MORT

Author: Terry Pratchett
Year: 1988 (1987)
Publisher: Corgi Books
Language: English

Arguably the most decisive parameter in anthropological research is perspective. It is the one constant that governs the objective, the method, and the conclusions of the ethnography and it delimits the framework for the level as well as the vantage point of interpretation provided through the resulting narrative. Drawing on linguistic scholarship from the 1950s and 1960s, social anthropologists differentiate between two types of perspective: emic (the point of view of a member of the observed community) and etic (the point of view of an outsider to the observed community).

What is emic and what is etic is often contested as the original idea of the terms is for them to be mutually exclusive yet in practice, most of the time they turn out to be contextual, circumstantial, overlapping, and interchangeable. There is always some characteristic that the observer shares with the observed that makes the fieldwork partly emic and always something that disconnects the observer from the group that makes the perspective etic.

One would think that the most impervious bulwark against a purely etic perspective would be life itself. Surely, life always unites the observer with the observed. Even if we were to be observed by aliens from a different planet, they and we both would share the experience of being alive.

Terry Pratchett, of course, has a different opinion. In “Mort”, the fourth book of his highly successful Discworld series, Death, which by most accounts is a seven-foot-tall skeleton with a voice that sounds like “two slabs of granite being rubbed together”, embarks on fieldwork to learn what it is like to be human. He eats, drinks, gambles, and dances (for some reason neither war, work, nor sex appear on his list of human behaviour) and interviews his informants like a true field anthropologist about the expected sensations from each social phenomenon and about the meaning of their activity. For Death, anything human is exotic. Death’s response, as always in all caps, to Mort’s attempts to understand him is telling.

“'My granny says that dying is like going to sleep’, Mort added, a shade hopefully.
‘I WOULDN’T KNOW. I HAVE DONE NEITHER.’”

While Death is preoccupied with his research, his business of uncoupling the spiritual existence from its worldly shell in the moment of expiration is managed by his dreadfully unqualified apprentice, Mortimer, or Mort for short. Here is the interesting twist of the idea for this book. While Death is trying to live and a living person is administering death, they begin to interchange. Mort gradually begins to turn into Death, and Death shows increasing signs of life.

In his own inimitable style, Pratchett ensures that the ineptitude of his characters both gets them in trouble and provides the solution to their predicaments. The book is just as hilarious and witty as can be expected. In fact, it is the Discworld instalment that was voted the most popular of all Pratchett’s books in a 2003 BBC poll. Pratchett himself has spoken very warmly of “Mort” saying in an interview that it was the first Discworld novel with which he was truly pleased. The preceding books, according to him, had been a series of jokes held together by a makeshift plot whereas in "Mort", the plot was in and of itself a purpose.

Surprisingly, unlike the Discworld books I had read thus far (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal rights (yes, I am reading them in the order Pratchett published them)), “Mort” does not end on the jocose tone one has learned to expect from Pratchett. Instead, the ending is imbued with affection, forgiveness, mutual understanding, and respect. As I pressed on through the last pages, I realised that I was shielding myself from acknowledging the emotions for fear of being tricked by Pratchett. I was waiting for the romantic scenes to be overturned at any time and I was afraid that when they were, I would feel embarrassed by allowing myself to be fooled by this well-known prankster of a writer. But that moment never came. The ending was in a sense elevated, and not at all parodic.

By any standard, “Mort” is an intelligent and highly entertaining novel. My only advice to the presumptive reader would be to familiarise themselves with the Discworld in general and the Death character in particular before they plunge into this story. I contend that a well-rooted love for and curiosity about Death greatly enhances the joy of following his awkward efforts to understand humanity and Mort’s struggle to clean up the mess he caused.