Sourcery

It's not easy to write good comedy, and it's significantly harder to write good parody. So I can only imagine how difficult it must be to create satire that is not just meant as a one-off gag, but is in fact an entire fantasy series in its own right, with lore and worldbuilding and continuity that surpasses most of the things it's lampooning.

Sourcery is my first Discworld book, though of course I've heard of both the series and the author for decades. I knew that it - and he - had a great reputation, and after finishing the book I can say it is well earned if only for his ability to thread this particular needle.

The most important part of a comedy is that it's funny, and Sourcery is very funny. Jokes are delivered at a rate equivalent to a belt-fed mounted machine gun. Even if one joke fails to land, you barely need to wait for the next sentence before a new one is attempted. There's puns, irony, satire, poop jokes, deep references, obvious references, and tons of meta jokes that could really only be told in literary form.

It's remarkable, often brilliant, sometimes distracting, and other times... a little annoying.

Sourcery is firmly a fantasy novel, and it's trying to tell you a story like one, with worldbuilding and adventure and character arcs that one expects. Most of the time the humor adds to the tapestry being presented, but not always. It's a book that doesn't take itself seriously, yet it still makes the attempt to tell a real story, with real stakes and character motivations and tension. It's a difficult balancing act, and not an altogether successful one. The prose constantly undercuts itself, oscillating between Loony Toons logic and real (well, fantastical) logic without much of a breather in between.

It's a bit of a mishmash, and you can imagine a creative process in which the phrase “cut that, it doesn't fit” was rarely said.

Take Conina. She's a stealthy master thief, yet also an extremely violent barbarian, but really, she just wants to be a hairdresser. She's descended from Cohen, and like him her name is a pun. She is the love interest of 2 (maybe 3) men and a treasure chest. She's serious and smart except when she's dumb and naive. Of the 4(ish) members of the party, she's generally most competent, but I had no idea what her motivation was for remaining in the story, and I think you could have probably cut her after the first 50 pages without losing anything.

It's mostly obvious which parts of Conina are meant to be silly jokes and which are meant to be serious characterization. But when you smash all those traits into a single character, and the primary supporting role no less, it just doesn't gel right.

It's like eating a tasty meal that nevertheless feels off, as if the ingredients weren't measured in the right ratio, or didn't fully combine in the cooking process.

I liked Sourcery, and I think I'll read more Discworld books someday, but only when I'm in the mood for its particular brand of food.