific island, which will include scenes and locations from the novel, as well as a treasure hunt through which users can win both virtual and physical prizes. Pratchett will participate in a Q&A on Second Life on October 9.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. HarperCollins, $16.99 ISBN 978-0-06-143302-3