Terry Pratchett : Portrait of an angry ‘old fart’

Doubleday, £25

BY ROSEMARY GORING

I’m going to make Alzheimer’s regret catching me,” said Terry Pratchett, in a phrase that encapsulates his attitude to life. The news that the best-selling author had been struck by a rare form of the disease, at the age of 59, made headlines around the world. From the moment of his diagnosis, in 2007, until his death in 2015, Pratchett – while continuing to write as copiously as ever – became an ambassador for awareness of Alzheimer’s. As he liked to point out: “When you’ve got cancer, you’re a battler against the disease. When you’ve got Alzheimer’s, you’re an old fart.”

Pratchett’s biographer Rob Wilkins was with him every step of this increasingly frustrating and distressing degenerative disease. As a young man, he was a devotee of Pratchett’s wittily subversive fantasy novels. In 2000, while working for Colin Smythe Publishing, Pratchett’s first publisher, he was dispatched to sort out the author’s CD-burner. The relationship blossomed from there. The increasingly over-worked novelist had been contemplating hiring a PA – “a lady from the village” – but it was Rob who fitted the bill.

His remit gradually expanded from making tea and fixing technical glitches to tidying up passages of novels and, eventually, typing at the speed of a stenographer while Pratchett dictated.

To Discworld fans, this might sound like the dream job, but as Wilkins suggests, being employed by Pratchett was not all strawberries and cream: “I was also fired many times over, although one quickly learned that Terry, being a writer, had an experimental interest in saying things to see what they sounded like, and if you adopted an experimental approach yourself, and simply turned up the next day, it would normally turn out that you hadn’t been fired at all.”

Many made the error of mistaking the avuncular-looking Pratchett for a Father Christmas figure but, as this intimate biography reveals, much of his creativity was driven by anger. This generated such a head of steam that, at his peak, he was writing as many as three books a year.

Wilkins has many advantages over most biographers, having not only known his subject well, but taken down notes while he was alive for his projected memoir. That book’s working title – A Life With Footnotes – has been redeployed here. The result, at times, is like a ventriloquist act, with Pratchett’s voice and personality emerging loud and clear, even when not directly quoted.

A discursive, conversational account of Pratchett’s life and career, Wilkins’s affectionate but verbose account begins in the hamlet of Forty Green, near the Chiltern Hills, which Pratchett described as “a sort of Lark Rise to Beaconsfield’s Candleford”. Here young Terry, an only child, was raised in a house with no running water by his mechanic father and ambitious mother: “The space race was a little way off, but already she was preparing to sling me into a higher orbit – by my ears if necessary …”

By the time they moved to the luxury of a council house with indoor loo in Beaconsfield, the outline of the adult Pratchett was already taking shape. He had a precocious understanding of astronomy, and of how to work a radio and, by the age of 11, had discovered books. The gift of a copy of The Wind in the Willows opened his eyes to literature: this was “the pivotal point, the coin-drop moment, the minute at which the scales fall away, the machinery clocks into gear and his life sets off at speed in a wholly new direction”. Thereafter, he wanted to read “absolutely everything”. Aged 12, he got himself a Saturday job shelving books in the local library, where in quiet moments he would devour copies of Punch.

Despite this, Pratchett was not a success at school. Among several lingering resentments was the way he was treated by the headteacher with whom he had a running battle about keeping the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the school library. Yet Pratchett was only 15 when his first story was published in Science Fantasy magazine, home to such luminaries as JG Ballard, Ray Bradbury and Mervyn Peake.

With a clutch of O-levels, he chucked in school to become a cub reporter on the Bucks Free Press. Within weeks, he had found his natural home in the children’s corner. As Wilkins writes: “The apprentice journalist is already on his way to mastery of the mock-heroic, cheekily loosening the nuts and bolts of conventional storytelling to see what laughs might follow.”

Pratchett’s journalistic career was not distinguished; possibly its lowest point came as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, South Western Region. When news broke of a gas leak at Hinckley Point nuclear power station, he collapsed and was rushed to hospital. It was not a heart attack as first suspected, but a panic attack.

Covering Pratchett’s youthful and lifelong marriage to Lynn, with whom he had a daughter Rhiannon, and the publication of his first novel, The Carpet People, Wilkins maintains the momentum, albeit in a cheerfully repetitive manner, as if humouring an audience hungry for the tiniest details of the great man’s life.

When Pratchett’s career begins to take off, with The Colour of Magic, the first of the phenomenally successful Discworld series, Wilkins faces the problem of any biographer with a subject who spent most of his time either at his keyboard, or on publicity tours: how to make interesting the matter of publishers’ advances, deadlines, occasional rewrites, and endless book signing.

To his credit, Wilkins knows how to keep the story bubbling. Nor is he above settling scores, as when he takes a swipe at a crass and uninformed put-down by Tom Paulin and Allison Pearson on the Late Review, which merely confirmed Pratchett’s disdain for the ignorance and pretensions of the literati. When, however, he won the Carnegie Medal in 2002 for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, his biographer reflects: “It was hard to avoid the conclusion that, in a potentially troubling development, Terry had just been found guilty of literature.”

A devoted and self-deprecating Boswell to Pratchett’s crotchety Johnson, Wilkins offers a generous portrait of a fizzingly imaginative workaholic. In a letter left for Wilkins to read after his death, Pratchett wrote: “I think I was good, although I could have been better.” Legions of his fans might argue with that.