Witches Abroad

Image credit: wiki.Ispace.org

The human experience is a weird, sometimes woeful, and wondrous thing. While a lot of it is made up of suffering, anxiety, hardships, and bad luck, a substantial portion of it is filled with lovely things such as fairytales: gifts that keep on giving for years and years and years.

I have just closed the cover on Witches Abroad, the 12^th book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in which he very cleverly creates another hilarious adventure by taking two aspects of human existence and reshaping them for better and worse. The first is travel and the absolute nightmare that it can be, and the second is fairytales and how dangerously limeless they are.

Ensuring that a young servant girl does not marry a prince should be a pretty easy task – you would think. But for the witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, it could not be more difficult. When Magrat inherits a magic wand and becomes a Fairy Godmother, she discovers that she must travel to Genua, a place where fairytales are running rampant and Happy Endings are making everyone miserable. With the ‘help’ of Granny and Nanny, she must stop a servant girl from marrying a prince and free the citizens of Genua from fairytale tyranny. That is if they can ever get there – between the language barrier, transport troubles, and questionable cuisine, it’s going to be a long trip.

Our favourite trio of witches is back and getting up to and into even more trouble than they have done before. Between Granny Weatherwax outconning conmen and Magrat solving world hunger with pumpkins, Witches Abroad is another fun and hilarious romp into an area of the Discworld that we have never seen before. Reminiscent of the bayous of Louisianna mixed with a swamp-tropical jungle, Genua seems like the last place in which to find fairytales. Pratchett overtly references practically every classic take you can imagine from The Wizard of Oz to The Frog Prince to Cinderella.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

As well as a laugh-out-loud trek through swamps and familiar plotlines, the book is a commentary on the woes of travelling as well as an exploration into how it can affect relationships. While happy endings are the Big Bad in this book, in a similar way to Moving Pictures and even Soul Music, it’s the strain that travel can put on relationships that keeps us flipping pages. Travelling unearths another layer of personality and I have seen what could have been lifelong friendships fall apart because the parties went travelling together. Of course this is not always the case, but it happens and it’s another layer to this book that makes it a well-rounded and compelling read.

‘There’s no place like home’ is definitely a message that comes out to play in this story, working wonderfully with Pratchett’s signature wit and dismantling of beloved stories. Witches Abroad is another delightful read in the Discworld series!

Author: Terry Pratchett, 1991

Published: First published in Great Britain by Gollancz in 1991. Pictured Corgi edition published 1992.

Witches Abroad is the 12^th book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.