Nation, by Terry Pratchett

While it’s been a good long while since Johnny and the Bomb, I always like to see Pterry taking a break from the Discworld to write a book in our own world. Only You Can Defend Mankind was my first Pratchett book, and remains a favourite, and Good Omens is of course one of his classics, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman. So I found the prospect of Nation, seemingly a little more mature than his other work for kids, quite exciting.

I must confess, though, I’ve been disappointed. Nation tells the story of a little inhabited island devastated by a wave. Only one boy, who was rowing back to shore after a coming-of-age ceremony, survives, and finds everyone he knows is dead. But he is not alone on the island. The wave also brought a great schooner into the midst of the forest, and on board was one survivor, a prim little white girl called Ermintrude.

What starts out seeming like a bit of a Walkabout set-up soon changes tone when other survivors from nearby islands appear, and a small community emerges. And what follows is generally slow, predictable and not very original. The strength of the harrowing scenes of Mau dealing with his dead kinsmen doesn’t sit well beside the initial characterisation of Ermintrude/Daphne, who is just too ridiculously naïve and idiotic to be sympathetic. In a book like Larklight that sort of characterisation works, because it’s consistent with its world. Nation soon abandons that angle and Daphne far too quickly becomes a completely different person.

Learning a completely new language happens unbelievably quickly and intermediary characters who can speak both English and the native tongue seem like a cop-out after the set-up. I’d understand this for the need to tell a story, but too much of the book is just treading water, creating inconsequential little crises and then solving them in a way that rather lacks tension. The discovery in the cave smacks of the hollow apologetic wishy-washy attitude of a sensitive leftist trying to exorcise his guilt but still coming out with mighty whitey clichés out of the earholes, and the little twist at the end is so obvious from the opening scenes that Pterry even throws it away and writes as though he no longer wants it to be a twist, but accepts any reader must have seen it coming, which comes over as surprisingly clumsy, not at all what I expect from such an accomplished and self-aware writer.

Nation may have been taken up as a worthy sort of a novel, highly lauded and adapted at the National, but I doubt it will stand as one of Pratchett’s classics, and found it to be too flawed and directionless, too bereft of characters I could truly care about rather than just feeling I ought to sympathise with, for me to really enjoy it. A shame!