"Reaper Man" by Terry Pratchett

A Discworld novel. Other reviewed in this blog include

• Carpe Jugulum in which Lancre is invaded by a family of vampires
• Going Postal in which Moist has to reform the postal service for Lord V.

But there are lots of others and all those I have read have been great.

In this DEATH, wj=ho always speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS, is retired. This causes an unfortunate disruption to normal services. In other words, Ankh Morpork is in chaos.

Pratchett maintains his usual blend of twisted metaphysical insight with jokes ranging from wonderful to brilliant:

• "seconds, endlessly turning the maybe into the was."(p 8)
• "there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone." (p 11)
• "gently slicing thin rashers of interval from the bacon of eternity." (p 15)
• "It's the difference between morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly." (p 33)
• "If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades would be represented by a shaft." (p 47)
• "Mrs Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small." (p 73)
• "Doing it without the right paraphernalia is like taking all your clothes off to have a bath." (p 101)
• A funeral is "a reverential form of garbage disposal". (p 122)
• "that long nasal whine which meant that folk song was about to be perpetrated." (p 168)
• "JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A METAPHOR DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE REAL." (p 194)
• "Cities - big sedentary creatures growing from one spot and hardly moving at all for thousands of years. They breed by sending out people to colonise new land." (p 202)

But this is just a taste of the brilliance. He can by funny and wise, and funny and touching at the same time. Wonderful. August 2017; 285 pages