Dragons at Crumbling Castle and
Other Tales. By Terry Pratchett. Illustrations by Mark Beech. Clarion.
$16.99.
Many years ago, when there
were wolves in Wales – no, that’s not it. Once upon a time, or twice – no, not
that either. Everyone comes from somewhere – that’s it. Everyone comes from somewhere, and where Terry Pratchett
of Discworld fame comes from is
Buckinghamshire, England, where once upon a time, or twice, back in the 1960s,
a young Pratchett worked for the local newspaper, not only reporting on many
and varied local events (none of them particularly significant) but also
writing for the paper’s “Children’s Corner” under the pseudonym “Uncle Jim,”
creating a wide variety of stories (some of them particularly significant, at
least in retrospect).
Dragons at Crumbling Castle is, many years later, the result of
Pratchett’s youthful indiscretions, so to speak. The 14 stories here were not
intended for the ages (newspaper writing never is), but they were intended for those of a young age,
and this book is therefore a marvelous introduction to the world (or worlds) of
Terry, now Sir Terry and regaled with honors aplenty for his many and various
works of more-recent times. There are a few direct tie-ins of these early
stories to Pratchett’s books: “Tales of the Carpet People” and “Another Tale of
the Carpet People” eventually led to Pratchett’s very first book, entitled, not
surprisingly, The Carpet People. But
most of the relationships between these short pieces and Pratchett’s later work
are in the realm of sensibility rather than specific characters or themes. Just
to stick with “Tales of the Carpet People” for a moment, for example, one
character tells another, “Worthwhile things aren’t just there for the taking,
you know,” and that sounds very much like later Pratchett (although in his
later books, worthwhile things are
sometimes just there for the taking). And in the same story, which is a
journey-to-a-new-land sort of thing with echoes of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Pratchett writes,
“Something large and black seemed to be dancing around the bottom of the hair,
blowing its nose menacingly.” And that too sounds a bit, just a bit, like later
Pratchett.
The thing is, Dragons at Crumbling Castle is fun both
for people who know later Pratchett and for those who encounter him here for
the first time. None of these stories is up to the level of his later work, but
so what? The themes of unlikely heroes, somewhat dangerous danger that usually
is not too dangerous, and all sorts
of unexpected narrative nooks and crannies, are in their formative stages in
these tales; they would emerge in their full splendor only later. Dragons at Crumbling Castle is
juvenilia, but it is mighty entertaining juvenilia.
So here we have the title
story, set in King Arthur’s time, featuring a reluctant boy sort-of knight, a
not-very-effective opposing knight, and a decidedly inept wizard who is nothing
at all like the later Rincewind but might be a very distant relation. We have a
heroic tortoise who sets out to see the world and conquers an asp along the way
– a tortoise named Hercules. We have a particularly short and particularly
funny story called “Hunt the Snorry” in which a large band of adventurers
searches for something known only by its name and does, alas, eventually find
it. We meet “Edwo, the Boring Knight,” “The Abominable Snowman,” and “The
Blackbury Monster.” We experience the nefarious machinations of Baron von Teu
as he does dirty deeds to make sure his gas-powered automobile defeats the
steam-powered one of Sir Henry Toggitt, which pulls a little coal tender behind
it, as shown in one of more than 100 hilarious and perfectly appropriate drawings
by Mark Beech. “The Big Race” includes not only gasoline and steam cars but
also a “mechanical car, with its eight drivers still hauling on the big key,”
and “an electric car, an elastic-driven car, a compressed-air truck, a hot air
balloon-powered bus, and two sail-powered bicycles.”
What is abundantly clear in
this collection of early Pratchett is that many years ago, when there may or
may not have been wolves in Wales but there were surely newspapers in
Buckinghamshire, there arose the initial stirrings of an imagination that grew
in later decades to produce some of the most prodigiously entertaining books to
be written in modern English. Whether Dragons
at Crumbling Castle is a young reader’s first introduction to Pratchett or
an older reader’s opportunity to examine the early work of a satirist who has
been compared with the greats of centuries past, it is a book that gives great
pleasure on its own while also whetting one’s appetite for examining or
re-examining later, larger-scale Pratchett – writing that is surely more
polished, finely wrought and weighty, but is scarcely more delightful.
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