So last night I walked into the theatre like Wyatt Earp on a deceptively quiet street in Tombstone, my finger already on the trigger. And what I found is this: Nation is pretty good. You still have to pay attention, but according to the chief spy, attention has been made a lot easier. Cox, the chief villain, has an unnecessary back story, in my opinion; in the book he is a vicious psychopath, almost a force of nature. I wanted him to be not a two-dimensional but a one-dimensional character, evil incarnate. There were one or two places where the laws of narrative demand their due; if you’re going to have a young Victorian girl sawing off somebody’s leg during a musical number it’s pretty important that the audience can understand why this is happening. And refugees arriving at a hospitable island after terrible suffering really should look close to death—which segues neatly into the amputation problem. And in my experience the ending needs approximately another twenty words of dialogue to make a complex and very delicate scene come into focus. All this being said at length, I couldn’t help but love it. It isn’t my book. The medium changes things. Nation the book whispers where Nation the play shouts; this is because the book has to reach your eyeballs, while the play has to reach the back of the theatre, and making things louder also makes them different. Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage. In the book there is time to make certain that the reader, or even the reviewer, understands the difference between the grandfathers, the departed elders of the tribe, and the grandfather birds, vulture-like scavengers. In the play they collide, but not on the whole badly. In all fairness to Mark Ravenhill (the adaptor), to fully realize Nation on stage would probably require a performance of Wagnerian proportions, and much, sadly, had to go. As it is, it could be honed further to helpful effect, and I, who came prepared to be appalled, found myself charmed by it. The house was two thirds full, which would seem to me not too bad for a Wednesday. People sobbed, gasped, cheered and cried, and all moreover in the right places, as it dawned on me that what I was watching was, in a very strange way, a Victorian melodrama for the twenty-first century.
I spoke to a great many people after the show, because I signed a great many autographs, and heard nothing but good things. Even the older couple who vouchsafed to me that they thought there was a bit that they had not “got,” seemed quite happy that the idea had been there to be got, even if they personally hadn’t got it.
And no theatre in the country would have been ashamed of the tsunami of applause. It is not my job to be a shill for the National. Remember the author doesn’t get the blame. It could listen more, and earlier, and I must admit that we had an amicable conversation subsequently about further small tweaks to aid understanding and prevent confusion, so possibly I am not entirely useless. But the cast were great, and it is recognizably Nation, even if slightly out of breath. I will go back to see it again—probably more than once.
DOCTOR WHO?
Honorary degree acceptance speech, University of Portsmouth, 2001
Nine times so far British universities have suffered short bouts of insanity during which they have awarded me honorary degrees as a Doctor of Letters.
It’s now a tradition that I return the compliment and some suitable member of the faculty gets a degree from Unseen University (plus a badge and rather nifty UU scarf). It gets a laugh and a picture in the papers and everyone seems to enjoy it. I used to do the oration in Latin, or the Discworld equivalent, which coincidentally looks like very bad Latin, but it had to be very bad indeed before most people “got it”; Jack Cohen at Warwick University got his for “habeum tonsorius per Alberto Einstineum.”
This one, from the happy day in Portsmouth, was how the English ones go.
Vice-chancellor, venerable staff, guests, students, and graduates, I hope that no one will take it amiss when I say that what we are in fact doing today is celebrating ignorance. Ignorance is generally an unregarded talent among humans, but we are in fact the only animal that knows how to do it properly. We’ve got where we are today by starting out ignorant.
It wasn’t always like this. A few thousand years ago, we knew everything—how the world began, what it was for, our place in it … everything. It was all there, in the stories the old men told around the fire or had written down in a big book. No more questions, everything sorted out.
But now we know that there’s vast amounts of things that, well, we simply don’t know. Universities have made great efforts in this area. Think about how it works: you arrive at university, the gleam still on your A levels, and you’ve pretty well got it all sussed. Then the first thing they tell you—well, the second thing, obviously, because they have to tell you where the toilets are and so on—is that what you’ve learned so far is not so much the truth as a way of looking at things. And after three years or so you’ve learned there’s a huge amount that you don’t know yet, and that’s when they give you a scroll and push you out. Ignorance is a wonderful thing—it’s the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything.
Well done for surviving and thank you, Vice-chancellor, on behalf of the graduates, and also on behalf of myself.
I’m not quite sure why you’ve given me a Doctorate of Letters. Certainly the biggest service I have performed for literature is to deny on every suitable occasion that I write it but, nevertheless, I am honoured. I suspect the award has really been for persistence. I have been writing Discworld books for the better part of two decades. They have, I hope, brought pleasure to millions, and it almost seems unfair to say that at least they’ve brought fun and money to one. They’ve taken me around the world a dozen times, I’ve had a species of turtle (an extinct species, I’m afraid) named after me, and I think I’ve signed more than three hundred thousand books; I’ve even done a signing in the middle of a rain forest in Borneo and three people turned up—four if you include, as you should do, the orangutan.