Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Wow. I've just read The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchet, and I'm alive to write about. With the explosively good writing in there, I almost didn't make it! The storyline was superb and the hilarious twists make me constantly rolling in the aisles. Definitely a completely satisfactory read. A connection I had to it? Well. Throughout the book Twoflower, the first tourist on The Continent is noted to have certain technology people who live on The Continent have never heard of. One of them is a camera. Owning a camera myself I can understand more about it. This in part shows that it is a Just Right book. Most words, ideas, and actions I understand (when intended to, this a very weird book) but some, such as the word skewbald, I did not understand. A friend has enlightened me, telling me that skewbald is a color of horse with chestnut and white patches on coat, mane and tail.

Well, I know for a start that Rincewind the (totally failed) magician changed. In the start he was a pretty down to earth, realistic person, who knew that adventures were not fun and that his life was probably more important than gold. Being a coward as well, he was of the opinion that it was more important than anyone else's. But as the story progresses, first with meeting Twoflower with his magic box, then being hired as his guide in the money of Twoflower's country, the pure, solid, epic gold the rhinu. Twoflower on his continent is middle class. On The Continent, he's as rich as a king. Rincewind, sustained on this phenominal money, leads Twoflower far and wide, more and more becoming daring and brave. He almost uses the one spell he knew, which was powerful beyond imagining, ingrained in his brain by a magical force, on an evil demon who nearly destroyed them and the barbarian who started to accompany them. Then they pretty much become friends and sail of into distant oceans together, where they get captured by the Krulls and very narrowly escape, but then it ends. They are tragically separated, Rincewind sailing of the Edge of the World and fall onto a toe of the Great Turtle A'tuin the planet rests on. Then Death comes for him, an evil presence walking towards him who throws back his hood and reveals... Scrofula. The scourge of almost nothing in the Discworld. Rincewind protests, saying he didn't even have scrofula but it's too late. Rincewind is thrown into the sky, out of the Universe, and, in a final act of tremendous bravery that brings us to the end of the book, jumps back in.

If there was something I could change, I would change the part in Shal-Shamaroth's temple. The evil demon dies from a single syllable of Rincewind's terrible (and only) spell, which I find rather inconsistent. When he accidentally slipped out a syllable on the inverted mountain of Dragonwyrm, only an insubstantial dragon or two died. Hardly the same effect. It might have been the huge magical field in the Dragonwyrm, but there was an octaring field over at Shal-Shamaroth's. Still, I really liked it. It really showed me transitions of people to radically different things and that people can change. What a stellar book!

~Condensed tale 3