“Mort” by Terry Pratchett

I’m kind of embarrassed to say that this is the first Discworld novel that I’ve read. I would have loved these when I was younger, and I’m still into this sort of book now. Pratchett seems to enjoy taking classic tropes of fantasy literature and turning them on their head, making them amusing or absurd. For example, the Discworld is quite literally a disc that is balanced on four elephants and a giant turtle. It even states in the book that scientists don’t think that a world this ridiculous is possible. But here it is anyways.

Our protagonist here is Mort, short for Mortimer, (also the French word for “death” haha) who becomes apprenticed to Death. He’s a bit of a fool, but that just makes him more likeable. Death himself is also much nicer than you would think, he seems to have a thing for cats and gets lonely every once in a while. Mort’s job is to separate the souls from people’s bodies once they have died, a job that he constantly questions. Death’s response to many of his objections is that there is no justice, only death. And there is no fairness that can be found in death.

Mort tries to make it more fair by saving a princess that he developed a crush on from being murdered. Naturally, this upsets fate and reality, her subjects all think that she’s dead now and can’t see or hear her. This brings up an interesting note about reality in this world, whatever people believe in is what is real. A wizard tells Mort that the gods only die when people stop believing in them, and Mort develops a habit of walking through solid objects when he doesn’t know that they are there. Anything can be true if you get enough people to believe in it. Which is quite a heady bit of philosophy for a kid’s book.

As demonstrated, you don’t need to be familiar with the Discworld previously to enjoy this book. I’ll probably be checking out more of Pratchett’s novels now though, I quite like the world he has set up here.