Reaper Man (Discworld 11)
Half of Reaper Man was the best Discworld book I’ve read yet. The other half, while not terrible, was one of the worst.
This book falls into the unfortunate trap of alternating between two tangentially, but almost entirely not, related plots. The primary plot, for which the book earns its title, involves Death (perhaps the only character to appear in every book in the series) and a bit of cosmic-level political intrigue that results in his being fired from his job as the anthropomorphic representation of mortality. With only a short time remaining in his — er, life — Death takes on the (hastily constructed) identity of Bill Door, a farm hand in an obscure region of the Disc.
And those scenes involving “good old Bill Door” are top notch. “Bill” does farm work. “Bill” enjoys a pint down at the pub. “Bill” deals with a child who can see that he’s a “skellington.” And “Bill” falls in love. It’s quite touching, without managing to dip into pure sap, watching Death realize what it means to be human. The book really needed more of this.
Instead, the other half of Reaper Man deals with the consequences that come about during the period in which Death is not actually collecting souls. This, in itself, is a perfectly fine idea for a B-story, and should complement the primary action nicely. But somehow, even though we get off on the right foot (following the undead afterlife of elderly wizard Windle Poons), we end up mired in much the same area that plagued Moving Pictures: trying to shove modern ideas into the decisively medieval setting of the Discworld.
This is not to say that modern ideas can’t work in these books. The (apparently faithful, and also quite good) BBC adaptation of Hogfather featured a computer, which seemed plausible enough in Discworld logic. And the “in-sewer-ants” bit in the early books was freakin’ hilarious. But something about a city full of shopping carts and a creepy otherworldly shopping mall… well, it just didn’t work for me.
Not all of the B-story is a waste, though. We meet a fair amount of interesting (and apparently relevant later on) characters along Windle’s strange journey, including an odd assortment of dysfunctional monsters. And Windle himself is not an uninteresting character. It’s just that I kept wishing for Death when I was reading these scenes.
Special attention should be brought to Nigel Planer, the primary voice of the unabridged Discworld audio books. I’ve actually been experiencing most of these books via these audio versions, and Planer is by far the best of the lot they have reading them. His reads of both Death and Unseen University’s librarian (the emotions he manages to convey using only the word “ook” are amazing) are, to my mind, the definitive versions of what they sound like. Reaper Man in particular featured well over a dozen characters in addition to the usual number of incidentals, and, remarkably, Planer lends a distinctive voice and the appropriate mannerisms to every single one of them. It can’t be easy work being a one-man radio drama. Well done, sir.