I traveled cross-country on a train once and I hoped for a magical sort of experience, but I’m sorry to say—with no offense meant to railfans, whose enthusiasm I applaud—it wasn’t magical, it wasn’t romantic, it was boring.
I finished Raising Steam today. The book takes us on a trip on a train, and unfortunately it’s a boring journey. The novel is the worst I’ve yet read from Pratchett.
The sentence crafting is certainly up to snuff. But the tone is overly triumphant and self-congratulatory. The narrator lets us know at every turn how wonderful and invincible his characters are, and we’re meant to cheer and high-five him the whole way through. I’m not so sure, though, that the characters are that laudable, judging them by their actions, and even worse, the writer loves his characters too much to let them face any real challenges. It’s a given from the start that the good guys will succeed. The plot has a sense of inevitability like, well, trains, and also the monotonous plodding forward of a train. It’s almost as if Pratchett were caricaturizing his own novels or writing his own fan fiction.
So it’s not a great Pratchett novel compared to, say, Going Postal. But though it may have been a bad story, perhaps it was a good goodbye.
Pratchett passed away earlier this year. Raising Steam was his last book published while he lived and the last time Pratchett as an author and we his readers got to romp with Moist and the rest of the crew. So perhaps the celebratory tone is fitting. The good guys kick ass, the bad guys are defeated, and in the end we get to see the characters we love happy and thriving.
But if you’re not yet ready to say bid adieu to Pratchett, you’re in luck. There’s one more chance.
One final Pratchett book will be published posthumously in just a couple of weeks. And then the lights will go down on Discworld permanently. But that book won’t visit Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett’s last book, titled The Shepherd’s Crown, will be a Tiffany Aching book! A children’s book! A book featuring the wee free men!
That’s incredibly exciting.
It will be a children’s book written by a man acutely aware of the cloaked fellow with a scythe standing just there behind him, peering over his shoulder, drumming his bony fingers. I love the Tiffany Aching books, and I yearn to know what sort of Tiffany Aching book Mr. Pratchett would’ve written while staring his own mortality straight in the face.
This is a literary event rivaling (and in my little world far surpassing) Go Set a Watchman in importance.
The UK release date is August 26. We in the USA must wait until September 1. I’ve marked my calendar.
I’m four chapters in. And I just couldn’t wait to post about it. My early review (no spoilers):
