One of the best books I read in 2008, I just managed to squeeze into the year. I finished it about five minutes before the bongs, on the same day its author’s knighthood was announced.<\/p>\n
Nation\u00a0<\/em>by (Sir) Terry Pratchett could have been a Discworld novel but it wouldn’t pack half the punch it does. It’s more or less set in our world’s nineteenth century, with just enough variance for Pratchett to have fun. But the underlying premise simply isn’t funny and he doesn’t try to pretend it is: the Nation is a Pacific island (one of the Mothering Sunday islands, which are an extension of the Bank Holiday Monday group) whose population is wiped out by a tsunami following a volcanic eruption. Mau is the sole survivor. On the island he meets Daphne (n\u00e9e Ermintrude, but in Pratchett style she chooses a name that better reflects her personality), scion of the aristocracy and related more closely than she realises to royalty, who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck caused by the same tsunami. They both have a great deal of pain to get through. Being Pratchett heroes, of course, they manage; and then you remember the author’s own recent personal tsunami, his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, and you realise this is Pratchett’s Book of Job.<\/p>\n I hadn’t realised before how well Job works for non-believers as well as believers. I remember Pratchett saying in an interview that he’s a humanist, and therefore an atheist, and either way that unfortunately means he can’t get angry with God because he doesn’t believe in him. Job, and\u00a0Nation<\/em>, show that you can still scream WHY? at whoever you do or don’t believe in, and either way you get the same answer: “Because. Who’s asking?”<\/p>\n After all that, don’t get the idea it’s heavy going, because it isn’t. Pratchettism abounds. When you hear a sentence like “it only needs 138 people to die and your father will be King!” then it’s just asking for trouble – the humour equivalent of the\u00a0gun on the mantelpiece<\/a>. The platonic love story – Mau and Daphne are still children – is funny and moving, and there are sideways views of science and religion and civilisation and wonderful turns of phrase left, right and centre. One of my favourites was a description of Daphne’s great-great-aunt: “apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she’s gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapours, and stayed there, still gently vaporizing …”<\/p>\n It’s great fun, and it’s also one of the few books I actually feel honoured to have read.<\/p>\n And here’s everything else I read in 2008. In summary, with last year’s figures in brackets:<\/p>\n total: 53 (60) In full:<\/p>\n One of the best books I read in 2008, I just managed to squeeze into the year. I finished it about five minutes before the bongs, on the same day its author’s knighthood was announced. Nation\u00a0by (Sir) Terry Pratchett could … Continue reading
\nscience fiction\/fantasy: 30 (30)
\ntranslated from Swedish: 4 (4)
\ngave up reading: 2<\/p>\n\n