Nation, by Terry Pratchett

Entry for 21 March 2009:

I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett books since I discovered them as British imports in Canada in 1992 when I was on sabbatical at York University. I began by reading the first of Diskworld books, The Colour of Magic, to my oldest son, Brendan, who was 10 at the time. (Incidentally, we just watched the movie version of the first two books last week.) After that, I read them in sequence, first to Brendan until he was 17 (up to about The Last Continent, he reckons), and then to Kenneth until he graduated from high school. In the meantime, Kenneth got to hear Pratchett’s non-Diskworld children’s books, the Bromeliad Trilogy and the Johnny Maxwell books. The last Pratchett book I read to Kenneth was either Hat full of Sky or Thud!. Since then, I’ve had to read them to myself, which is not quite the same, but still nice, because it reminds me of my kids.

For his most recent book, Pratchett has temporarily set aside the Diskworld in favor of a young adult, slightly alternate history book, entitled Nation. I’m not sure where this book sprang from in Pratchett’s fevered imagination, but it is clearly a South Seas adventure tale, complete with nautical mutiny, buried treasure, and cannibals, part Treasure Island, part Robinson Crusoe, part King Solomon’s Mines, undoubtedly inspired by the author’s childhood reading experiences. (It resembles Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book in this harking back to earlier favorite books, but doesn’t follow its originals so closely.) However, it also updates these earlier models by reflecting current events (the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami) and current interests in multi-culturalism and non-western perspectives.

It locates all this in the context of a double coming of age story, tracking a couple of teenagers, a well-to-do English girl and a native boy. The cultural differences and consequent misunderstandings between the pair provide plenty of opportunity for Pratchett to comment ironically on Western civilisation. However, his main interest is to show how these young people deal with traumatic loss and seek to rebuild their lives under drastically-altered circumstances. One of the book’s themes is thus trauma and recovery, and the first half of the novel deals with this poignantly and honestly. At the same time, the two protagonists have to deal with difficult real-life situations. This is the adventure story aspect of the book, in which two very bright and resourceful young people come up with imaginative solutions to the dangerous situations they find themselves in; in this time-honored way, the book serves as a model or inspiration for today’s young people to behave in similarly inspired ways.

At a deeper level, however, the book is centrally and most consistenly about how we all have to differentiate ourselves from our respective cultural traditions while still preserving continuity with the past. Which voices of parents, grandparents, peers, ancestors do we ignore because they are no longer relevant, which ones do we simply follow, and which ones do we listen to and make our own by modifying or adapting them in the current situation? This is a universal developmental challenge, and Pratchett does a lovely job of portraying how these cultural voices live in us, even in the absence of external others to remind us and to reinforce these views. As we well know from therapy, it is in this inner realm of conflicting aspects of self or voices that the most important developmental work occurs.

In short, this multi-layered book ranks with Terry Pratchett’s best, most profound examinations of the nature of the human spirit. Over the past 25 years he has gone consistently further into the deeper, more complex aspects of human psychology, repaying our continuing interest in successive installments of his oeuvre.