Turtle Recall
With the Irish Discworld Convention just a few days away, Ed Power talks to best-selling author – 65 million copies and counting! – Terry Pratchett about his disdain for literary snobs, why Tolkien was wrong about The Orcs and the fall-out from his controversial Choosing To Die documentary.
Ed Power, 11 Nov 2011
Terry Pratchett and death have been locked in a slow, sad dance for many years now. The reaper is the Discworld author’s most beloved creation, a poignant, dryly funny character who adds a peculiar humanity to his PG Wodehouse-esque fantasy romps. But their relationship became far more personal when the writer was diagnosed with a terminal strain of Alzheimer’s called posterior cortical atrophy, and arrived at the conclusion that one day things might progress to the stage where he would prefer to take his own life. The terrible irony is not lost on him.
“In Discworld, Death isn’t unkind. He’s got a job. He’s rather like a civil servant really. He doesn’t go out of his way to be nasty. He dusts you down, points you in whatever direction you are going and wishes you luck. But as you get older and slightly more philosophical, you realise everyone dies. When you get to the stage of life I am at, where occasionally one of your contemporaries falls off the perch, you are well aware of the closeness of death. But there’s a reason for it – it’s so that there is space for new people and the planet doesn’t fill up.”
Without having ever quite intended to, Pratchett has become a sort of unofficial spokesperson for the assisted death movement (he hates the phrase assisted suicide, feeling it stigmatises). Last year, he made a quite upsetting BBC documentary entitled Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, which included footage of a terminally ill man in his 70s taking a barbiturate-based drink and slipping into a sleep from which he did not awake. Predictably Christian groups were outraged, which, oddly, Pratchett can understand.
“It would have been strange it if wasn’t upsetting, “ he reflects. “If people looked at it and laughed, well you would never want to have tea with these people ever again. Something like that needs to be upsetting. Otherwise you aren’t quite human. It was upsetting for those of us involved, including the whole movie crew. But it was totally without ego on the part of those making the movie. There was something happening. We watched and let it happen.”
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