★★★☆☆ Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Yet another anthropic personification...
Thief of Time
Terry Pratchett, Sian Clifford (Narrator), Bill Nighy (Narrator), Peter Serafinowicz (Narrator)
Yet another anthropic personification...
Thief of Time is novel 26 in Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series, and Number 5 in the Death subseries. The Death subseries is not really about Death, I would argue, although he (the character who represents the personification of death) is prominent in most of them. The truth is that Death (voiced by the deeply ominous sound of Bill Nighy in the audiobooks) is the most prominent and reliable character in the entire Discworld series. He appears in all of them, so one might be a little puzzled as to what distinguishes the Death subseries from the rest.
The Death subseries consists, I affirm, of those novels that focus on the metaphysics of the Discworld. Although there are gods in the Discworld, they are not the true powers. The gods are mostly on the Greco-Roman model, petty squabbling destructive personalities with super-powers. (They are, however, less conspicuously randy than Greek and Roman gods.) They are like this because they were created by humans, not the other way round, and have all the faults of their creators exaggerated to god-like proportions.
Death is not a god. The true powers of the Discworld are anthropic personifications of the fundamentals of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Death is the most prominent of these. He looks like a skeleton dressed in black robes, carries a scythe, and rides a pale horse. (The horse’s name is Binky.) Others are Pestilence, War, and Famine, as well as the Tooth Fairy and the Hogfather (who is the Discworld‘s knock-off Santa Claus). And there is Death’s grand-daughter Susan Sto Helit whose status is more than a little confused.
Death is, a little surprisingly, the most prominent champion of life and change among the personifications. He is frequently opposed by an army of personifications called the Auditors. The Auditors would claim not to be opposed to life, per se. However, they like things tidy and dislike anything that makes a mess. And so, the Auditors would view a Universe without life as an improvement over the untidy mess that is the Discworld as it exists.
Thief of Time introduces Time as a metaphysical reality to the Discworld. You will not be surprised to learn that there is a personification of Time and that he is a character.
I am not, by and large, a huge fan of the Death subseries. I’m not, by and large, very interested in metaphysics, and I don’t find Sir Terry‘s take on it all the penetrating. Some of the characters are good -- Susan in particular is always a pleasure. But the meandering plots, with holes filled in by just Making Stuff Up, annoy the Auditor in me.