The device means that good characters can die, who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting – people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. They are met by Pratchett’s personified Death – a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie – who has organized himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behavior, prompted by his long association with our agitated species.

When they do, they take time to realize what has happened. But unlike many creators of fantasy worlds he makes sure his readers know death is real, while at the same time finding ingenious devices to help us to accommodate that knowledge. Like all good storytellers he writes against death, creating impossible escapes, thrilling dangers, the come-uppance of the wicked and so on. It went on to say that he began work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, “work experience meaning something in those days”. The short biography he used to have on his book jackets began with the information that he was born in 1948 and is still not dead. Terry Pratchett, like TS Eliot’s Webster, has always been much possessed by death. From various reviews I have read regarding Discoworld, it is more accurately labeled a collection, as opposed to a series, although Pratchett often brings in a character, or references a character or activity from a previous book. I did not realize that Night Watch was the 29th novel in the Discoworld Series, and have dutifully placed this “series” on my “Must Read” list. The working title of the piece was The Nature of the Beast, referencing the “beast” within Vimes, but it was discarded when Frances Fyfield published a book with that very title in the UK in the latter part of 2001. The story offers a complicated and potentially grim scenario in places, with dark humor and entertainment thrown in for balance. The protagonist of the novel is Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.

‘Night Watch’ was written by Sir Terry Pratchett in 2002.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett