Mort

Terry Pratchett was brilliant and the master of a fantasy sub-genre that probably belongs to him alone. Mort is a novel set in Discworld. The Discworld novels fall into different categories: Tiffany Aching, Rincewind, the three witches, Sam Vines and the guards, and Death. Each book focuses on one of them, although they cross over and pop up in each others’ books all the time. It is best if you start from the beginning of a particular grouping and work your way through, otherwise you’ll miss a lot of inside jokes, references, etc. There are charts on the internet that will show you the groupings. You can trust Terry Pratchett to not be too linear and to not be very predictable. Mort is an early novel of Death. Mort is a bumbling young adolescent of no particular talent when his father takes him to the job fair to find an apprenticeship. Just at the stroke of midnight, Death arrives to offer Mort the apprenticeship. Death lives with his man servant, his daughter, and Binky, an immensely powerful horse, at a compound of his own creation. Like all of the Discworld books, the tone is satirical and clever. This book did not make me laugh out loud like Wee Free Men, but it was amusing. Ankh Mopork is much the same (a city impossible to describe here). Mort is sincere but nave. Death is suffering from burnout and mayhem ensues. Somehow, Terry Pratchett makes all the nonsense work. These books do not contain any scenes, language, or images that would rate even a PG-13 rating at the movies. If a reader does not have sufficient maturity, much of the book will be wasted, because you wont get the jokes or understand the satire. I count myself lucky to still have so many novels of Discworld ahead of me.

Its impossible to do justice to reviewing a classic. The Death series and character is my favourite in Pratchetts disc world, maybe followed by the wizards. Who knew the grim-reapers story could be so sweet?

Somehow Pratchett draws almost every character, however fearsome, as a public servant, just trying (not overly hard) to get by. Only the women are powerful and determined in these books, even when inclined to frills.

You just cant beat the scene of Death interviewing for a job, seeking something with cats and flowers.

The use of capitals as Deaths voice is hilarious and so clever, adding a third dimension to two-dimensional words on a page. I wish Pratchett had lived to turn the world of texting and tweets on its head in the same way as he did with these books.

Pratchett builds relationships between the characters with the barest line or two, almost incidentally or outside the narrative, yet with complete conviction.

The poetic rambling writing, while seemingly leading to nowhere, other than to footnotes, builds an incredible story and powerful characters. In Pratchetts beautifully unassuming way, this book is, simply, masterful.

In this, Pratchetts cynical witty honest world, where there is no justice, only ME (Death), where there is no way Mort can win, Death delivers the most unexpectedly just end. With hardly any death. Poetic justice at its finest.

Only Pratchett could write about death and eternity in this way. Its bittersweet reading this when Pratchett has passed. Few people leave behind this kind of creative, enjoyable, thought-provoking legacy.

Thats the best inadequate review I can give.

I love the entire series of Discworld books, but I think this might be where Pratchett really hits his stride. Death is such an interesting character in the Discworld so its only logical to give him his own story arch. It only makes sense that Death would only speak in CAPITAL letters. This book made me realize why Death is so fond of cats, they do have nine lives after all. My one complaint is that the current Kindle edition (and several others in the series) have the asterisk for the footnotes, but no link. Pratchetts asides are not important to the plot, but definitely show his humor.

I never write reviews, but the typos and errors in this e-book drove me crazy. There were numerous places where dialog had an open quotation mark and no closed mark, some lines were repeated at the end of paragraphs, and the footnotes did not appear at all in-line so I didn’t see them until I got to the end of the book (out of context). I could have lived with the quotation mark/capitalization issues, but there are numerous places in the book where Pratchett is trying to show how two of the characters are changing, and he uses a different dialog formatting to demonstrate this, sometimes mid-sentence. This is super confusing with all these weird formatting issues. There were places where I think lines of dialog had line breaks in the middle but no closing quotation marks, so I wasn’t positive if the next line was dialog or not. And it was all over, not just in parts. I opened other books on my Kindle, thinking maybe there was some glitch in the device, but the other books do not appear to have any errors.

On top of all of that. On top of it. The Kindle thinks the beginning of the dang book is 55% in. I didn’t notice this and was confused about what was going on, but trusted Pratchett and rolled with it for a while, assuming things weren’t being explained for a reason, until I went to see if these typos were actually intentional by comparing it to the free sample, and thereby discovered… I had read the middle of the book first. Again, I checked my other books–I own over 100, and while I did not check them all, I do read about a book a week so I think I would notice–and this appears to be the only one on my device that has glitches, so I have to assume it’s a problem with the Kindle version.

If you’re debating the Kindle version or buying the paperback, then go paperback!!!!

Mort is a young lad who gets a job as an apprentice for Death on Discworld. This is the story of how he gets on as he learns his craft.

I have NEVER read a Terry Pratchett novel before and was curious to find out why he had become a top selling author. Fantasy novels are NOT my regular reading genre but like Real Ales, I like to try different ones to see if I like them.

There are 40 novels in the Discworld series, they do NOT have to be read in sequence and are all stand-alones. Why did I chose Discworld #4 as my first book? Unashamedly, it was on special offer for just 99p and the price was right!

Mort was written in 1987, so I wondered what a book written over 30 years ago has to offer. Well, Discworld is a fantasy planet, so very different from Earth. Discworld is flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the shell of the enormous star turtle Great ATuin, and which is bounded by a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space.

Mort is a fantasy tale involving wizards, magic and spells. There are 5 central characters in this tale, the main being Mort, a young lad moving into the world of work. Death is his boss and the tone of his speech is one of authority and appears IN CAPITALS. His daughter also has a role to play, so has a princess and a wizard. There is one animal taking a vital role, it is a horse. This is not any old horse but a special horse that belongs to Death which can fly into the air to travel extensive distances across Discland at great speed. This horse has great power and is very strong because later in the story Mort, Deaths daughter, the princess and the wizard climb onto its back and fly away! Oh yeah, whatever, this is a fantasy.

No time period is mentioned but the feel is of the dark middle ages. There is no mention of technology or modern infrastructures, far far away from our modern obsession with social media, smartphones, cars and CCTV. Yet the dialogue and attitudes between characters is relatively contemporary. For example

The piercing blue eyes glittered at him. He looked back like a nocturnal rabbit trying to outstare the headlights of a sixteen-wheeled artic whose driver is a twelve-hour caffeine freak outrunning the tachometers of hell.

Terry Pratchett uses an extensive vocabulary in this novel, it is NOT a childrens book and he uses some obscure and very old words. For a fantasy novel, this range of vocabulary makes for an intelligent and articulate adult read.

Terry creates his scenes with great skill and has a talent for great storytelling. For example

Ankh- Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.

.There are odds bits of dry humour scattered through this book, for example

It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever, he said. Have you thought of going into teaching?

So Terry wrote this novel and how did I rate it as a reading experience?

Ah, I thought a change from my usual genres of reading would be a refreshing and delightful change. I found Terrys writing talent was GOOD but this story LACKED DEPTH. I think Mort is a lightweight tale, which if it was on TV, people would have one eye on the screen and talk over the whole programme. I did not get much out of reading this book. I found the entertainment value was POOR and just continued reading to the very end because that is the type of guy I am. For such a top selling and popular author I was disappointed. I think that Mort is a POOR read and only gets 2 stars from me. I am glad I only paid 99p for this book and that I now know what pleases some people.