Flipping Through Pages #7 - The Colour of Magic (A Book Review)

It took me less than two pages to fall in love with Terry Pratchett.

An endeavour to start and finish the enormous Discworld series in a year had filled me with trepidation. Would I like it? Would I be able to sustain myself to go through the books?

Two pages.

That’s all it took to remove all hesitance.

Discworld feels like a magnum opus of delicious proportions, and I have not even reached the starters. It’s a problematic task for any writer to build completely new universes and inhabitants that make you care for their journey. Not so much for Pratchett when it came to me.

His world is a cavalcade of vivid colours and proportions, whether they be the humongous Ankh-Morpork, the golden city of Agatea or the updown mountains of Wyrmberg and its imaginary dragons. And in the middle of all that are two unlikely companions – a cowardly and inept wizard named Rincewind and a naïve but brimming with wonder tourist named Twoflower.

Rincewind in particular is wonderfully flawed. Pragmatic beyond a fault, you almost feel for him as he tries to avoid Death (the scenes with the two of them are the highlight of the book and a source of pain in my stomach leading me to a worry of my own death from too much laughter), get rich, not be exposed as the fraud he is and in a beautiful reminder that Pratchett is masterful beyond just satire – escape his tragic beginnings.

For he carries something terrible that is played for laughs in some manner, but in others, it serves to show how Rincewind is much more than just another flunked wizard. Twoflower is brilliant in himself as the tourist from Agatea who wants to see it all – brimming with imagination and wonder even at death’s door. He brings forth most of the honest smiles as I turn the pages.

There are others that capture Pratchett’s intricate understanding of the fantasy genre (and beyond) – whether it be a parody of dragon riders, barbarian heroes, old gods or magical talking swords and the expanses of space and time.

The Colour of Magic is the start of a journey into exploring fantasy as a genre inside a universe that is only starting to get discovered. Gods, monsters and all sorts of beings populate this – making the reader smile, laugh and while I did not experience that here, maybe tear up as events pass. The book ends on a cliffhanger leading into the Light Fantastic and that is where I shall go next.

Anyway, that’s enough. As Pratchett merrily would say, this is where normal language gives up and has a drink.

This is going to be an amazing journey.

So, I give it 9 out of 10.

+Humour in its finest form
+Some wonderful self-aware satire of the fantasy genre
+Rich characterization
+Wonderful story pacing divided into sub novellas

-Some contrived get-out-of-jail abilities occur