Back again.Finished Reaper Man a little while back - on Sunday, I think, but I've been too crazy busy to sit down and write about it before now. Sooo, Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man.
Discworld's anthropomorphised Death character is only my second favourite personification of Death - but only because of this book:
...which was a book that I feel completely in love with, because it's miraculously wonderful.Terry Pratchett's Death is a sympathetic character, just as Marcus Zusak's Death is - and, in this book, that characteristic proves to be his undoing. The 'Auditors', mysterious beings who keep reality in order (hmmm, my brain just made an interesting connection - I watched an advanced screening of The Adjustment Bureau last night...) decide that Death is becoming too sympathetic and humanised for his occupation, so, while looking through his shelves of 'lifetimers', (hourglasses with people's names on them - showing how much life they have left to live) Death discovers a new lifetimer - his own. And he's running out of time. So Death leaves his office, abandons his job and finds a new one - as a farmhand - while he waits for his time to run out.
But, in the meantime, people who ought to be dying... aren't. Sort of. I didn't really understand how this part of the story worked, so much - and I didn't actually care, because Death's storyline was the part of the book that had my interest. The main character of this plot is Windle Poons, a 13o-year-old wizard who knows that he ought to be dead (because wizards always know) by a certain day, but, finding that he isn't, struggles trying to find out why and what he should do. There's a long and complex plot-thing involving snow globes, shopping trolleys and the birth of cities, but, to be quite frank with you, I had no idea what was going on.
This wasn't my favourite Discworld book at all, but it was enjoyable. I only understood and relished one of the plotlines, but it was a pretty good plotline. :-)
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