words Marc Burrows
There’s a quaint myth that persists in literary circles that Terry Pratchett wrote funny books about wizards. Little throwaway stories for men called Kevin in Iron Maiden T-shirts, chortling into paperbacks on the Tube. Anyone who’s actually engaged with his work knows better – and now, more than a decade after his death, the literary establishment is, at last, catching up.
Night Watch, widely considered one of Sir Terry’s finest novels, is being published as a Penguin Modern Classic in April 2025, taking its place in a canon of accepted “great works of literature” that includes The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It’s a moment of vindication for an author who, despite selling over 100 million books and being knighted for services to literature, was consistently belittled, not for the quality of his writing, but because he wrote fantasy. Because, as he once put it, he’d dared to “put in one lousy dragon”.
Even as Pratchett became Britain’s bestselling living author – a fact City Life magazine found “galling” in 2001, a year before Night Watch was published – the critical establishment kept him at arm’s length. The poet Tom Paulin snorted on BBC’s Newsnight Review that Pratchett was “an absolute amateur” who “doesn’t even write in chapters.” The Nottingham Evening Post dismissed his Discworld series as “Middle England with spells”. “Pratchett gamely jests that ‘occasionally he gets accused of literature’,” sniped one critic in The Sunday Times. “I cannot for the supernatural life of me imagine by whom.”
Even some of the positive coverage took swipes at his readership, describing them as “nerdy-looking, anorak-wearing” types (The Observer) or claiming they were “down at heavy metal HQ practicing sexual inadequacy and ram raiding” (NME).
Things did begin to shift in his later years. Pratchett won the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents around the same time Night Watch was published, and respect from critics began to grow, if grudgingly. Even as the accolades piled up – an OBE, a knighthood, an honorary professorship at Trinity College Dublin – the belief that fantasy was a lesser form endured.
It was into this atmosphere of snobbery and dismissal that Pratchett sent Night Watch into the world in 2002, perhaps the darkest and most politically charged of all his work. Yes, it’s a story about a policeman trapped in his own past. But it’s also about revolution, power, justice, and the impossibility of genuine change in a system built on structural inequity. Plus, there’s a bit where someone sticks ginger up an ox’s bum, and you don’t get that in War & Peace.
The novel sees Commander Sam Vimes – one of Pratchett’s most vivid and complex creations – torn from his own time and flung back to a grim earlier era, when Ankh-Morpork was a police state with revolution in the air. Vimes must assume the identity of his former mentor and guide his younger self through a bloodbath he cannot prevent.
The book’s themes – mob rule, the fragility of order, the limits of justice, the abuses of power -remain depressingly relevant. When Pratchett writes about how revolutions unravel, how the powerful cling to their grip, and how idealism curdles into violence, he could be writing about any moment in history, from the French Revolution to January 6th.
It’s an extraordinary novel. Though it nods to everything from Les Misérables to The Terminator, Night Watch never feels derivative. It wears its influences lightly, using them to ground us in something familiar before pulling us somewhere altogether more complex. Despite the grimness, it’s also frequently hilarious. Pratchett’s eye for human absurdity never fails him, even in the darkest scenes. This is a comedy that’s also a political thriller. A police procedural that’s also a fantasy. Very few books balance this much so deftly.
Genre snobbery has always haunted the literary world; the assumption that fantasy can’t address “serious” themes has persisted for generations. But Pratchett also faced a more peculiar kind of inverted snobbery: the belief that anything so popular, so readable, so enjoyable couldn’t possibly carry real meaning. If you’re making readers laugh out loud on public transport, certain critics will assume you’ve nothing of substance to say.
In one of the most telling – and frankly shameful – pieces ever written about him, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones claimed that the outpouring of love after Pratchett’s death showed how “a middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom.” He then admitted he’d never actually read Pratchett: “He is so low on my list of books to read before I die,” he wrote, “that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him … It’s time we stopped this pretense that mediocrity is equal to genius.” That’s what Sir Terry was up against.
What those critics missed was that the magic of Discworld was never really about the wizards, or the talking rats, or the turtle. Those weren’t the themes, they were just, well… characters. The real magic was how Pratchett used a fantasy world to explore very real human ideas: power, identity, prejudice, and – as he put it – the need not to treat people as “things”.
As Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant and literary executor, puts it: “It’s a gratifying experience to see Terry’s greatest Discworld novel take its well-deserved seat amongst other classic titles of the modern age. For so long, Terry worked against a backdrop of snobbery uniquely targeted at genre writers, it’s heartening to see him once again recognised as the great wordsmith, commentator and thinker that he was.”
There’s a bittersweetness in this recognition arriving posthumously, more than a decade after his death. But there’s also something satisfying, a sense that, in the end, the work spoke for itself. The truth has, at last, got its boots on.
Night Watch took the long road to recognition. But, like Sam Vimes, it got there, and on its own terms.
Marc Burrows is performing ‘The Magic Of Terry Pratchett’ – a multimedia journey through the life and work of Sir Terry at London’s Duchess Theatre on Monday 28th April 2025, with special guests including Rihanna Pratchett; Sir Terry’s daughter. He will then take the show on a UK tour in the autumn. For more information, visit: www.marcburrows.co.uk
