Eric

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Classic narratives are considered classic for many reasons. I think that one of the biggest and most important being longevity and the fact that the messages, structures, and basic idea is so stoic so as to weather the ravages of time and transcend generations, but also so malleable and open to new and fresh interpretations that it’s almost impossible not to write a new version of it every couple of years or so.

I just closed the cover on one such treatment of the classic tale of Faust, this one featuring a hapless wizard, a teenaged boy, and an Underworld that yearns for the good ‘ol days of terror and torment. I am referring to Terry Pratchett’s Faust Eric.

Eric is the Discworld’s only demonology hacker; an impressive sounding job title if you can pull it off. Sadly, he can’t. All he wants is three wishes granted, minor improvements to life such as living forever, ruling the world, and having the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with him. But instead of a demon who can offer these improvements, he summons up Rincewind, the Discworld’s most incompetent wizard. Alongside Rincewind and his terrifying Luggage Eric is in for a wild ride through space and time, one that will make him streamline his wishes to just one: that he’d never been born.

I honestly only know so much about the story of Faust, but I believe the message (like that of many wish-themed narratives) is ‘be careful what you wish for’. Over the centuries we have seen, read, and heard stories that involve some magic being granting wishes that always come with some sort of twist unforeseen by the hero that eventually comes back to bite them. While the same semantic twists are used to hilariously upturn Eric’s wishes, resulting in very funny and entertaining scenes of human sacrifice, epic warfare, and the nothingness of the beginning of the universe, Pratchett delves deeper into the nature of wishes and their role in the universe, which in turn brings the book to a very uplifting and funny conclusion that doesn’t really leave our heroes any better off.

The hapless wizard Rincewind returns to make this story more enjoyable as his penchant for cowardice and expertly running away gets the heroes out of many scrapes in hilarious and against-all-odds fashions, whilst at the same time occasionally passing on titbits of wisdom and ‘real-worldliness’ to the young upstart. The character of Eric is a recognisable type of young man with relationship problems that are further fuelled by his using literature as a method of understanding how things are in the real world.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Faust Eric is a fun little Discworld novel filled with action, time-travel, character growth (?), and plenty of comedy. I very much enjoyed it.

Author: Terry Pratchett, 1990

Published: First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1990. This edition published by Millenium, an imprint of Victor Gollancz Ltd, 2000.