Monstrous Regiment

"Monstrous Regiment is a standalone Discworld book. The Discworld books often returned to the same characters—you know, there are books about witches, books about gods, the police procedurals, the books about Death (that is, the character Death not the concept of death)—but Monstrous Regiment stands totally alone. Originally it wasn’t going to be written as a Discworld novel, it was going to be set during the Peninsular Wars. I don’t know if that was a marketing decision. He always said the Discworld novels sold as well as the other books, there was no real difference in sales. I don’t know how true that is. But I think in the end he realised he could do more in Discworld. By this point in the Discworld, it’s no longer a medieval swords and sorcery fantasy, it’s mostly set in the Victorian era. Monstrous Regiment is set in what is basically a war-torn eastern European country, more or less. They are fighting a war and losing, everyone has been conscripted, and it’s all very horrible. A teenage girl disguises herself as a boy and goes off to war to find her brother. She joins a platoon, basically the dregs of whoever they have left. Most of them have died. So it becomes an exploration of the futility of war. He really goes there. And it’s also an exploration of gender, the boxes we get put in: how we are expected to behave if we are women or men. And, again, you have this theme of powerful people pushing other, less powerful, people around. In this case it’s generals and common soldiers, kings and pawns. It’s a very interesting book. As I said, one of the themes in all his work is the stories we tell about ourselves, the way we explain our true selves and the stories we have forced on us. Gender roles are a good example of that, the stories forced on us. So this book is about somebody who tries to make their own story, and it’s a really good ripping yarn that has a lot of interesting stuff to say. It’s a dark book. It kind of comes out of nowhere. It doesn’t really fit with any of the other Discworld books, although there are a couple of recurring characters that pop in. But you see them from another angle, as you are viewing them through the eyes of different characters. I think it could easily have been that book set during the Napoleonic Wars. It has those big hats, red hats on the battlefield. And although there is some really funny stuff in it—war movie cliches and Apocalypse Now references—it’s probably the least funny of his books, and the most serious. It’s really good, and it’s another one that I return to again and again. “If you really want the experience of watching him develop, I’d say: start with Mort and read in publication order” This also came out of that purple patch in his writing, where everything he was writing was amazing, where it had a lot to say. Another thing I like about Terry’s sense of morality and social justice is that, as he expands as a person, the work expands. And I think that’s a reflection of the world becoming more inclusive—we all float up with it. So, good example: there is an early Discworld book where he says that racism doesn’t exist on the Disc—because of all the different species. Black and white live in harmony, and gang up on green, right? But he realises quite quickly after that, that if you’re exploring the human experience you can’t not include racism. So, suddenly, there are books where there are racist ideas, and he explores racism in another book . I mean, there’s very little sex in general in the Discworld. The relationships are all relatively cosy. There were no gay people in the Discworld books for a while, although there is a queer romance nestled in the background of Monstrous Regiment. Plus it deals with women dressed as men, although in the case of Polly, the main character, she’s dressing as a man to achieve a goal. But there are other characters whose gender identity is much more a part of their narrative, and they are doing it for different reasons. He explores it beautifully. A few years ago, somebody said that Terry Pratchett would be against trans rights, but they had obviously not read Monstrous Regiment , because this is a book about how the person you are is not the person you are told you are. So it deals with those ideas, and then the futility of war. It’s not subtle, there are a lot of limbs in this book. Because it is war as it was in the 19th century, with cutlasses and sabers. It’s visceral and unpleasant. It’s very different to a lot of his other work, and it is a book that you can just pick up. It’s not necessarily a starting point for Discworld, because it doesn’t link to any other Discworld books, but it’s a superb piece of writing. Could I add one more point? When he was writing, his editor said that she didn’t believe that a woman could dress up as a man and fool the other soldiers. She rejected the premise on the basis of it being too far-fetched that anyone could get away with it. So Terry did a lot of research in lesbian bookshops—he just loved reading—and discovered there were huge numbers of women who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, who fought in the American Civil War, the First World War… people who were only