Nation

I am no good reviewer, and usually I cannot think of something to say beyond getting a good or bad impression on something.

But this time I feel obliged to say that this is a really deep book, I think it can influence it's readers and inspire them to be better than they were before. It speaks of death and calamity, but it is in fact a very humanely done, so that the highlight is on an expectation of a bright future and finding our place in the world rather than grieve and sorrow. It is very nice that the most touching parts are not great troubles, but on the opposite some small details that can not be viewed as troubling in any way.

I would recommend this book to anyone, it has some retro air about it but that does not feel like a stale story, more like a touch of style.

I'd read this before in print form, but picked up the audiobook (read by Stephen Briggs, long time collaborator with Pratchett) and have to say the audio version was brilliantly done and gave real warmth and life to all the characters.

The book itself is a stand-alone, not part of the Discworld or any of Pratchett's other series; it's set on an alternate version of earth, I think somewhere around Victorian times (or the other-universe equivalent thereof). A massive tsunami hits a tiny archipelago of tropical islands including "The Nation", which is the island of the boy Mau, who is returning from his boyhood testing ceremony to become a man. Mau, being in a boat, survives; the rest of his island does not, so he arrives expecting to complete the ceremony to become a man and instead spends days retrieving and putting to rest the bodies of every single person he has ever known in his life so far.

At the same time, the British ship Sweet Judy is caught by the tsunami and swept into the archipelago, leaving young Daphne (aka Ermintrude) the sole survivor. She and Mau meet in the wreckage of his former home and slowly find ways to communicate and rebuild and deal with grief and strangeness.

It's a little hard to describe exactly what the book is about. It's about Daphne and Mau, learning to understand each others' different cultures and to reach across that gap for common ground. It's about learning to deal with loss and grief, and about hope. It's about valuing other cultures, and does strongly make the case that "primitive" cultures like Mau's are not in fact primitive at all; in fact I felt that Pratchett went a little far in the wish fulfillment direction here, as Mau's culture and how it's dealt with in the story are a rather starry-eyed alternate reality dream of how it MIGHT have been when colonial culture met a "primitive" tribe and actually behaved in a civilized way, instead of really any of the ways it actually happened in our own universe's history. And of course, being a Pratchett book, it's also about people, and how we are all people with all our flaws and strengths and foibles. And there's a lot of charming imaginary detail in there too about Mau's island and its unique ecosystem that includes pink bananas and the tree-climbing octopus among other things.

It's not a typical Pratchett book, and has fewer outright jokes and asides than a Discworld book, although there are still plenty of funny moments. But it is still a typical Pratchett book in that his view of humanity and all our various weaknesses and peculiarities comes through very strongly.

I have a confession to make: I don't always like Pratchett. I don't even always like all of his Discworld. I'm likely to like, or at least, be able to enjoy, anything with the Watch, the witches, or Death, but Rincewind bores me, and much of his non-Discworld stuff I just can't engage with.

So I approached this novel with a certain amount of trepidation, which was needless. This is a quite decent book, not only as books go, but as Pterry books go.

There is a sort of children's literature, mostly written in the nineteenth century, where a white child or children is lost in the wilderness, and encounters a native child or children (native to whichever wilderness they are lost in, that is) who are for whatever reason also separated from their community. The children band together and become industrious little settlers, building a European style cottage while the children who are native to the area provide expertise in what is and isn't poisonous. Almost invariably, the white child will teach the native child English, and most probably will conscientiously indoctrinate them into Christianity. Frequently they will 'name' their improvement project, since obviously any name they had previously wasn't supplied by the Empire, and doesn't count.

If you are familiar with this sort of story, Nation will heal many wounds, but even if you aren't, it's a decent story, and you will probably recognize some of the tropes being discredited. The children in this case are Mau, sole survivor of the tsunami that hit his island, and Daphne, sole survivor of the wreck of the Sweet Judy. Nation is as much Mau's story as it is Daphne's, if not more. Frankly, I think this is the best story of its kind that a white guy is capable of writing, and Pratchett is at his best; compassionate and observant and characteristically clever.

I particularly agree with Mau re: the purpose of pants, which raises the question, what on earth is the point of pants without pockets? One might as well not be wearing them.