Witches Abroad 
by Terry Pratchett
1991, 320 pp.
Read October 2, 2009

I keep a list of the books I read—have done ever since I realized I was having trouble remembering what I’d read when.  In that list I track the books I’ve read for a second or third (or twentieth) time with an X somewhere in the record.  When I look back over the lists for months or years past, there are sometimes long streaks of X’s with not a single new book in sight.  Sometimes we need a book that has worn a pleasant rut in our minds, an old friend who makes no demands on us beyond slipping back into the comfort of a well-known story.  (Sometimes life requires a whole string of such books.)  Me, I’m most likely to turn to a series of old favorites: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

Just explaining this series could take up an entire post, since there are 37 Discworld novels (counting the juveniles and graphic novel) and a whole slew of ancillary volumes.  Since this post is about just one of those books, I have to resort to bullet points:

• The Discworld is a flat world carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle;
• The series began as pure parody of certain popular fantasy novels and ideas back in the late ‘70s, but has expanded to broader parody and then to general humor;
• The novels are loosely grouped into sub-series with different main characters.

Witches Abroad is the second Discworld novel featuring Pratchett’s version of the three witches of myth and folklore, the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—in this case, the hopeless romantic and wet hen Magrat Garlick, the cheerfully earthy Gytha “Nanny” Ogg, and steely-eyed Granny Weatherwax.  Granny Weatherwax, leader of this coven insomuch as witches will admit to a leader, made her first appearance in Equal Rites, though in substantially different form.  (One of Pratchett’s authorial quirks is a near-complete disregard for canonical consistency.  If a character behaves very differently in a later volume, or a fact from one book is contradicted in another, the reader is expected to simply go along for the ride.)  The first book with all three witches is Wyrd Sisters, which is a lovely parody of Macbeth (hence the need for three witches).  Witches Abroad picks up the story shortly after the end of that book, when Magrat inherits a fairy godmother’s wand and responsibilities, requiring the three witches to journey to far-off Genua for a retelling of the classic fairy tale, Cinderella.

Or…not.

In this case, the fairy tale is being driven by Lilith de Tempscire, who is Ella’s other fairy godmother—the one who wants her to marry the prince and live Happily Ever After.  She’s so committed to this goal that she is ruthlessly pruning away anything that might prevent the happy ending from coming true, even to the point of creating a truly loathsome prince for Ella to marry.  Magrat’s goal, with the help of her fellow witches, is to stop the story from playing out to the end.

Wyrd Sisters is a fairly straightforward retelling of Macbeth; all the major plot points are covered, and except for the ending, no major new storylines are introduced.  In Witches Abroad, Pratchett roves a bit further, dealing not just with the Cinderella story but with the idea of Story in general.  Many other fairy tales and legends are introduced and turned on their heads—Count Dracula defeated by a hungry cat, the woodcutter chastised for not helping Red Riding Hood’s defenseless and lonely grandmother better, anthropomorphic animals seen as pitiable rather than funny.  Pratchett is not the first to cast a skeptical eye on these old tales (see, for example, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood, or James Finn Garner’s Once Upon a More Enlightened Time series), but he does so to make the point that Story moves on whether we like it or not—that the idea of dreams coming true is lovely only if you don’t remember some of your worst dreams.

The key to fairy tales—to Happily Ever After, for that matter—is everything falling into place at the right time.  Princesses wake to a kiss from just the right prince, the evil stepmother gets what’s coming to her, the third little pig manages to kill the wolf or the third brother succeeds where his older brothers fail.  Real stories don’t fall together so neatly, and in Witches Abroad Lilith has to force the story into the lines she wants.  This leads right into another major theme of the book, which is the idea of free will.  In Lilith’s Genua, everything is clean and orderly and perfect (much later, the city of Dulac in Shrek showcases the same idea).  The citizens are happy because if they aren’t, they’re dead; Lilith has no compunctions about cutting out anything that threatens her image of the happy ending.  She’s also genuinely taken aback by Granny Weatherwax’s insistence on ruining everything, and by Magrat’s assertion that Lilith is actually the “bad” godmother—isn’t she doing everything she can to ensure Ella’s happiness and the peace of Genua?

Granny, facing down Lilith, knows better, and in their final showdown puts it succinctly:  “You shouldn’t turn the world into stories.  You shouldn’t treat people like they was characters, like they was things.”  In order to make a story turn out your way, you have to control how everyone in it behaves.  You have to choose for them, turn them into puppets.  In Granny’s world, people often suffer or lose their happy ending, but on their own terms—far more important than a happiness dictated by someone else.

As serious as all this sounds, this would not be a Terry Pratchett novel if it weren’t also incredibly funny.  The witches’ progress across the Disc, leaving complete havoc in their wake, is half the fun of the story, particularly their part in the running of the bulls.  There’s Pratchett’s tribute to the cuisine of New Orleans that makes me really really hungry for a bowl of gumbo.  And, of course, the witches’ discovery that there is one animal for whom believing it is human is not a tragedy but an experience: the cat.  Cats, after all, tend to believe they are human; I have one that routinely takes a seat at the dinner table and looks as though he expects to be served.  The transformation of Nanny Ogg’s vicious cat Greebo into a man is…well, it has to be read to be fully appreciated.  But the great thing about Pratchett’s novels is that there is more to them than humor.  Humor is such a subjective thing that if a book depends on being a kind of funny you don’t appreciate, it’s pretty much a loss.  The Discworld novels have a lot more to them than humor.

I expect to get my copy of the latest Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, by the weekend.  My tradition of ordering them from England dates back to before you could get the books in America at the same time, and now instead of having the new one long before anyone else, I have to wait almost two weeks and avoid the P section of the F&SF shelves.  Until then, I imagine I can get a few more Discworld novels read.

For a list of the books in the Discworld series, visit Fantastic Fiction; for more information on a recommended reading order, see this chart (incomplete, but a good starting point) which can be downloaded in a larger version here.