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And they take center stage and amaze you with flags of all nations and smoke and mirrors, and you cry: “Amazing! How does he do it? What happened to the elephant? Where’s the rabbit? Did he really smash my watch?”
And in the back row we, the other conjurers, say quietly: “Well done. Isn’t that a variant of the Prague Levitating Sock? Wasn’t that Pasqual’s Spirit Mirror, where the girl isn’t really there? But where the hell did that flaming sword come from?”
And we wonder if there may be such a thing as wizardry, after
all. …
I met Neil in 1985, when The Colour of Magic had just come out. It was my first ever interview as an author. Neil was making a living as a freelance journalist and had the pale features of someone who had sat through the review showings of altogether too many bad movies in order to live off the freebie cold chicken legs they served at the receptions afterwards (and to build up his contacts book, which is now the size of the Bible and contains rather more interesting people). He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.
He also had a very bad hat. It was a gray homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural unity between hat and man. That was the first and last time I saw the hat. As if subconsciously aware of the bad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I put this in for the serious fans out there: If you search really, really hard, you may find a small restaurant somewhere in London with a dusty gray homburg at the back of a shelf. Who knows what will happen if you try it on?
Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the sheer strangeness of the universe, in stories, in obscure details, in strange old books in unregarded bookshops. We stayed in contact.
[SFX: pages being ripped off a calendar. You know, you just don’t get that in movies any more. … ]
And one thing led to another, and he became big in graphic novels, and Discworld took off, and one day he sent me about six pages of a short story and said he didn’t know how it continued, and I didn’t either, and about a year later I took it out of the drawer and did see what happened next, even if I couldn’t see how it all ended yet, and we wrote it together and that was Good Omens. It was done by two guys who didn’t have anything to lose by having fun. We didn’t do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.
. . . Hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like when he was staying with us for the editing and we heard a noise and went into his room and two of our white doves had got in and couldn’t get out; they were panicking around the room and Neil was waking up in a storm of snowy white feathers saying “Wstfgl?,” which is his normal ante-meridian vocabulary. Or the time when we were in a bar and he met the Spider Women. Or the time on tour when we checked into our hotel and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been showing him strange late-night seminaked bondage bisexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing but reruns of “Mr. Ed.” And the moment, live on air, when we realized that an underinformed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction. …
[cut to a train, pounding along the tracks. That’s another scene they never show in movies these days. … ]
And there we were, ten years on, traveling across Sweden and talking about the plot of American Gods (him) and The Amazing Maurice (me). Probably both of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One of us says, “I don’t know how to deal with this tricky bit of plot”; the other one listens and says, “The solution, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem. Fancy a coffee?”
A lot had happened in those ten years. He’d left the comics world shaken, and it’ll never be quite the same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the fantasy novel—everything afterwards is in some way influenced. I remember on one U.S. Good Omens tour walking round a comics shop. We’d been signing for a lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled at the concept of “dis story wid no pitchers in it,” and I wandered around the shelves looking at the opposition. That’s when I realized he was good. There’s a delicacy of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his work.
And when I heard the premise of American Gods I wanted to write it so much I could taste it. …
When I read Coraline, I saw it as an exquisitely drawn animation; if I close my eyes I can see how the house looks, or the special dolls’ picnic. No wonder he writes scripts now. When I read the book I remembered that children’s stories are, indeed, where true horror lives. My childhood nightmares would have been quite featureless without the imaginings of Walt Disney, and there’s a few little details concerning black button eyes in that book that make a small part of the adult brain want to go and hide behind the sofa. But the purpose of the book is not the horror, it is horror’s defeat.
It might come as a surprise to many to learn that Neil is either a very nice, approachable guy or an incredible actor. He sometimes takes those shades off. The leather jacket I’m not sure about; I think I once saw him in a tux, or it may have been someone else.
He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with his head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn’t look as though he’s in his forties; that may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there’s a special picture locked in his attic.
Have fun. We did. We never thought about the money until it went for auction and the big numbers started to get phoned in. Guess which one of us was amazingly cool about that. Hint: It wasn’t me.
P.S.: He really, really likes it if you ask him to sign your battered, treasured copy of Good Omens that has been dropped in the tub at least once and is now held together with very old, yellowing transparent tape. You know the one.
ALSO BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People • The Dark Side of the Sun • Strata •
The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers • Diggers • Wings •
Only You Can Save Mankind • Johnny and the Dead •
Johnny and the Bomb • The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jolliffe)
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents •
The Wee Free Men • A Hat Full of Sky
THE DISCWORLD SERIES
The Color of Magic • The Light Fantastic •
Equal Rites • Mort • Sourcery •
Wyrd Sisters • Pyramids • Guards! Guards! •
