Terry Pratchett : a Life with Footnotes

I very nearly didn't become a Terry Pratchett fan, or rather as early as I did, no doubt at some stage I would have been tempted. Not that I wasn't a fully signed up member of the nerd brigade playing both D&D and Warhammer 40K having progressed from the wonderful Fighting Fantasy books of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. And I had certainly become a reader of fantasy fiction thanks to my mother offering me her copies of both The Hobbit and Terry Brook's Sword of Shannara. Actually, I can't be too sure that the fact that Mr (as he was then) Pratchett was also called Terry wasn't a factor in me picking up some of his books from the local bookshop in Formby, a small town just north of Liverpool. Also, one of them, The Colour of Magic, was a signed copy which even back then I thought was rather cool despite the fact I had missed his actual visit, something I now regret to an unbelievable degree.

However my first read of Colour of Magic left me somewhat cold, and not for the issues that Rob reports Terry himself had with those first two books. You see this was the 1980s, when the whole fantasy genre was rather looked down upon to say the least. Plus the whole Satanic Panic saga was in full swing, though thankfully that was more a problem in the US than the UK, at least in my experience. But here I was, a very defensive young teenager who loves his Fantasy and this here Terry Pratchett is making fun of it! For a start I hadn't expected a comic slant, somehow that fact had passed me by and secondly that young mind of mine wasn't yet quite able to pick out satire. I don't think things improved much with The Light Fantastic, although I pushed through. I'd saved up quite a few weeks of pocket money for this privilege, and I wasn't about to 'waste' my hard-earned car cleaning cash! Thankfully I had also picked up Equal Rites at the same time, so I guess this must have been 1987? Either way things suddenly clicked for me. He wasn't here making fun of Fantasy, he was laughing at humans and all their constructs. Of course that didn't mean the standard fantasy tropes were off the menu, but they weren't the focus, it wasn't the point. I picked up Mort later that year, and I was sold, this here Pratchett fellow was not a bad egg!

All this meant that when we lost Sir Terry Pratchett I felt it as much as all us fans did, not just the devastating loss of the man himself but all those works that were yet to come, one of which would have been his autobiography. Time ran out in the most terrible way, and so we will never know what that book would have been. What we do have though is Rob Wilkins look into the life of the man he worked alongside for so many years, and if I'm completely honest, all things considered, it's just possible I prefer this version of Terry's life story. It's sometimes a good idea in a story to have a character playing the 'everyman' to whom we can all relate, and what we have in Rob is, I suggest, an 'everyfan'* By Terry not actually getting what he thought he wanted for a personal assistant he ended up with one of us enamoured folks who so loved his writing, and so via Rob we get a chance to experience how things were through eyes not all that different from our own.

I found myself pulled in to this book of Terry's life in a way I've not been for many a year, devouring the book, it could be argued, as I haven't since I ran out of Pratchett books to read. Of course there are a great many things that have changed in my life to account for that too, but being reminded of how I used to stay up at night getting stuck in to a new Discworld novel was a pleasant side effect. And the whole book was such a lovely journey through Terry's life and left me with a pile of happy memories that sparked things from my own history. Robs manages to take jumping off points hinted at in Terry's notes for the autobiography that never came, and weave them into a compelling integrated tale. Many biographies can feel somewhat 'bitty' jumping from big event to big event, but here I never felt like we were rushing through a fairground ride of Terry's life, more a gentle stroll, stopping to appreciate certain the scenery as we went whilst never feeling unnecessary. Smiles and little chuckles accompanied me throughout my read.

Then came the final chapters of the book, and though we all know how the story ends, it was always going to be a hard read. Even if it had just been a story I read from afar it was bound to be a depressing and sad tale, but as someone who's own mother received a diagnosis for early onset Alzheimer's at the age of 62, and who died in 2020 right in the middle of a pandemic and whose funeral I was unable to attend due to the lockdown it was a particularly gruelling read. Though also somewhat cathartic, I would wager. One of the hardest parts of being alongside someone who goes through the torment of Althzehmer's is there is somewhat of a lack of a cut-off between life and then the grief. The person you loved sort of just disappeared along the way, and you find yourself wondering when you actually lost them. It's the water torture of grief with a few tiny drops of it each day slowly chipping away at your mental state. Rob's thoughts, feelings and his conveying of how Terry was thinking opened me up to some of the things my mother must have been going through, what any suffer must go through. I particularly welled up at the story of when Neil Gaiman visited and Terry seemed quite distant until Neil started singing. Music does seem to survive most of the process, my mother even at the late stages, would always respond to us playing a bit of Cliff Richard.

So the book then, I really can't recommend it enough to anyone with even a passing interest in Terry Pratchett and his work. And thank Great A'tuin that Rob was there for the ride we all would have loved to have taken.

* Everyfans, not to be confused with Onlyfans of which Rob, as far as I am aware, is not a member.+

+ Yes a footnote, if you expected anything else you are in the wrong place!