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Review: "Wee Free Men"
Nov. 21st, 2022 10:20 amListened to this audiobook with Katy on the way to and back from Wales to see Jon and Robin. (Robin's fibre-art has really come on, we checked it out in the gallery she does some work in and it looked fab! I kind of wanted to buy some of her seasonal stock, but the Christmas lot wasn't swapped in yet, so will try and remember to check back on that.)
I really liked this. There were a couple small snags. Pratchett slightly over-eggs Tiffany's specialness in Miss Tick's conversations with her un-familiar. There's a conversation between Tiffany and the Gonnagle where he's a bit shirty with her for rudeness out of nowhere, and you can feel the book trying to turn a lesson it's not deeply committed to there. That needed a little more flow. When they're escaping from the sea-dream, there's a slight repetitive hitch--two almost identical sentences about escape a couple paragraphs apart, not as a meaningful parallelism but more as an editorial accident. Was this very carefully looked to, or was Pratchett's reputation so strong by then that it wasn't? A disservice to him, if so. (These things were possibly more evident having listened to the book rather than read it, as well.)
More importantly, there's some beautiful writing around deep time and the Chalk that felt a bit Garner (appropriately enough, as he's really like, the contemporary British fantasy poet of the hyper-regional). Several bits of this felt productively in conversation with other writers in the genre. The red-sunned world the dream-blobs come from is a touch Charn, the use of the burial mounds is a bit Tolkienian. None of that felt cheap or paested on yay, more just--satisfyingly aware of the extant emotional and descriptive capacities of the field.
I felt unusually and interestingly Seen by the descriptions of Tiffany's relationship to feeling at certain points, which was all the more unexpected because it's not as though this is the type of character Pratchett often wrote, exactly. So what afforded him this insight into what I think of as a very gendered relationship to family and labour? I guess just general bumming around the world attentively long enough, but it worked notably well. Specifically, it felt modulated through certain therapy discourses, but not in the irksome 'every human psychological reality possible is encompassed by relatively well-off American 20 year olds' fandom way I've become so lamentably familiar with. This was more integrated and plausible than that. It's something you can put up with, in the way you accept that the sweets in this book have chemical additives for a joke. That's a realm of industrial modernity the rest of the story has little truck with. If mass-manufactured confectionary exists in the Discworld, it's still patently not the sort of sweet they'd eat in the Chalk's economic conditions. But if Pratchett wants to talk about contemporary Britain for a second, well, whatever, it's serving the story.
I really liked this. There were a couple small snags. Pratchett slightly over-eggs Tiffany's specialness in Miss Tick's conversations with her un-familiar. There's a conversation between Tiffany and the Gonnagle where he's a bit shirty with her for rudeness out of nowhere, and you can feel the book trying to turn a lesson it's not deeply committed to there. That needed a little more flow. When they're escaping from the sea-dream, there's a slight repetitive hitch--two almost identical sentences about escape a couple paragraphs apart, not as a meaningful parallelism but more as an editorial accident. Was this very carefully looked to, or was Pratchett's reputation so strong by then that it wasn't? A disservice to him, if so. (These things were possibly more evident having listened to the book rather than read it, as well.)
More importantly, there's some beautiful writing around deep time and the Chalk that felt a bit Garner (appropriately enough, as he's really like, the contemporary British fantasy poet of the hyper-regional). Several bits of this felt productively in conversation with other writers in the genre. The red-sunned world the dream-blobs come from is a touch Charn, the use of the burial mounds is a bit Tolkienian. None of that felt cheap or paested on yay, more just--satisfyingly aware of the extant emotional and descriptive capacities of the field.
I felt unusually and interestingly Seen by the descriptions of Tiffany's relationship to feeling at certain points, which was all the more unexpected because it's not as though this is the type of character Pratchett often wrote, exactly. So what afforded him this insight into what I think of as a very gendered relationship to family and labour? I guess just general bumming around the world attentively long enough, but it worked notably well. Specifically, it felt modulated through certain therapy discourses, but not in the irksome 'every human psychological reality possible is encompassed by relatively well-off American 20 year olds' fandom way I've become so lamentably familiar with. This was more integrated and plausible than that. It's something you can put up with, in the way you accept that the sweets in this book have chemical additives for a joke. That's a realm of industrial modernity the rest of the story has little truck with. If mass-manufactured confectionary exists in the Discworld, it's still patently not the sort of sweet they'd eat in the Chalk's economic conditions. But if Pratchett wants to talk about contemporary Britain for a second, well, whatever, it's serving the story.
