Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

three witches riding off into the great unknown

A book review. Sort of.

I read a lot. An absolutely absurd amount. When I say I’ve read over ten thousand books, that’s not an exaggeration, it’s a conservative estimate. One time a guy challenged me to name five hundred books that I have read, and after ten minutes of me listing novels without a pause he said “alright, fine, I believe you, please stop now.”

From board books for babies to classic literature and everything in between, I can dominate a book club discussion. Not that I’ve ever been in a book club. My therapist says people are probably too intimidated by me to invite me to join. I hope that’s not true, but also I have met many people who are embarrassed to tell me what they’re reading because they think I’m LITERARY or some shit.

I had a professor in undergrad who assigned The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. It was a class on modern American literature, and I thought it was a nice fit for the class. But there was this one super obnoxious guy who pitched a fit about having to read it because, according to him, detective novels are not “literature.” The prof looked him dead in the eye and said “I see. You consider yourself to be Literary with a capital ‘L.’ I, however, see the value in all forms of the language arts.” It was fucking epic. One of my favorite moments from college.

I’m not Literary. I just like books. All books. Name a genre and I’ve read at least a few. Except erotica. Sexually explicit content embarrasses me. My childhood made me ashamed of sex. It’s one of those things I’m working on. But I digress.

People are forever asking me what is my favorite book. I always tell them they need to be more specific. When you’ve read as many books as I have, you wind up with a couple hundred “favorites.” This blog feels like a good place for me to share a few.

I’m going to start with Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett (1991) because that is what I’m currently reading. I adore Terry Pratchett. I was obsessed with the Discworld novels in my late teens and early twenties, and his writing has done a great deal to shape my worldview, particularly when it comes to social policy and religion. Without the Discworld I would not be the person I am, so it seems fitting that I should revisit those novels now, when I am trying to rebuild the self that I lost chasing an unworthy man.

I think everyone is shaped to some degree by the art to which they are exposed. Even the absence of art can have a profound impact on how a person develops. Many people would perhaps find it challenging to clearly articulate how different pieces altered their personal paradigm, but that is of no consequence.

You don’t need to be able to explain it or even to recognize it when it happens. The impact is there, nonetheless.

Art shapes the world. That is what Witches Abroad is about.

The power of stories.

Witches Abroad features the indomitable Granny Weatherwax. Granny has been an important role model in my life, to the degree that had I birthed a female child I had every intention of naming her Esmerelda. When I took the Louisiana bar exam, my pseudonym1 was Esmerelda Weatherwax. Granny means so much to me that I still haven’t read The Shepherd’s Crown. Every time I try I’m overcome with tears only a few sentences in. I know what is coming and I can’t bear it. As long as I never read the words, she remains alive.

Yet in spite of my adoration for her, I failed to absorb the most important lesson of Witches Abroad: You can’t force a happy ending.

Witches Abroad is the third Granny Weatherwax novel and the 12th Discworld novel overall. There are 41 total novels that take place in the Discworld universe, and while I intend to write about several of them I will not be writing about them all. There’s only so many hours in the day and I have a lot of other things to talk about.

Terry Pratchett published the first Discworld novel in 1983, the year of my birth. This has always seemed very fitting to me. A universe that so shaped my life came to life the same year I did. It’s a very pleasing coincidence.

But back to the book.

In Witches Abroad, Granny, Nanny, and Magrat travel to Genua to stop an evil witch/fairy godmother from forcing a marriage between a peasant girl named Emberella, who is secretly the daughter of the murdered Baron who used to rule the city, and the Duc who succeeded him to the throne.

The Duc is actually a frog, not a prince. He is only human shaped during the day. This book is a mash up of a whole bunch of well known stories and fairy tales. It’s absolutely delightful.

Magrat–the Maiden of the coven–inherits a magic wand from a fairy godmother and is tasked with watching over Emberella. Unfortunately, the wand did not come with instructions and pretty much all Magrat ever manages to do with it is turn things into pumpkins. When Magrat tells Granny and Nanny about the wand and Emberella, they naturally insist on accompanying her on her quest.

