Review:
Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett
| Series: |
Discworld #18 |
| Publisher: |
Harper |
| Copyright: |
1995 |
| Printing: |
February 2014 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-227552-6 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
360 |
Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you
probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny
Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect
you could pick it up as you went if you wanted. This is a sequel of sorts
to
Lords and Ladies, but not in a very
immediate sense.
Granny is getting distracted and less interested in day-to-day witching in
Lancre. This is not good; Granny is incredibly powerful, and bored and
distracted witches can go to dark places. Nanny is concerned. Granny
needs something to do, and their coven needs a third. It's not been the
same since they lost their maiden member.
Nanny's solution to this problem is two-pronged. First, they'd had their
eye on a local girl named Agnes, who had magic but who wasn't interested
in being a witch. Perhaps it was time to recruit her anyway, even though
she'd left Lancre for Ankh-Morpork. And second, Granny needs something to
light a fire under her, something that will get her outraged and ready to
engage with the world. Something like a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes
attributed to the Witch of Lancre.
Agnes, meanwhile, is auditioning for the opera. She's a sensible person,
cursed her whole life by having a wonderful personality, but a part of her
deep inside wants to be called Perdita X. Dream and have a dramatic life.
Having a wonderful personality can be very frustrating, but no one in
Lancre took either that desire or her name seriously. Perhaps the opera
is somewhere where she can find the life she's looking for, along with
another opportunity to try on the Perdita name. One thing she can do is
sing; that's where all of her magic went.
The Ankh-Morpork opera is indeed dramatic. It's also losing an astounding
amount of money for its new owner, who foolishly thought owning an opera
would be a good retirement project after running a cheese business. And
it's haunted by a ghost, a very tangible ghost who has started killing
people.
I think this is my favorite Discworld novel to date (although with a
caveat about the ending that I'll get to in a moment). It's certainly the
one that had me laughing out loud the most. Agnes (including her Perdita
personality aspect) shot to the top of my list of favorite Discworld
characters, in part because I found her sensible personality so utterly
relatable. She is fascinated by drama, she wants to be in the middle of
it and let her inner Perdita goth character revel in it, and yet she
cannot help being practical and unflappable even when surrounded by people
who use far too many exclamation points. It's one thing to want drama in
the abstract; it's quite another to be heedlessly dramatic in the moment,
when there's an obviously reasonable thing to do instead. Pratchett
writes this wonderfully.
The other half of the story follows Granny and Nanny, who are unstoppable
forces of nature and a wonderful team. They have the sort of
long-standing, unshakable adult friendship between very unlike people
that's full of banter and minor irritations layered on top of a deep
mutual understanding and respect. Once they decide to start investigating
this supposed opera ghost, they divvy up the investigative work with
hardly a word exchanged. Planning isn't necessary; they both know each
other's strengths.
We've gotten a lot of Granny's skills in previous books.
Maskerade
gives Nanny a chance to show off her skills, and it's a delight. She
effortlessly becomes the sort of friendly grandmother who blends in so
well that no one questions why she's there, and thus manages to be in the
middle of every important event. Granny watches and thinks and theorizes;
Nanny simply gets into the middle of everything and talks to everyone
until people tell her what she wants to know. There's no real doubt that
the two of them are going to get to the bottom of anything they want to
get to the bottom of, but watching how they get there is a delight.
I love how Pratchett handles that sort of magical power from a
world-building perspective. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City, the center of
political power in most of the Discworld books, and Granny and Nanny are
from the boondocks. By convention, that means they should either be awed
or confused by the city, or gain power in the city by transforming it in
some way to match their area of power. This isn't how Pratchett writes
witches at all. Their magic is in understanding people, and the people in
Ankh-Morpork are just as much people as the people in Lancre. The
differences of the city may warrant an occasional grumpy aside, but the
witches are fully as capable of navigating the city as they are their home
town.
Maskerade is, of course, a parody of opera and musicals, with
Phantom of the Opera playing the central role in much the same
way that
Macbeth did in
Wyrd
Sisters. Agnes ends up doing the singing for a beautiful, thin actress
named Christine, who can't sing at all despite being an opera star, uses a
truly astonishing excess of exclamation points, and strategically faints
at the first sign of danger. (And, despite all of this, is still likable
in that way that it's impossible to be really upset at a puppy.) She
is the special chosen focus of the ghost, whose murderous taunting is a
direct parody of the Phantom. That was a sufficiently obvious reference
that even I picked up on it, despite being familiar with
Phantom of
the Opera only via the soundtrack.
Apart from that, though, the references were lost on me, since I'm neither
a musical nor an opera fan. That didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book in
the slightest; in fact, I suspect it's part of why it's in my top tier of
Discworld books. One of my complaints about Discworld to date is that
Pratchett often overdoes the parody to the extent that it gets in the way
of his own (excellent) characters and story. Maybe it's better to read
Discworld novels where one doesn't recognize the material being parodied
and thus doesn't keep getting distracted by references.
It's probably worth mentioning that Agnes is a large woman and there are
several jokes about her weight in
Maskerade. I think they're the
good sort of jokes, about how absurd human bodies can be, not the mean
sort? Pratchett never implies her weight is any sort of moral failing or
something she should change; quite the contrary, Nanny considers it a sign
of solid Lancre genes. But there is some fat discrimination in the opera
itself, since one of the things Pratchett is commenting on is the switch
from full-bodied female opera singers to thin actresses matching an
idealized beauty standard. Christine is the latter, but she can't sing,
and the solution is for Agnes to sing for her from behind, something that
was also done in real opera. I'm not a good judge of how well this plot
line was handled; be aware, going in, if this may bother you.
What did bother me was the ending, and more generally the degree to which
Granny and Nanny felt comfortable making decisions about Agnes's life
without consulting her or appearing to care what she thought of their
conclusions. Pratchett seemed to be on their side, emphasizing how well
they know people. But Agnes left Lancre and avoided the witches for a
reason, and that reason is not honored in much the same way that Lancre
refused to honor her desire to go by Perdita. This doesn't seem to be
malicious, and Agnes herself is a little uncertain about her choice of
identity, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like Agnes got
steamrolled by both the other characters and by Pratchett, and it's the
one thing about this book that I didn't like. Hopefully future Discworld
books about these characters revisit Agnes's agency.
Overall, though, this was great, and a huge improvement over
Interesting Times. I'm excited for the
next witches book.
Followed in publication order by
Feet of Clay, and later by
Carpe Jugulum in the thematic sense.
Rating: 8 out of 10
As promised, on this post I m going to explain how I ve configured this blog
using 
A new version of the 
Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: