Closing off the Sourcery

For all of the tedium I find in Pratchett's busting out excellent fantasy concepts (certainly the stuff of symphonic metal lyricists' sweetest dreams) but then making fun of them, he writes an excellent ending. Especially when he says goodbye to one of his recurring characters. At least, I imagine that this is the last book featuring Rincewind, since he winds up staying in the Dungeon Dimensions, after all.

Another thing that struck me while wrapping up with Sourcery, is that Pratchett's style makes two things apparent: that he has a background in journalism, and that he really knows how to show things. The first comes from his judiciously brief rambling descriptions, and the second comes from his books' chapter-less organization.

Without the form of blocks meant to be coherent unto themselves, Pratchett is far more free to dance around the perspectives of a plethora of characters than authors who have definite jumps in their story where they leave one character's head and go into another.

Pratchett uses his lack of chapters to great effect, as each one demands that you re-focus your attention on the events of the book. That's not to say that he always shows and rarely tells, but for at least the first few lines of each new section, all he offers is a setting or character trait with which to ground yourself. Writing like this also makes scenes like those between three of the four horsepeople of the Apocralypse apparently come out of nowhere, making them even odder than their content suggests they'll be. And there is a great deal of charm in this.

However, I don't have another Pratchett to read for quite a while, so that charm (and its attendant frustation of full fantasy potential) will just have to glow like an ember in my memory.