Discworld Tour: Mort

 Welcome back readers.

It is once again time for me to take you on a little walkabout in the magical land of the Disc. Our next stop being:

Mort has a special place in my heart, reader. It was the first Terry Pratchett book I picked up and read. This is also the first Discworld book to feature Death. Sure he pops up in every book, but this one is about him and his family. Let's dive in, shall we?

Mort starts off with our titular protagonist going to a hiring fair with his father. Mort's family are all farmers and Mort is very bad at it. He is also bad at being apprenticed. He and his father wait all day and are about to give up when, at the stroke of midnight, Death appears and asks Mort if he'd like a job. Mort accepts and is spirited away to Death's house. Here he meets Ysabell, Death's (adopted) daughter, and Albert, a wizard who cooks food that makes your arteries go clang. I like to imagine it as the grim lovechild of a deep fryer and the greasier types of English food. Like you took a full English breakfast and then battered and fried it. 

Ysabell dislikes Mort on sight and Mort is hopeless at his job. So hopeless, in fact, that he kicks off the plot by trying to save Princess Keli of Sto Helit from being assassinated. Death warns him that messing with fate is a good way to get yourself slapped by the forces of time and sure enough, Mort's actions create a split in time. People keep acting like Princess Keli is dead, something she does not appreciate. At the same time, Death also decides to take a little vacation, something he tries a few times in a few different books. Death, you see, wants to understand humans. He's been ushering souls to the great beyond since the dawn of time and what he wants most is to know what it's like to be human. This is Not Great (tm) for Mort and co. And co being the rest of the world. The longer Death is away, the more Mort is forced to become Death, which is overwriting his humanity in the process. 

All the while, Mort is trying to keep the alternate reality he created where Princess Kelli is alive from being destroyed, eventually ending up taking her and the wizard Cutwell (who is also trying to help) into Death's house. There they are confronted with Death himself who has just learned all the shenanigans Mort has gotten up to from Albert. He is not happy, it turns out. In a desperate attempt to save Kelli and Cutwell from being reaped, Mort challenges Death to a duel. 

Mort does not win and gets slapped by Death. The three marks Death's skeleton hand leave on his face are thematically important and will come up in later stories, so remember them, reader. But, even though Mort lost, Death gets the gods to alter reality so that Kelli is alive and ruler of Sto Helit rather than the scheming Duke. Ysabell and Mort marry and go to live in Sto Helit as Duke and Duchess. Albert stays on with Death. He worked very hard to not die, thank you very much.

And that is Mort. It's another short book, coming in at 304 pages. It's the starting point for all of the books featuring Death (and Susan, but we'll get to her later), so it lays the groundwork for his character as well as for the supporting cast of his books. I would also say it's a good starting point for getting into the Discworld series as a whole. A lot of the Discworld books deal with fate and anthropomorphic personifications like Death, and the people who try to mess around with time or fate or destiny. A good half of the problems on the Disc are caused by some doofus trying to bend destiny into a pretzel shape for reasons. The other half are people in power trying to bend other people into pretzel shapes, also for reasons. They're usually not good reasons. 

Thus we have completed another stop on our tour. Next is Sourcery, another book dealing with magic on the Disc, meaning we're seeing Rincewind again.

Until next time, readers 🎃