found out after they had died and their bodies were stripped. It is a real phenomenon. Women go to war for the same reasons that men go to war—they want to fight for their country, or they want to fight for something—and for other reasons too. That’s right. There’s Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch . This is not a novel, but a sort of spin-off, a companion to the YA Tiffany Aching books that Terry created towards the end of his life. It features a teenage witch. That’s wonderful, because—early in his career—Terry was not great at writing women, and especially women in their prime. At the start of his career, he wrote some good young children (because he had a daughter) and some very vivid and well-written older ladies. But he took time to get young women right. Later there were five Tiffany Aching books in which she grows from eight to 17. He was made an honorary Brownie Guide for writing ‘a real girl.’ By this point, he’d seen his daughter grow up, he knew her friends, he understood young women better. He said that he never had to think about what she would do: he would just put her in a situation and she would tell him, and he would go along with it. I think she was basically his favourite character. Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch is written by Rhianna Pratchett, his daughter, and Gabrielle Kent, a children’s author. It’s beautifully illustrated and it’s aimed at young adults. Rhianna Pratchett is the only person authorised to write sequels to Terry’s work. More novels, I mean. He didn’t want what happened to Douglas Adams to happen to him—where somebody else wrote another book in his series. He always said, if Rhianna wants to write Discworld novels, she’s welcome to. But no one else. And she’s always said she’s not interested in writing new novels. Helping to develop films, writing spin-offs, playing in the world, yes. But not actual novels. So this is just a nice complement to the Tiffany Aching books for existing fans. Terry always said that he didn’t want his work to be pillaged after he died. You know, there are something like 12 volumes of Tolkien’s unfinished stories. There’s a Douglas Adams book called The Salmon of Doubt , collecting half-finished bits and bobs, cut scenes, early drafts. So Terry had a strict rule, that his hard drive containing all his unfinished work would be crushed by steamroller after he died. Which really happened! There is no new Terry Pratchett stuff that has never been published. But—it turns out—there were a bunch of stories that had already been finished and published that we didn’t know existed. I mentioned earlier that he worked as a journalist and as a sub-editor between 1965 and 1977, before he moved into working in PR. All that time he was writing these short children’s stories. The Uncle Jim stories dry up in the mid 1970s. But recently somebody found a new story with the Terry Pratchett byline published in the 1980s in the Western Daily Press . They got in touch with Terry’s agent, Colin Smith, who is kind of the keeper of the archive. They said: I found this, I didn’t realise you didn’t know about it. But the problem was that they didn’t know when it had been published; it had been clipped out of the newspaper when they were a teenager, and they’d clipped the story but nothing else. So Colin dispatched two friends—both medical doctors, who had been involved in the fandom for years—to the British Library Newspaper Archive. They started in the 1980s and worked backwards, and as it turned out, it was published in 1984. But because they were diligent academics, they recorded every short children’s story published in the Western Daily Press in the 1970s and 1980s, and they came across a story called ‘The Blackbury Thing’ by someone called Patrick Kearns. Now, Terry had created a fictional town called Blackbury where he had set children’s stories. So they thought, that’s interesting, that’s a coincidence. When they read the story, the tone seemed very familiar. And they found other Patrick Kearns stories, with other names that popped up in Terry Pratchett stories. And they took them back to Colin. Now Colin know that Kearns was Pratchett’s mother’s maiden name. And, well, Patrick and Pratchett aren’t so very far apart. And they realised they’d found an entire tranche of Terry Pratchett stories written under another pseudonym, one he had never told anyone about and had basically forgotten. So through that research they’ve unearthed 20 new short stories that we didn’t know about. They’re wonderful children’s stories with an irreverent Roald Dahl feel. You see lots of the ideas that he’d later use in the Discworld books popping up. You see him refining ideas, his sense of humour developing. They’re very silly but also funny and very charming, and you can see hints of the writer he was going to be. It’s a new book, but the contents aren’t new. This is writing that was published almost 50 years ago. But essentially, out of nowhere, we have one last collection of Terry Pratchett’s writing. Marc Burrows is touring the United Kingdom throughout 2024 with his comic lecture The Magic of Terry Pratchett . For full details and dates, visit marcburrows.co.uk/live-dates"