Mort (Terry Pratchett)

24 June 2015

Mort

In tribute to the late, great, Sir Terry Pratchett who sadly died in March this year we will be discussing one of his most highly rated Discworld novels at June's meeting:

Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job.

Henceforth, Death is no longer going to be the end, merely the means to an end. It’s an offer Mort can't refuse. As Death's apprentice he'll have free board, use of the company horse - and being dead isn't compulsory. It's a dream job - until he discovers that it can be a killer on his love life...

Average Rating:

Sinclair Manson (25 June 2015 12:55)

I was quite a fan of Terry Pratchett, when I was a teenager, but this didn't spark much nostalgia for me. I laughed a little but a lot of the humour fell a bit flat. The joke of Death being humdrum and even awkward doesn't feel as fresh as it did back then, although that's hardly Terry Pratchett's fault. A lot of the more metaphysical stuff, reality resisting Mort's interference and so forth, didn't captivate me the way it might have done twenty years ago. It was mentioned in the discussion that later Discworld books took on more of a Dickensian aspect, unraveling with humour the peculiarities and absurdities of various institutions. There's a germ of that here but without that focus, this book didn't really make much of an impression on me.