Wintersmith
by Terry Pratchett
Wintersmith is the third in the Tiffany Aching series that began with The Wee Free Men and carried on with A Hat Full of Sky. It's the fourth Discworld novel for younger readers - the adult series has reached 30 titles in 23 years and is an established favourite with teenagers. So is this Discworld Lite?
Not really. Tiffany Aching has now reached thirteen and, if puberty raises problems for ordinary girls, just think what it can do for a witch! Tiffany has an awkward, lumbering sort of friendship with Roland, the aristocratic boy she rescued in book two, conducted mainly through letters. But one day she makes the uncharactersitic mistake of stepping into the Dark Morris, the dance that brings winter on.
And finds herself dancing with the wintersmith. This entity then, massively inconveniently, falls in love with her and there begins an unorthodox courtship. The erotic charge in this strand of the story made me wonder whether to list this title under Teenage, but firstly, Tiffany is still only thirteen and was nine when the series started, so the whole feeling of the title is 8-12. And then Terry Pratchett doesn't really do anything with this undercurrent. I kept wondering what it what have been like in the hands of the Diana Wynne Jones who created Howl or the Margaret Mahy that invented Sorensen Carlisle in The Changeover.
The little blue men, known as the Nac Mac Feegles, do their usual comic turn, with many cries of "Crivens!" but the heart of the book is where the wintersmith tries to make himself a human body: "Iron enough to make a nail/ Lime enough to paint a wall ..." in order to woo Tiffany more effectively. In his efforts, the spirit of the season locks the countryside in an arctic winter.
Pratchett begins the book with a scene from the climax at the end and tells the rest of the story in flashback, so we already know that Tiffany will overcome the wintersmith with magic heat (and rescue her little brother from under the snow) so any suspense is wrested out of the narrative. Besides it's Tiffany's own attraction to him that is the danger, not the wintersmith himself. She can't help finding him cool - a pun that Pratchett exploits.
So the story sort of drips away like thawing ice. I think the trouble is that a very adult idea presented itself to the author in a junior form and he bottled out of pursuing it where it wanted to go. Still, no Discworld addict is going to complain and, even though some ideas are clearly being revisited here - like a pointy hat and silver jewellery not being what makes a true witch - fans, of whom I am proud to be one, will find plenty to admire.
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