Book 2: The Light Fantastic

'The Light Fantastic' is the book in which the Discworld begins to assert its own identity. Having successfully deconstructed his paleotypes in 'The Colour of Magic', he goes on to rebuild the Discworld in his own idiom. However, he is still unable to cast it entirely adrift from the 'real' world, and a large portion of this book is devoted to explaining the difference between fantasy and reality.

On the face of it, 'The Light Fantastic' continues the story of its precursor, where the two protagonists of that book were launched into space. However, it seems that this is actually a different world, one in which that sequence of events never really happened, even though the characters remember it. By normal standards, of course, this is cheating, but Pratchett gets away with it by rationalising the change within the story, as a magical effect directed from the Octavo, the book that created the world.

The Octavo is the mirror, in the Disc's reality, of 'The Colour of Magic' itself, the book that really created the Discworld. The fact that a part of this book has been lodged inside Rincewind's head all this time explains a lot about his character, especially why the world never seems quite 'right' to him: on some deep inner level, he knows it's a work of fiction. It also explains why this book, by culminating in returning the missing spell to the Octavo, 'completes' its predecessor, which was always 'one spell short of a creation', as the saying goes. So when it changes the world, the Octavo is doing no more, essentially, than rewriting itself.

As the new star approaches, panic sets in all over the Disc: bathed in the Light Fantastic, people find their whole world turned upside down; sunrise and sunset lose their meaning, and even wizards find their magic failing them. In their panic the common people turn to desperate measures, including book-burning and wizard-stoning; even Rincewind finds himself forced to use magic in self-defence.

The villain of this book is Trymon, an accomplished wizard with great magical skill and a cold and logical mind. But when Trymon tries to read the Octavo, instead of an act of creation, he forms a hole in 'reality' to the Dungeon Dimensions, home of the ungainly Things: the logical mind cannot create, only break things down.

This is truly the book where the story of Rincewind ascends from the low comedy of 'The Colour of Magic' to the high tragedy that is his lot from now on. Having made his choices in the first book, in this one there is an inevitability about everything he does; he is set on the course of the Aeschylian tragic hero, doomed like Tithonus, 'a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream', never to find the peace he craves.

Mike Kew

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