My Discworld Book Number
This is my 32nd Discworld book.
Discworld Serial Number Based on Publishing Date
This is the 30th book in the Discworld series and was published for the first time in 2003.
Introduction to Discworld Series
Discworld is a fictional world created by writer Terry Pratchett. It is a flat world balanced on the back of 4 elephants; they in turn stand on a giant turtle. The turtle’s name is Great A’Tuin. The names of 4 elephants are Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phone, and Jerakeen.
Pratchett writes stories set in this world. He has written 41 Discworld books. The genre of these books can be broadly said to be fantasy-satire.
Discworld is a satiric reflection of our own world. The flat world should be the first indication of the satire. Because in this world things are as people (as in flat-earthers) want them to be.
Magic is strong in Discworld. Light travels quite slowly because of thick magic in the atmosphere.
In this world different humanoid species (combinedly known as sapients) live together, but not necessarily peacefully.
Premise of The Wee Free Men
The books of Discworld series are set in different parts of Discworld with different set of characters and different subjects. Based on these, there are various sub-series of Discworld series. The Wee Free Men is beginning of one such sub-series, Tiffany Aching.
Tiffany Aching is a nine years old intelligent and enterprising girl and also a budding witch.
As the magic is strong on Ramtop mountains, most of the wizards and witches are from this area. However, Tiffany is not from the mountains. She is from Chalk country. The land is soft and not conducive to making witch. Yet Tiffany becomes a witch, mostly because she realises, as Granny Weatherwax from Ramtop mountains would say, most of the witchcrafts is headology, the power of suggestion.
We first meet Tiffany when she is mediating on the word “susurrus”. That sets her character right away. She loves to read and also she craves for a mysterious and profound whispers aka susurrus in her life. She is the youngest among many sisters and she has a younger brother Wentworth. She belongs to a long line of sheep herding family. She loves to make cheese.
She has decided to become a witch just recently. She feels closest to her late grandmother, who seems to have had a lot up her sleeves.
Tiffany is the true literary successor of Granny Weatherwax. Like her she also believes the power of magic lies in knowing when not to use it and also she knows
And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.
Wentworth goes missing one day suddenly, as Tiffany starts looking for him, she discovers many hidden sides of her grandmother including her friends. Among her friends, there are the Wee Free Men. They have also few scores to settle with the child kidnapper.
Tiffany leads them in search for her brother.
Witches are supposed to have animal familiars. Tiffany gets a toad passed over from another witch. He is supposed to guide Tiffany in her new life as a witch. However, most of the times he remains clueless. But what he lacks in “clue” department can be compensated more than enough with his wit and wisdom.
After, Lords and Ladies we again meet elfs and their queen in this book. Most probably the queen is the lady from Lords and Ladies, now her lord is gone. They live in fairy land, where time and reality both are distorted. It is in a different dimension. Here all nightmare comes true and dreams become twistedly true. Nothing is real. Everything is stolen or reflected from the real world. There live some dangerous creatures named drome.
The whole thing gives me a strong Stranger Things. Fairy land is somehow like the Upside Down from the Netflix series.
Can Tiffany rescue her brother from such an impossible place?
About The Wee Free Men
So far, I could remember, I first read about them in Feet of Clay. Wee Mad Arthur has turned into a typical Ankh-Morporkian. He is a businessman yet he has not forgotten his root. He is quite focused on money angles in every event and his means are always questionable. That’s what the Wee Free Men do! They steal and they drink. In this book, he has been referred as a gnome.
Then in Carpe Jugulaum I met Nac Mac Feegle and his cronies. Like Wee Mad Arthur, they are all six inches tall.
In Carpe Jugulaum the specie is referred as Nac Mac Feegle. In the same book, readers can get to know a little more about this specie such as, as a team they can accomplish anything including stealing a cow. They are originally from Uberwald. They are displaced by the vampires, so they have huge rage against them. They help the witches in their resistance to the vampires and other missions.
They are informally referred to as wee men. They are also known as pictsies. They call themselves the Wee Free Men.
‘..They’re rebels,’ said the toad.
‘Rebels? Against who?’
‘Everyone. Anything,’…
Their body is covered with tattoo so they look blue. It is impossible to discern their real skin colour.
