Pratchett Remembered

TERRY PRATCHETT a life with Footnotes* by Rob Wilkins

*The Official Biography appeared [Go Libraries!], all 400 pages of it, in our living room a few days ago. Reader, I read it. I didn't need to do this, I didn't even really want to do this but I started and so ploughed on to the end. Which is more that I can say for at least two of Pratchett's Discworld books. The picture [L] shows Jocelyn Bell-Burnell [bloboprev], David Attenborough and Terry Pratchett in medieval kit receiving honorary degrees from my alma mater TCD.

Rob Wilkins, the biographer, was the long-term PA / secretary / amanuensis of the prolific and commercially successful author Terry Pratchett. He dead, so fans are not going to get anything more out of him. But Narrativia aka Terry Pratchett Inc is still in business with spin-offs. Merch here. This biography is another spin-off, I guess. It is very much the hagiography, because Wilkins is still working for the Pratchetts at Narrativia and I think still using the Pratchett Estate as his office. A biographer could lean hard into the disagreeable, anger-management=poor, controlling aspects of Pratchett's character; could be more critical out the make-weight elements of the Canon; could be bothered to include an index.

But then few of the people who are going to read, let alone buy, the book are going to want those details. I'm ambivalent about the works of Pratchett. I am close enough in birthplace [180km] and birthdate [8 years] to recognise the allusions in the Discworld satires but that's not enough to retain my interest. If I had wanted to be in the English Media Gang, I coulda been a contender: but I didn't and I left the country before Terry Pratchett started writing novels. And I still get most of the in-jokes. You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy, I guess.

The most interesting bit of the book is when Pratchett was at the height of his commercial success and before he got his adverse mental health diagnosis in 2007. That's when the author stopped being a knowing, driven, sole-trader with a gift for words; writing because he can do no other. The commercial publishing world has agents, editors, translators, cover-designers, type-setters, printers, and booksellers. This memoir documents how most of the people in this trade (as in science, teaching or probably any other 'industry') are teetering at the edge of their competence and incapable of thinking outside a paper-bag let alone Outside The Box. A number of laughable errors of taste, failures of empathy or business sense are documented by Wilkins. Like expecting Pratchett the golden goose to work a 5 hours book-signing session without providing a decent chair, a table with four legs the same length or even a curling sandwich.

Nevertheless, a minority of workers in this corner of the book trade are really really good at their jobs. Wilkins, and some of the book-dedicatees in the Canon, acknowledge that good editors make a great book. Good publicists have to do more than lay the latest book before the eyes of people who count (money). And never forget that luck and timing still play their part.