The Wee Free Men
Terry Pratchett
Introducing Tiffany Aching
The Wee Free Men is the 30th novel in Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series. “Wee Free Men” is a reference to the Nac Mac Feegle, a clan of drunken, profane, rowdy, and violent Pictsies. You might imagine that The Wee Free Men introduces the Nac Mac Feegle, but in this you would be mistaken. The Nac Mac Feegle had a role in novel 23, Carpe Jugulum.
The Wee Free Men is the first novel in the Tiffany Aching subseries of Discworld. From that fact you might imagine that it introduces Tiffany Aching, and in this you would be correct.
In The Wee Free Men Tiffany is a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of farmers on “The Chalk”, a term clearly meant to evoke the chalk downs of England. Tiffany’s grandmother, Sara Aching, now dead, was a shepherd and something like a witch, although she didn’t call herself that. Tiffany wants to be a witch when she grows up. I don’t think it’s spoiling to say that that is eventually going to happen. The Tiffany Aching books are thus a sort of continuation of the Witches subseries.
The Witches subseries was mainly about the three witches introduced in Wyrd Sisters: Magrat Garlick, Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax. Nanny and Granny make a cameo appearance in The Wee Free Men. It felt to me like a hand-off, as if Pratchett decided he wanted the witchcraft of Discworld to take a new direction, and that new direction is Tiffany Aching. Helping that impression along is that Carpe Jugulum, the final Witches novel, is the one that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle.
The story begins when Fairyland (see Lords and Ladies) begins to impinge on Tiffany’s home country. It becomes serious for Tiffany when her little brother Wentworth goes missing. Tiffany determines to find him and get him back. In this endeavor she has the help of the Nac Mac Feegle.
I liked this a lot, mainly because I liked Tiffany a lot. She seems to me in most respects a realistic nine-year-old girl, although obviously an unusual nine-year-old with extraordinary gifts. Indeed, she feels to me like a sort of alternate Sam Vimes. What I mean by that is that she is an admirable character constructed to demonstrate what a Good Person should be. One should not assume, of course, that the beliefs and morals of a character in a novel are those of the author of that novel. Nevertheless, I often feel that way about Sam Vimes. And I suspect that I will eventually feel that Tiffany Aching in some degree speaks in Terry Pratchett‘s voice.