Nation
by Terry Pratchett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Terry PratchettEdition: Roughcut
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-30
ISBN: 0061433012
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Reviews of Nation
Book Review: Not Discworld, not humor, but pure Pratchett
Summary: 5 Stars
In spite of being the best-selling living British author, and one of the most talented, most hoidy-toidy types pigeon-hole Terry Pratchett away in the ghetto called "fantasy humor". So a very large number of educated people have not even heard of him, let alone give him any space as an author of English Literature. This is in spite of writing some of the most truth-filled and life-filled three dozen books you'll find in a bookstore. Perhaps Nation was Pratchett's conscious decision to address that, or perhaps Nation was a book Pratchett, the author, simply had to write before he stopped being able to write.
Nation is not Discworld. It's not humor, parody, or satire. It's categorized as "young adult", which is something of an insult, because it's seemingly based solely on the fact its two primary protagonists are both about 13 years old and his prose is not filled with expletives. Pratchett's style of prose reads like Hemingway, conversational, even informal. But he asks big questions. Nation is a book full of those big questions and the conflict between the pat answers we give ourselves and the truth.
Set in a somewhat parallel-reality 19th century Earth, the story centers on Mau, a young islander who encounters a tidal wave on his way back from his manhood sojourn and survives, a fate not shared by the rest of his people, which he knows only as the Nation. After returning home to nothing, and enduring the horror of burying his tribe at sea, he encounters another survivor. She is Ermintrude (a name she despises, so she introduces herself as Daphne), an English aristocratic maiden who is the sole survivor of the schooner Sweet Judy, dashed upon the island by the tidal wave. Mau and Daphne attempt to negotiate the delicate difficulty of communication while they are surrounded by the aftermath of horrific events.
As the largest tiny island in the tidal wave zone, eventually small groups of survivors from other destroyed village islands begin to arrive. They including a cantankerous priest, a dazed mother with a baby, a pregnant woman who gives birth right after arriving, and a pair of brothers who have worked for the English as seamen. Eventually several dozen people gather at the Nation, with young Mau as their shell-shocked chief.
Mau struggles with the fact that he never learned his tribe's customs. He believes he lost his "boy soul" during his coming of age on the remote trial island, but never received his "man soul" upon arriving home because there was no one left to grant it. His thoughts are filled by his anger towards, and then dismissal of, his tribe's gods while trying to care for all who arrive at the Nation. Daphne goes through a more readily recognizable transition, going from a home where she was consciously raised with as little practical knowledge as possible into a disaster zone where she is utterly alone amongst another ethnic group and is forced to learn life on the fly.
Many of Pratchett's literary signatures are easily recognizable in Nation. Though he has toned down his trademark annotations, Nation still has many moments of what might be called "life humor", funny because they're rooted in life's absurdities and ironies, not because of any conscious attempt to be funny, such as Daphne's discomfort with wearing "only" a dress, pantaloons, and underwear and wanting to "maintain standards" in spite of the absurdity of it in her present surroundings. His characters are basically good, but struggling with immense questions and petty hypocrisies. He consciously sets his story in a parallel reality, so as not to be tied to geographic precision or obligated to populate his environment with real animals. While it's easy to recognize the "Southern Pelagic Ocean" as the south Pacific, it may not be as obvious that the Nation's indigenous Grandfather Bird (which the English call the Pantaloon Bird) is no more ludicrous an animal in its habits than any number of other exotic animals with odd habits. And nodding to Pratchett's fantasy roots, both Mau and Daphne must contend with unbidden communications from voices beyond the veil, such as Mau's conversations with his tribe's death deity, Locaha, and the demanding, bullying voices of the Grandfathers of the tribe.
Many of the issues of faith, organized religion, and hypocrisy Pratchett first directly addressed in the 1992 Discworld novel Small Gods (and turn up continually in his other Discworld novels) crop up as central themes in Nation. The cynical priest Ataba knows, and eventually is forced by Mau to confess to him, that the tribe's "god anchors" -- large square stones used by the former Nation as ad hoc altars -- were man-made, but Ataba also knows that his people need them as simple answers to difficult questions that might get in the way of day-to-day survival if they were thought about too much. It is typical Pratchett irony that Mau and Daphne, both haunted by black events (Mau losing his entire tribe to the tidal wave, Daphne's mother and newborn brother dying in childbirth) and given to conflicts of faith, are the ones that are spoken to by the collective memories of the tribe's Grandfathers and Grandmothers, respectively.
Because Pratchett primarily works in humor, it's not surprising that he's gotten short shrift from literature critics. Perhaps with Nation, Terry Pratchett will have the opportunity to be released for a time from his "fantasy humor" ghetto and finally get some of the literary respect he so richly deserves.
Summary of Nation
The sea has taken everything.
Mau is the only one left after a giant wave sweeps his island village away. But when much is taken, something is returned, and somewhere in the jungle Daphne?a girl from the other side of the globe?is the sole survivor of a ship destroyed by the same wave.
Together the two confront the aftermath of catastrophe. Drawn by the smoke of Mau and Daphne's sheltering fire, other refugees slowly arrive: children without parents, mothers without babies, husbands without wives?all of them hungry and all of them frightened. As Mau and Daphne struggle to keep the small band safe and fed, they defy ancestral spirits, challenge death himself, and uncover a long-hidden secret that literally turns the world upside down. . . .
Internationally revered storyteller Terry Pratchett presents a breathtaking adventure of survival and discovery, and of the courage required to forge new beliefs.
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