Genua (which is modeled after New Orleans) is clear across the disc from Lancre, where the witches live. As the trio makes the long and occasionally arduous journey from one side of the disc to the other, they encounter–and alter–many familiar stories. The witches unknowingly defeat a vampire, with some assistance from Nanny’s cat, Greebo. Okay, they don’t defeat him. The witches don’t even know about the vampire. Greebo encounters the vampire in his bat form and eats him. The terrorized villagers rejoice and throw a feast, and our heroines never have any idea why.

Not Greebo. Greebo is not a ginger (although he has always wanted to be) and he’s missing one eye and his ears are all torn up.

The coven witnesses the running of the bulls and, drunk on absinthe, manage to ruin the entire event. Later in the journey a house falls on Nanny’s head. She survives, and refuses to part with her ruby red boots (slippers being very impractical for travel to foreign parts).

The book is all about stories. About the power they have over people. About the power people have to alter them.

The nearer the witches get to Genua, the more apparent it becomes to them that someone is manipulating reality to make it conform to various common “rural myths.” “Someone’s been making stories happen in these parts, I know it,” Granny says, while preventing the Big Bad Wolf from eating Red Riding Hood’s slightly senile grandmother.

Witches Abroad is not the first time Pratchett writes about the power of stories to alter reality. In Wyrd Sisters, the second Granny Weatherwax novel and a VERY loose adaptation of Hamlet, the usurper of the throne hires a playwright to tell his version of the events that led to him being crowned King of Lancre. While watching the audience absorb the false tale portrayed in the play, Granny observes, “This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.”

Stories can shape reality. Stories teach us lessons, and shape our belief systems. The patterns followed by common tales are created by and inherent to social norms. Stories caution us about what happens if you fail to behave in accordance with the unwritten rules of society. Stories teach us what is expected of us, and what we should expect from life.

Witches Abroad is about the dangers of letting stories guide your life. Granny expounds on the importance of not blindly following the narrative, stating “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

Stories shape the world. Art influences reality. But in the end, all people must have free will to think and choose for themselves. Even if their choices don’t fit the socially acceptable narrative.

It’s the difference between influence and force. The difference between learning and obeying.

Sometimes people get too caught up in the story. They see the framework of the thing, and spend their lives trying to mold themselves to fit inside of it. They let go of “what they know they really need” and instead pursue what others “think they should want.”

That is what happened to me.

Stories have power. Stories create and underscore the social norms by which we are all expected to live. The power of these narratives is precisely why it is so important that we encourage and advance the writings of marginalized groups. New perspectives are necessary to dismantle the mold into which we are all expected to fit.

We’ve all heard it before, over and over again. The story of The American Dream. The bedraggled but compelling underprivileged child drags themselves up from squalor and poverty, outperforms everyone in the classroom, rockets to the top of their profession, gets married, buys a nice house, has two darling babies who will never want for anything and lives happily ever after.

But what if it doesn’t FIT?

After the story ends, life keeps going. And ever after is such a terribly long time.

I have read over ten thousand stories. And somewhere along the line I got lost in them. I forgot to keep track of the real me. Instead I created a character to fit neatly inside the socially acceptable narrative, and let her take charge of my life.

Many will blame my circumstances. The story was safe. I could see the shape of it, carving a path through the wilderness of my bleak reality, and it was easy and reassuring to simply follow along and let the story materialize around me.

witches abroad in the night

But the story isn’t real and the dream wasn’t mine and in the end “stories just want happy endings. They don’t give a damn who they’re for.”

In the end, Granny asked Death, “When can I get out?’

Death replied, “When you find the one that’s real.”

Stories have power. They allow us to see into the hearts and minds of others, to walk in their shoes for a brief moment and learn from their experiences.

Stories shape who we are. But we shouldn’t let them control who we are.

Always keep track of the real you. Don’t waste your life “wishing for things, instead of working out how to make them happen.”

Make your own happy ending, instead of trying to mimic the one we have been sold all our lives.

Control your story. Don’t let the story control you.

Go see the elephant.2

Becoming Alternative is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider subscribing to my substack at https://becomingalternative.substack.com/ or making a one time gift at https://venmo.com/u/rmfontenot

  1. Louisiana makes you take the bar exam under a fake name because the graders are practicing lawyers and there’s a LOT of legacies in law school so they have to do something to prevent people getting passing scores just on the basis of who’s their daddy. Kansas just assigned us a number. I like the fake name method better. ↩︎
  2. If you want to know what this means, go read the damn book. ↩︎
Share the Post:

Explore More Posts