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the-light-followed · 5 years ago

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WYRD SISTERS (1988) [DISC. #6; WITCHES #2]

“‘No one would come up here this time of night.’ Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered. ‘What’s to be afraid of?’ she managed. ‘Us,’ said Granny Weatherwax, smugly.”

Rating: 6/10

Standalone Okay: Yes

Read First: Yeah!

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

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I’m just going to jump right in with this one: the best part about the Witches sub-series of the Discworld is that they are all, in their own way, stories about stories. They’re stories that follow other stories, the tropes and archetypes and established narrative structure, but they’re also stories that subvert that structure at just the right moment to make something that feels much more truthful, and often, much more real.

Stories about stories.

This is sometimes very literal: Wyrd Sisters, for example, has very obvious Shakespearean roots, notably from Hamlet and Macbeth, and seems to gleefully delight in throwing around references—three witches meeting to cast spells, blood on the murderer’s hands that won’t wash away, the ghost of a murdered father begging his son to seek revenge, a theater called The Dysk that mimics Shakespeare’s Globe, etc., etc., etc.—that then get turned over on their heads. We’ll see it done again with the fairy tale elements of Witches Abroad, and the Phantom of the Opera parody that is Maskerade. These books are, in a very real sense, skipping the setup and instead using cultural touchstones as framework. The books starring the witches are literally new stories being told about stories we, the audience, already know and recognize.

But sometimes it isn’t literal at all: witches, after all, work magic most often through psychology and metaphor. “Headology,” as the witches call it, is the basis of witchcraft, and it’s all about the stories being told. It’s in the things the witches do for respect, like their hats and black outfits and their out-of-the-way cottages they pass down from one witch to the next, or the way they bow instead of curtsey. It’s in the things they call magic even when it isn’t, like using real herbs and medicines to cure illnesses, or waving their hands over a pot of tea and chanting nonsense before ‘reading the future’ in the leaves, all of it only for the look of the thing from the outside.

And it’s also in the things they tell themselves. For example, when Magrat’s broomstick stops working in Wyrd Sisters, she does what she calls a Change spell—which simply means that the rest of the world remains the same, but she changes the way she sees herself. Before, she was a young woman on a broom rapidly falling out of the sky, and now she’s a confident young witch who can deal with any disaster that comes her way, so she’s therefore a lot less worried about it.

And it works. That’s the thing: Magrat is just fine. Witches do magic in and on themselves, it’s all nothing more than a thought, and yet it works.

None of the Witches books are particularly subtle about the point they’re trying to make with the whole deal, either. In Wyrd Sisters, it seems like everyone is talking about the power of words and stories, the way that the things we tell ourselves and each other can shape the reality of the world we inhabit. There are some negatives you can pull out of that message—history is malleable and written by the victors, propaganda triumphs over the truth, etc., etc. But there are a lot of more interesting, thought-provoking ideas to consider, instead. For example: just because narrative structure has already delivered us the broad strokes of the plot (anyone who’s studied any Shakespeare, which can reasonably be assumed to be any native English speaker older than about sixteen, can probably guess the general course of Wyrd Sisters by about page twenty), it doesn’t mean there can’t be originality and meaning in the specifics.

And that originality and meaning is what makes all the Discworld books work so well. Pratchett is parodying, sure, but he’s also creating something very new and earnest and sincere, and that just doesn’t work if the story is an exact beat-for-beat retelling of an already-told tale.

Wyrd Sisters agrees with that idea. Destiny is all well and good—it’s nice to think that what’s to come is pre-planned, easy to predict, and impossible to subvert—but the world just doesn’t work like that. The story isn’t plotted out in advance.

As Pratchett says later in the book: “Destiny was funny stuff…You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else—coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.”

The witches certainly don’t truck with destiny. Or, well, it may be a tool in their storytelling arsenal, but they don’t see it as a concrete thing. Destiny is what you make of it, and Granny and Nanny are movers and shakers. That makes it especially ironic that the book is called Wyrd Sisters—the word “wyrd” is an old Anglo-Saxon concept referring to fate or personal destiny, so the “wyrd sisters” themselves typically would be the three Fates, a la Greek mythology, rather than three women who tend to grab Fate and Destiny by the ears and twist until they decide to agree that the witches have the right of it.

Honestly, though, if Granny Weatherwax looked at me like that, I’d do whatever she wanted, too.

I just want to bring up something I really like about Pratchett’s writing style: despite the fantastical setting, despite how far from reality he can get, he’s not afraid to switch to Roundworld concepts or just flat-out break the fourth wall in exchange for better, more impactful descriptions. I like to call this cinematic writing, and sometimes that’s actually very literal. There are quite a few passages in various Discworld books where he starts to write in an almost movie-script style. After Moving Pictures, which is still a good four books away at this point, I think that becomes less notable. Here, and in the previous few Discworld books (Mort, Sourcery, Equal Rites), when Discworld does not have any parallel equivalent to Roundworld’s Hollywood, it’s pretty damn unusual for an author to just outright throw aside their own fantasy setting to make a description in real-world terms.

