Review: Nation, by Terry Pratchett

[jeriendhal]

Summary: Mau is having a bad day. After spending a month on the Boy's Island in the Southern Pelagic Ocean (an AU version of the South Pacific), he's sailing home in his hand carved canoe, having finished the rites of manhood, leaving his boyhood behind and ready to recieve his first tattoo and That Thing With the Knife Where You're Not Supposed to Scream and become a man. Unfortuately, one volcanic induced tsunami later, he comes home to find all the people of his small island nation have been wiped out. Now he's stuck between being a boy and man, with no one to talk to except a strange white "Ghost girl" who doesn't understand a word he says, and the voices of his ancestors in his head who just give him orders to do things he has no idea how to accomplish.

Ermitrude "Daphne" Fanshaw is also having a bad day. On her way to join her father in Port Mercia, where he is the British governor, the ship she's sailing on, the Sweet Judy, is also caught in the tsunami that killed all of Mau's people. But an insane bit of piloting lands the wounded Judy in the middle of the island, though it kills all of the crew, leaving her the sole survivor. Now all she has for company is the wounded-in-soul Mau, and they're dependant on each other for mutual survival.

Oh, and due to a nasty bit of Russian Influenza back home, she's gone from 138th in line to the British Crown to Crown Princess, but she doesn't know that yet.



Nation is slightly misnamed. A better title for it would be "Society", for that's the central question the book revolves around. What do you do when you the one you belong to is wiped out, or is rendered far out of your reach? How do you form one, or even know how to act, when there are only two people within the next few thousands of miles? Then what do you do when there's more than just two of you, and the others are looking to you for guidance, when you're still trying to figure things out?

People used to just reading Pratchett's Discworld books might be slightly put off by this one. For one thing it's not in the DW's default humorous mode. The closest one, with its arguments between religious belief and science, would be Small Gods, which is not coincidentally one of the more serious Discworld books. There are funny bits to it (like Pratchett's little riff on Moby Dick with the Sweet Judy's cook) but given it's central plot revolves around a boy who has had his entire world literally destroyed, his mother, father sister and everyone else he's ever known dead, don't expect a laugh riot.

What you do get a very fascinating study in basic survival, worthy of My Side of the Mountain or Axe, combined with a thoughtful examination of how people form connections and relationships under the most dire of pressure. It's also an study of the truths, half-ruths, and outright lies we form to make those connections, which if not formed in 100% honesty, serve well as the glue that holds people together.

Also, it also has Richard Dawkins being bitten by a tree climbing squid, so that's worth a read too... :)

Comments

[secoh.livejournal.com]

He has slowly been slipping into Literature for some time now. I'll always read his work, and in some ways it shows a lot of personal development on his part too.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to use That Word with PTerry, thank the gods. He's got too much self-awareness of the genres he writes in to try and duck what he's doing with an academic label.

[secoh.livejournal.com]

I think it's a cunning ploy to trick Robert asprin fans into reading something intelligent for a change :p