Pratchett leavens Tiffany’s passage into adulthood with generous portions of assistance from the Nac Mac Feegle, the six-inch-high blue men whose love of boozin’, fightin’ and stealin’ is subordinate only to their devotion to Tiffany, their Hag o’ the Hills. Tiffany must remember everything she’s gleaned from all the witches who have trained her to defeat him, and the key is a childhood memory the old Baron shares with her on his deathbed. He operates by playing on fear and causing the common folk to forget what their witches have done for them. Witches, arguably, embody the accumulated wisdom of their craft, while the Cunning Man is a collective memory of evil. But one of the Cunning Man’s MOs is wanton book burning, a calculated obliteration of memories. The Cunning Man is resurrected when Letitia, Tiffany’s erstwhile swain Roland’s fiancée (Pratchett confronts her with this betrayal, too) summons him inadvertently when trying to work a spell against Tiffany. Books preserve all memories, even the ones better consigned to oblivion. Themes of memory and forgetting run throughout this tale. Here he challenges her with the Cunning Man, a centuries-old disembodied hatred that seeks ignorance and uses it-“Poison goes where poison’s welcome”-against witches. He throws a lot at Tiffany, who crashed spectacularly into her calling when she armed herself with a skillet and, at the age of nine, ventured into Faerieland (which is not nearly as nice as it sounds) to steal her brother back from its Queen ( The Wee Free Men, 2003). A love that causes Tiffany over and over to square her shoulders beneath her pointy black hat and do what’s needful. Beneath everything he writes, however, even as he has readers howling helplessly with laughter, is a fierce, palpable love for his fellow human beings, however flawed they may be. It can’t be easy being Terry Pratchett, either, an author known foremost, perhaps, for his screamingly funny Discworld novels, of which this is the latest.
Ask Tiffany Aching, and she’ll tell you: It’s not easy being a witch, especially when you’re only almost 16 years old.
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