My favorite example of this from Wyrd Sisters:

“It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words. It’s a lot easier in pictures, when you just use a calendar with lots of pages blowing off, or a clock with hands moving faster and faster until they blur, or trees bursting into blossom and fruiting in a matter of seconds… Well, you know. Or the sun becomes a fiery streak across the sky, and days and nights flicker past jerkily like a bad zoetrope, and the fashions visible in the clothes shop across the road whip on and off faster than a lunchtime stripper with five pubs to do. There are any amount of ways, but they won’t be required because, in fact, none of this happened.”

You can practically imagine the way that scene would look in a blockbuster movie, and it’s wonderful that Pratchett describes it crystal clear just to let us know that it is not, in fact, how it looked at all.

There’s a lot more to like about Wyrd Sisters, too, for all that it isn’t one of my favorite Discworld books. It’s a far better introduction to the witches—specifically Granny Weatherwax—than Equal Rites is, even though Equal Rites is technically the first book in the Witches sub-series. It introduces some characters we’ll see a lot more of later, like King Verence and the greater Ogg family, but also characters that will go on to become staples of the Discworld, like Nanny Ogg and Magrat. We also have some lovely cameos from already established characters: notably Death and his interactions during the play at the castle, but there are some good Ankh-Morpork moments, like the Librarian’s appearance at a barfight.

And we get to see the good old Discworld humor really click—it’s all about that balance between absurdism and realism, or between established tropes and self-awareness. One of my favorite examples of this comes right at the beginning of the book:

“As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’”

Pratchett’s really got a sense for it by this point, and he can deliver zinger after unexpectedly delightful zinger. Discworld books are always beautifully funny, of course, even though after a while you really get a feel for when a good joke is coming. Some people might think that knowing the punchline is coming might make it less funny: it absolutely does not. All it does is make the unexpected, sneaky moments—when the humor Pratchett has been secretly setting up for ages finally creeps up to smack you in the face—hit harder. Maybe others disagree, but I can read Discworld novels again and again, and they always get me just as much as they did the first time through. In my opinion, that’s real comedic talent.

Up next in the series we have Pyramids, our first unconnected one-off story, which is wonderfully weird even for a Discworld book! Stay tuned!

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Side Notes:

Every time that oh-so popular Ankh-Morporkian dive bar, the Drum, pops up, it’s fun to note where it’s at these days: Mended Drum, Broken Drum, etc. In Wyrd Sisters, Tomjon and Hwel go drinking in the Mended Drum.

There are several adaptations of Wyrd Sisters, including a 4-part BBC radio show, an animated film, and a stageplay.

As I go over my highlighted quotes and annotations from each book, putting these posts together, I learn more and more about myself. What I like, what I find funny, what I care to notice. For example, Vetinari shows up exactly ONCE in this book, and just in a footnote, and yet I still highlighted it and wrote a note next to it that contained mostly exclamation points. There’s no real point to this; I just want everyone to know how much I love Vetinari.

Favorite Quotes:

“Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.”

“Now, just when a body would have been useful, it had let him down. Or out.”

“‘How many times have you thrown a magic ring into the deepest depths of the ocean and then, when you get home and have a nice bit of turbot for your tea, there it is?’ They considered this in silence. ‘Never,’ said Granny irritably. ‘And nor have you.’”

“His body was standing to attention. Despite all his efforts his stomach stood at ease.”

“Back down on the plains, when you kicked people they kicked back. Up here, when you kicked people they moved away and just waited patiently for your leg to fall off.”

“The Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.”

“She gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn’t occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. In any case, an elderly lady banging a bowl with a spoon was probably not the spearhead of an invasion force.”

“‘You’re wondering whether I really would cut your throat,’ panted Magrat. ‘I don’t know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out.’”

“Wizards assassinated each other in drafty corridors, witches just cut one another dead in the street. And they were all as self-centered as a spinning top. Even when they help other people, she thought, they’re secretly doing it for themselves. Honestly, they’re just like big children. Except for me, she thought smugly.”

“‘Man just went past with a cat on his head,’ one of them remarked, after a minute or two’s reflection. ‘See who it was?’ ‘The Fool, I think.’ There was a thoughtful pause. The second guard shifted his grip on his halberd. ‘It’s a rotten job,’ he said. ‘But I suppose someone’s got to do it.’”

“Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains.”

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

“Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.”

“‘Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.’”

“‘I shall haunt their corridors,’ he said, ‘and whisper under the doors on still nights.’ His voice grew fainter, almost lost in the ceaseless roar of the river. ‘I shall make basket chairs creak most alarmingly, just you wait and see.’ Death grinned at him. NOW YOU’RE TALKING.”

#discworld #wyrd sisters

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