Their society works in the line of bee hives. There is only one queen bee, or only one female pictsy per a tribe. These females are known as kelda. All members of the tribe are her sons and some brothers who had accompanied her from before. The female always leaves her own tribe and joins another tribe/hive as she needs a partner who is not her brother. Some of her brothers accompany her as she joins the new tribe. The kelda has hundreds of sons while maybe only one daughter, who starts her own tribe.
The females are fatter and taller. They are around seven inches in height.
Their tribe is based on only one foundation, that is to steal.
We are a famously stealin’ folk.
Yet they have some limits. They don’t violently assault their victims, unprovoked. Although they love fighting so much that if there is no enemy, they fight among each other. They do not steal from needy people. They are not cruel or sadist.
They are secretive about their names, mostly because they don’t want the law enforcements to know their names. So they use names such as Rob Anybody Feegle, Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock
They believe they are already dead and are living in their heaven because of the past good deeds. Now who are we to contradict that, especially when we have no idea about our being dead or alive.
From the dialect they speak (for instance, “Nae” in place of “No”) and the love for alcohol, one can assume Pratchett has borrowed from Scottish culture to create this specie.
They are natural allies of witches, In this book they become ally of Tiffany, who also become their temporary kelda.
My Two Pennies
As we know, Tiffany Aching is not the first witch “main character” in the Discworld series. Before her we had stalwarts like Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. I loved the fact that Pratchett chose to make old ladies, who are mostly “invisible”, his main characters. I wrote in my musing on Carpe Jugulaum:
I could never find the logic behind making the inexperienced puberty stricken teenagers (or at best someone just passed teenage) the hero or the “chosen one” in fantasy stories. On the other hand Granny and Nanny, who have experiences of two life times and who have crossed teenage angst decades back, make perfect sense as heroes and saviours.
However, to my disappointment Pratchett replaced these characters with a pre-puberty witch. Maybe he wanted to mobilise some young-adult readers from the Harry Potter frenzied book market.
Granny and Nanny make split of second guest appearance. I can’t stop feeling sad at their dismissal from the series.
Having said that, I would like to add, I did not not like Tiffany. In fact, I feel she is a great example of a young adult character who is focused on her goal. An ambitious young girl, whose subplot does not involve choosing between two good looking teenage boy. Although I was 9 decades back, I could completely identify with a loner book-loving girl in search of adventure and who could not fit into her family.
Tiffany sometimes feels she is nothing more than a way of moving boots around.
So maybe I was too harsh on Pratchett few lines back. And also he can’t have been cashing on Harry Potter’s popularity as he has not spared it from satiring.
But the school, now, the school. There would be lessons in broomstick riding and how to sharpen your hat to a point, and magical meals, and lots of new friends.
That’s how Tiffany had thought one learns magic but that is obviously not real.
Like all other Discworld books this book has satired many things apart from the boy wizard.
The chief satire is on traditional western fairy tales. At some point I felt the book is a hardcore satire on Enid Blyton’s works, especially the Faraway series and The Wishing Chair series. Both the series gave me immense pleasure once upon a time at the same time I also enjoyed their satire. In both the series, Blyton has narrated how a bunch of kids along magical creatures have adventures in strange lands they regularly enter through the tree or the chair. In this book, the captive children along other species of humanoids pillage the lands they enter regularly.
When I was a child western fairy tales were not my staple read. Some how I could never connect with the Cinderellas, Sleeping Beauties et al. I discouraged my daughter to read these stories when she was little. I felt the focus of these stories were too much on a girl getting a “prince charming”. Pratchett has critiqued the stories in The Wee Free Men, especially on the basis of gender politics. In the stories. Some specific body features are associated with innocence and good. Likewise, some other specific body features are associated with evilness. Wise and intelligent women are mostly depicted as villains or most specifically witches.
She never really liked the book. It seemed to her that it tried to tell her what to do and what to think. Don’t stray from the path, don’t open that door, but hate the wicked witch because she is “wicked”. Oh, and believe that shoe size is a good way of choosing a wife.
The Fairy land, where a queen rules over a land with forever winter and lures children using sweets, seems like a nod to the Narnia series.
There is reference of Moby Dick quite a bit too. The man and the whale chase each other all around the world. So logically they are chasing themselves. The man is chasing himself in the end while circling around the world to chase the whale. In situations like these, Pratchett seems to have forgotten he is writing about a flat Discworld not a spherical earth.
The common western decoration piece, the dainty shepherdess also comes up. No real shepherdess looks like the show piece.
Overall another great book from the Discworld series.
Musings 