Book Comments
Title: The Carpet People
Authors:
Terry Pratchett and
Terry Pratchett
Publication
Date: 1992 (and 1971)
What follows isn't a review. Just some thoughts that occurred to me
while reading one of my favourite author's more mysterious books.
First, a disclaimer: I love Terry Pratchett's fiction. Seriously.
Love. It. I went in with high hopes and a full expectation to enjoy
the book. What I did not expect was to spend so much time pondering
the introduction. Not that there weren't many other clever
'Pratchettie' things going on in this book, because there definitely
were. Tongue-in-cheek jokes about how to take over an empire using
currency instead of swords, jabs at philosophers (that one hit close
to home, given my degree in philosophy!) and a fascinating race known
as the wights who can remember the future, that is, until one day
they can't! (Cue existential crisis).
But,
as I said, what I want to focus on is the introduction, where
Pratchett tells us that this book was written by two authors, and
both of them have the same name. One is seventeen-year-old Terry
Pratchett. The other is forty-three year old Terry Pratchett,
established author of the Discworld
novels. Pratchett tells his readers that, when the Discworld
novels became popular, people rediscovered this little book. By then
the book was out of print, but the fans began pestering the
publishing company for a copy of this book, if it was indeed by the
same author as the Discworld.
The question was, was it by the same author?
The answer in this case is a bit complicated. On the one hand, yes it
was by the same author in a strictly legal and practical sense. But,
in a more personal sense, no, the author was no longer the same.
Pratchett tells us that he looked at the old manuscript and found
that many of his ideas had changed in the intervening years. He
thought differently about what made a good story in general, and what
made a good fantasy story in particular. He decided a few things
needed to be changed here and there, and ultimately ended up
rewriting the entire book. So, the 1992 edition isn't quite the sort
of book that the forty-three year old Pratchett would write if he
were to approach the same subject matter again, and it isn't the same
book that the seventeen-year-old Pratchett wrote in 1971. It's a
collaborative effort. But, jokes Pratchett, at least he doesn't have
to split the royalty cheque with the other author!
This introduction fascinated me. As I read the book, I wondered about
which aspects were the seventeen-year-old Pratchett's contribution,
and which were the forty-three-year-old's. I wondered about what the
book looked like in its 1971 incarnation. I wondered if we all grow
to fundamentally disagree with our earlier selves. And, finally, I
wondered about the self itself. What is it that makes us who we are?
(Cue existential crisis! I know, I know, there's a joke about
philosophers lurking here somewhere.)
It's
curious to me that Pratchett couldn't let the book stay as his
seventeen-year-old self had written it. Writers often talk about
their books as their babies, that they are unwilling to send out into
the world. But in a sense, these books can be something else as well;
they are often parts of the writer's self. The 1971 book could tell
us something about what seventeen-year-old Pratchett thought about
the world, what he valued, and what he found funny. The 1992 book
mixes this up, leaving me curious and bewildered.
Identity, persona and authorship are all tricky concepts. Did
Pratchett have a right to rewrite the book? Legally, of course he
did. But part of me is left with an image in my head of a
forty-three-year-old man muzzling a seventeen-year-old boy. Or is it
a forty-three-year-old man guiding and refining a
seventeen-year-old's rough ideas?
Whether muzzling or mentoring, I cannot say. But I enjoyed trying to
puzzle it out. Now I wonder whether all writers cringe at the efforts
of their younger selves. Maybe growing up is just growing
embarrassed.
If so, I guess we only have ourselves to blame.
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