Pyramids

Image credit: fantasyhyllan.se

It’s very fun and interesting to come across a story with a particular setting, written by an author whose works you’ve been frequenting, think you can guess how the story is going to go, and then be completely derailed and bamboozled when the story takes a turn beyond anything that you imagined. I can tell you, it’s bloody delightful. I just experienced it with the seventh Discworld novel: Pyramids.

Teppic was sent away from his home, the kingdom of Djelibeybi, to get an education and be trained by the Assassin’s Guild in Ankh-Morpork. But this was not suited to the task that he had assigned to him by fate. When Teppic inherits the throne much earlier than he expected, his conflicting world views of the Old and the New are the first in a plethora of problems that soon arise: problems that include, but are not limited to, the construction of the Great Pyramid, an explosion of time, the rising of the dead, and an infestation of gods.

I think this has to be my favourite Pratchett tale so far. Given the way that he takes a specific theme or phenomenon from human history and society and then fashions an entire narrative around it e.g. theatre in the previous book, Wyrd Sisters, I looked at the cover of Pyramids and thought, ‘wonderful, this will be a fun and quirky take on ancient Egyptian culture’. Well, I was sort of right, but mostly wrong. Pyramids is a story about the Old World coming into contact with the New, the inevitability of change and progress, and a science-fiction cataclysm that happens when the stoic practitioners of the ‘old way’ meet with the free-minded younger generation of ‘the new’.

Some of the funniest sequences to date can be found within this book’s pages including a football game of the various Sun-gods, a luncheon with the greatest philosophical minds that results in no conclusions being arrived at, and a stalemate Trojan war where both sides have the same horse-brained idea. Against a brilliant desert setting we have a number of memorable characters including a black-clad king covered in knives, a barely clad handmaiden who is against the idea of being eat by crocodiles, a camel with the sharpest mathematical mind in the world, and a pair of brothers who, through architecture and accounting, discover quantum physics.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Pyramids is a delightfully funny and exciting instalment in the Discworld, making it bigger, wider, flatter, taller, minute and elongated all at the same time.

Author: Terry Pratchett, 1989

Published: Originally published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1989. Pictured edition published Corgi, Great Britain, 1990.

Pyramids is the seventh book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. It follows behind, The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, and Wyrd Sisters.