Eric (Discworld 9)
I was a bit disappointed when I saw how short Eric was — only about 150 pages (3 and a half hours in unabridged audiobook form), compared to the 3-400 pages/7-8 hours that the others before and after it. But sometimes, I suppose, a story is only as long as it needs to be, and this one didn’t feel especially short from the inside.
Apparently, many of the books in this series form sort of sub-series, concentrating on specific characters. I haven’t gotten far enough to read more than one book about the Ankh-Morpork night watch yet (though I look forward to it), nor the coven of witches in the Ramtops (also highly anticipated), but I have read several involving the cowardly would-be wizard, Rincewind.
When we last saw Rincewind at the end of Sourcery, he was being uncharacteristically noble in some demon dimension someplace. Not too shockingly, Pratchett felt the need to rescue his unhero so that he could live to run another day. And so sets up the events in Eric, in which an adolescent demonologist (the titular “Eric,” whose name has been hastily scrawled over a scribbled out “Faust” on the front cover) inadvertently summons Rincewind and demands the requisite three wishes from him.
Hilarity, naturally, ensues. The thing about these Discworld books, as I have observed in the past, is that it’s a bit difficult to discuss them after the fact. They are, for the most part, light reading, though this is not to say that they are in any way devoid of satirical social commentary or complexity of a sort. It’s just that Pratchett really seems to have the whole thing down to the point where not much more really needs to be said beyond the actual contents of the book. It’s rather like trying to deconstruct an episode of The Simpsons — you could do it, but it would sort of take all the fun out of it. And the internet certainly has its fill of that sort of person already, thank you very much.
One of the best things Pratchett does is cover ground that you think is obliterated beyond all possibility of freshness and extract some new thing that seemed completely obvious, yet hasn’t been done yet. Because, let’s face it, the basic story here — raising a demon and dealing with the consequences of ill-conceived wishes — is not exactly the most original. But then, neither was anything Shakespeare did. Or any of our modern geek heroes, for that matter. It takes a special kind of writer to breathe new life into the tired cliches, and Pratchett is exactly that kind of writer.
I can also thank him for permanently lodging the word “wossname” into my lexicon.