Category: Fantasy

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

On By Christopher TuthillIn Fantasy, Reviews, Young AdultLeave a comment

My eight and ten year olds read this wonderful and hilarious Terry Pratchett novel with me, and yesterday we went and saw the new film based on it. They loved both the book and the movie. The incomparable Hugh Laurie voices Maurice, and did a fine job bringing the self-regarding feline to life.

The movie hit mostly all the right notes in bringing this book to the big screen. There are some things I truly love about the book. First off, it’s an irresistibly funny and mischievous idea to update the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and of course Pratchett tweaks the tale so that the intelligent rats, in league with Maurice and a boy piper named Keith, scam town after town, infesting them and then pretending to be charmed by the piper, with whom they march away, before collecting their payday, splitting the cash, and moving on to the next victims.

I also love the idea that the rats at the center of the story became brilliant and self aware after eating magic potions from a dump filled with refuse from Unseen University. This is such an amusing idea that it seems like it could be the seeds of plenty of other books in Discworld. There is a lot of talk in both the book and the film about what it means to be intelligent, how the rats should best use their newfound intellect, and in what way they should live with humans. I daresay most people do not think philosophically like this about themselves and the purpose of their lives as much as these rats do; of course that’s part of the fun.

The rats’ names are a real hoot, too. When they became intelligent, they simply named themselves after things that they thought sounded cool in the dump, and the kitchens from which they pilfer food and widdle in the cheese. Hence they have names like Dangerous Beans, Hamnpork, Peaches, Big Savings, Darktan, Sardines, and so on. Great stuff that also never failed to make my kids chuckle.

Maurice, Keith, and the rats find themselves at odds with rival scheming ratcatchers, and then a Rat King who wants to control them and wage war on humans. The film diverges a bit from the book, but did an admirable job of bringing Pratchett’s wit and comedy to a new audience. My daughter had a great time at the movie and particularly enjoyed Death and his sidekick, a rat sized reaper.

Pratchett deftly handles some serious issues for kids in this book–death, for one, as well as bullying and tyranny and the need to defend oneself from such abuse. For a comic novel about magic rats, he covers a lot of ground and makes it seem effortless.

I highly recommend both the book and film to a wide audience. I think my kids and I will next read The Wee Free Men, another of Pratchett’s Discworld novels written for a young audience. Given how prolific Pratchett was, I don’t think we’ll be running out of Discworld books anytime soon.

Nine Princes in Amber

On By Christopher TuthillIn Fantasy, ReviewsLeave a comment

This isn’t exactly a review of Nine Prince in Amber. On my blog I talk about books I am reading, and that I love, and my personal experiences with these works. So what follows are my brief impressions of a weekend encounter with a book that I think is going to stay with me for a very long time.

Many years ago, when I was a college Freshman, a good friend told me of Roger Zelazny, and I dutifully picked up Nine Prince in Amber. At the time, I was looking for fantasy in the Tolkienian vein and somehow I couldn’t get into Corwin’s saga. It felt too strange for me, out of time and place, antiheroic, weird, and at that time, when I was still a teenager, I didn’t know what to make of it. I set it aside for more traditional heroic exploits like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, the kind of fantasy I understood better.

Thirty years later, I saw George RR Martin speaking reverently of his good friend and mentor, Roger Zelazny, and giving high praise to his work. If George loved his stuff so much, I figured I’d better listen.

So I picked up Nine Princes in Amber again a couple of days ago. Weird? Yes. Anti heroic? You bet. But I guess in the intervening decades I’d changed just a tad, read widely, and could appreciate this aesthetic. I still had a difficult time envisioning shadow earth, as well as the incredible longevity of prince Corwin, and the great city of cities, Amber, of which all other realities are mere reflections or shadows. This central theme of the ideal city, and its shadow realities, seems to me now the amazing charm of this book, part of its greatness. The idea of a kind of a Platonic ideal of a realm, nearly unattainable, but to which the hero is questing back to try and win for himself, really resonated with me on some subconscious level. The archetypal folks helping Corwin and hindering him along the way, his mythological, mischievous and murderous family, all of it was mixed together so expertly, in such a convincing way, that I felt it and enjoyed it very deeply. My criticisms of it aren’t criticisms, really, more matters of taste. As a person who loves mammoth fantasies and intricate detail in battles, I was a little chagrined by the very brief descriptions Zelazny used to describe massive, epic combat, or raising an army of a quarter million men and an armada of enormous size. But it works for this book, and if you want that kind of detail, plenty of other writers will provide it. Besides, there are nine more books in this story, so there is plenty more of Amber to explore.

I also loved the noirish feel to this, the mysterious story of this man who wakes from a coma not knowing who or what he is, but knowing he’s destined for something, that he better protect himself, he better get going and get some allies and start fighting before it’s too late. This guy is a godly prince, but he doesn’t know it yet. But this impetus to get on with it, to strive and fight for every inch, because nothing is guaranteed, this is the stuff of myth as well as noir. I loved the way Zelazny mixed high speech and low speech, high epic battles with lowly grimy hand to hand combat, old and new, mythological and familiar everyday things. What a perceptive, brilliant, erudite, gifted writer. Wonderful stuff, in my humble estimation. I guess I’d even say I loved this book.

I enjoyed it so much I read it in just a couple of sittings and was sad it was over, and I am eager to go back to Amber and walk the pattern again. I may need a break first though. This is heavy stuff, to me, not a typical fantasy realm of dragons and orcs, though I like those very much, as well.

So if my old pal out there is reading this, thanks good buddy for the recommendation. I’m also glad George RR Martin is out there promoting is friend’s work. It is so worth visiting, my friends. See you in Amber.