The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1)
author: Terry Pratchett
name: Paul
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1983
rating: 2
read at: 2012/01/31
date added: 2012/02/01
shelves: fantasy, novel, humor
review:
One thing I can’t say is that I wasn’t warned. When I first thought about diving into Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series, my inclination (as it always, always is) was to start at the beginning. But I did do a bit of research to figure out where the beginning was since it’s not like the Discworld books are labeled “#1 in a series,” “#2…” etc. What I found was that The Color of Magic was the first Discworld book to be published, but a lot of people familiar with Pratchett said, “I wouldn’t start here, though,” and then proceeded to give ten thousand entirely different recommendations for reading order.
Overwhelmed, I went back to my default which is to read and consume everything in order it was produced, pretending as it were that I were experiencing them in real time on their actual release schedule. So I picked up The Color of Magic.
The book is about Twoflower, a tourist from a rich Empire, who meets Rincewind, a failed wizard. Rincewind agrees to help guide Twoflower partially because the tourist is offering a generous daily fee, but perhaps also because Rincewind’s principal asset—his head for languages—makes him one of the few in the ill-fated city of Ankh-Morpork who can communicate readily with the odd visitor. The Color of Magic is broken down into four parts which each more or less chronicle a new catastrophe that the pair (along with a cast of assorted foils, temporary companions and antagonists who weave in and out of the vignettes) stumbles into and then back out of.
Plot- and tone-wise, the book is very reminiscent of Douglas Adams‘s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The characters (for the most part, I get to that in a moment) are exaggerated and colorful, the genre conventions are exploited for comedic effect, there is plenty of bizarre satire involved and the action is silly with most of the effects in the cause-and-effect relationship being even sillier.
However, my main problem with the book is that in spite of being silly and light and breezy, it isn’t actually very much fun, nor is it ever particularly funny. Humor being subjective, I can see that there are perhaps seeds of jokes that if I were in the proper mood for or if were worked out a bit more might cause the kind of out-loud laughter that Adams regularly drew from me, but as it stands I just didn’t find myself enjoying the book all that much. That’s not to say it was bad, necessarily, just sort of bland.
And I did find a few genuine issues as well, which may have contributed to my overall disinclination toward the book. One is that both principal protagonists are kind of dull. This is odd in the context of the rest of the book where secondary characters like the Lady, Hrun, Liessa, Death and The Luggage are all memorable and engaging but the central characters are just… blah. They seem to have a kind of Laurel and Hardy thing developing, but they are far less charismatic than those two and the result is that I found it hard to really care what happened to either of them. It doesn’t help that throughout the sense of deus ex machina (as intentional or exploited here as the HGttG Infinite Improbability Drive, but less clever) that floats around Rincewind gives the drama a deflated aura of pointlessness. But my biggest complaint is that the book both breaks Anton Chekhov‘s gun-on-the-mantle rule and doesn’t actually have a conclusion, settling instead on a cliffhanger.
I guess the principal takeaway from this book is that I like Pratchett’s style (most of this is based on the similarities with Adams) and I did like a lot of the silly details he built into the Discworld setting, so while this particular book may not have been my favorite, I did come away with an appreciation for the setting and a desire to read at least some more in the series. For my next entry, though, I think I’ll pick one that has a lot of recommendations from fans who’ve read the whole series.