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Only The Ripples: A Review of Terry Pratchett A Life With Footnotes [1]

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Date: 2022-12-06

I am hesitant to write this review.

Not because the book is poorly done, or uninteresting, or a hagiography. It is none of those things and is very often their opposite. Rather, I feel like I am writing the worst sort of review. The author, Rob WiIkins, Pratchett's personal assistant for the last couple of decades of his life -- did not write the kind of book that I would of have written. And that seems especially churlish given how close the two obviously were, how deeply felt Pratchett's loss is, and how much real love went into the writing of this book. But Pratchett's life is deeply meaningful not just for the reason your life or my life is -- the ways in which we interact with those around us. But because of the writing that allowed Pratchett to interact with millions upon millions over decades. And Wilkins does nothing to examine how who Pratchett was impacted what Pratchett wrote. And that feels like a significant loss.

Wilkins very clearly loved Pratchett, and I think he wants that love to come through to the reader. But it is an honest love. He does not hide much from us. He highlights how Pratchett could be brusque. How he could seemingly take for granted the hard work of those around him, how his perfectionism could lead him to treat the work of others with a hostility that most would regard, at best, as unnecessarily blunt and at worst as performatively asshole-ish. Wilkins wants you to see the whole picture, and to see how the ungraciousness at losing awards is part and parcel with the man who never left a fan signing before everyone in line had their signature. He doesn't shy away from the bad and he doesn't underplay the good.

Wilkins walks you through Pratchett's life. He details his academically underachieving if happy childhood, through his self-satisfied teenage years, his courtship of his wife, his uninspired journalism career, his even less inspired PR career, the early writing successes, the long fallow period, and then the reasonably rapid climb into stardom once he created the Discworld novels. All of this, as mentioned, is unsparing to Pratchett and very well told. Wilkins has an eye for the humorous or poignant detail (the passages describing the end of Pratchett's life are all the more heart rending for their subtltly), and his own writing has a dry wit that matches well with Pratchett's signature style. Reading the biography is not quite like reading a good Pratchett book, but it's a close cousin. And while there are times he protests a little too much on Pratchett's behalf (the discussion of Pratchett's odd tour reports is a case in point), you never get the sense that he is hiding facts or shading the truth of the events to make Pratchett look good. Wilkins loved the man -- all of him. And by the time the book is over, you may or may not feel the same. But you will or will not, if Wilkins has any say in the matter, because you know the man as best as Wilkins is able to show all of him to you.

It is an admirable way to write a biography, but it is also lacking. In the first instance, it is very "just the facts ma'am". We know that Pratchett treats Wilkins very much the same way an editor who Pratchett despised and who caused him to collapse from a panic attack treated Pratchett, but Wilkins never interrogates why. Similarly, we see Pratchett whipsaw from raging at collaborators to praising them as if the rages never happened, with precious little investigation into the reason behind such wild emotional swings. It is good to not excuse. It is less good to not interrogate.

Worse, Wilkins spends no time examining how Pratchett's life affected his writing. Why did he have that fallow period when he was a journalist, and why did it dissipate when he went into PR? What, if anything, does that say about his opinion of the value of those two jobs, and how is that reflected in works like The Truth if at all? How did his love of libraries but disdain for formal education manifest itself in his works? How did his family's disdain for a university education feed into the themes in his books? His mother, for example, was singularly focused on making sure he got a "pensionable" career, but was quite happy to see him not attend university, as that was not practical. She never apparently thought much of writing a career. Wilkins never thinks to as the question -- how did that affect what her son wrote?

Wilkins mentions two very interesting aspects of Pratchett very early in the book. First, that Neil Gaiman correctly pointed out once that Pratchett was angry and second that his wife was first attracted to his kindness. Anyone who has read Pratchett would not be surprised at those revelations. That anger and kindness are omnipresent in his books. But Wilkins never connects those observations to Pratchett's literary achievements. What, exactly, was Pratchett angry at? How did that kindness show through? What manner of kindness was it, exactly? Wilkins does not appear to be interested in the questions, and a rich source of understanding goes by the wayside as a result.

Maybe it is unfair to ask a biographer to have written the kind of biography I wanted read instead of the one he wanted to write. But Pratchett's writing was singularly important to me and to millions like me. He shaped my world view as much as any writer, as much as any thinker. There is as much Pratchett in the way I see the word as there is Orwell, Marx, or Gramsci. And thank God I encountered Pratchett before they made me read Hobbes or Nietzsche. What made him that thinker, that writer, is fascinating and worth exploring.

I do not regret having read the book. There is pleasure and value in learning about a life, especially a life as interesting a Pratchett's. Wilkins tells the tale more than well, and I will not begrudge him for trying to help the world see his great friend the way he saw him, to celebrate and understand Terry Pratchett the man who had so moved him. But I wish that he could have found the space to spend some time on how Terry Pratchett the man had influenced Terry Pratchett the writer who had, in turn, influenced and moved so many millions of us.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/6/2140240/-Only-The-Ripples-A-Review-of-Terry-Pratchett-A-Life-With-Footnotes

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