Nation is a good story. Humourous,
adventurous, insightful. It brings together, in times of great human tragedy, a
native islander boy on a very isolated South-Pacific-esque island in the
fictional Pelagic Ocean (brilliant touch) and a woman of high British society,
the nobility, the class of people that work their way into many books I read
and I really enjoy them.
I picked this book up in the middle
of reading Wizard and Glass, book IV of the Dark Tower series, so I was feeling
epic and dark. Not really in the mood for such a light read, but I won’t hold
it against Terry Pratchett. His humour is relentless, consistent and puts a
smile on my face throughout the book.
Mau, the protagonist, returns to his
home island after being sent out on a rite of passage, arriving just after a
catastrophic tsunami washes away his entire home civilization. He is met there
by a shipwrecked Lady, named Ermintrude but decides to go by Daphne
instead. Very much an upgrade. Anyway, the first part revolves around the
integration of two completely opposite cultures learning to survive on an
island, all whilst Mau fights his own internal battle with the Grandfathers,
a religion of sorts amongst the islanders, whom he blames for the deaths of
everyone he has ever known and loved, and further struggling to follow the
traditions that helped build his Nation and ensure their survival but denying
other traditions that seem pointless now. It makes for great internal conflict,
and the fact that the two parties are so poor at understanding one another,
seeing eye to eye, things tend to get solved more by rationalizing than by
clinging to traditions. Traditions only go so far for Daphne, who is from high
British society but shipwrecked with only an islander as her companion; and Mau
as well, who feels that traditions failed to protect people from the horrors of
mother nature.
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| Pictured: Terry Pratchett's teeth, beard and novel. |
Smoke signals are sent out, by means
of a continuous bon fire, and people from nearby islands begin arriving. Soon
enough there is a new Nation being built, led by a young man who is named Chief
very unconventionally, not having gone through the official rites of the
transition from boyhood to manhood usually granted to people who pass the test
that Mau indeed passed.
When mutineers-cum-pirates from
Daphne’s ship, the Sweet Judy, find their way to the island and threaten
violence, the Nation and Mau stand strong. And it isn’t until her father,
crowned as King by virtue of everyone dying to some epidemic of influenza,
rescues them that we see Daphne’s struggles fitting back into British society.
One Western party arrives on the island to use brute force and take it over,
and claim the white girl of course, whilst the other comes to plant a British
flag and claim the island as a new port, as well as to bring the girl back to
high society, albeit in a more peaceful, civilized manner. Both are wrong, and
both are made to see the error of their ways, yet Daphne still returns to the
place where she can be of more use to the islanders, helping set up science
foundations that study the secrets that the island beholds, most notably its
ties to early man and the first conquests of the world.
I believe it is a clever book, set
in a cleverly made up South-Pacific-like fictional place in an alternate
history universe. The people develop as we’d like to see people develop,
breaking senseless traditions in the name of progressing as a young nation,
discovering science, history, and other cultures with the help of the dominant,
ever well-funded and supplied Royal Kingdom. One of the better light reads and,
as always with Pratchett, very funny in many places, even if his humour is a
bit exhausting at times.
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