I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd's Crown

In 'I Shall Wear Midnight', Tiffany Aching is the fledgling witch of the Chalk, but the ancient revenant of hatred known as the Cunning Man is stalking to her. Born of twisted zeal and thwarted desire, the Cunning Man is the malevolent spirit of the witch hunt and hatred and strife follow in his wake. He brings the burning, and Tiffany will have to learn not to fear the fire and how not to fear the fire if she is to defeat him. And in 'The Shepherd's Crown', the death of a friend leaves Tiffany with too much to do and an old enemy pressing at the walls of reality trying to get in.

There's something decidedly melancholy about the conclusion of the Tiffany Aching series. Released in 2010, some suggested at the time that 'I Shall Wear Midnight' had something of the goodbye about it, but 'The Shepherd's Crown' is the farewell. It's Terry Pratchett's last completed novel - although the afterword notes that 'completed' is a strong term and it does feel as if Sir Terry had yet to perform the final pass at the last - and, taken with the later volumes in the main Discworld series, ushers in the last stages of a sea change on the Disc, the final transition from its roots as high fantasy parody in The Colour of Magic to something more akin to Downton Abbey with wizards. Cohen the Barbarian never met Granny Weatherwax, but it's certainly hard to think that his brand of unstoppable masculine senility would cut much ice with Tiff.

It's almost as if the Discworld has at last grown up, which is perhaps ironic for books aimed at younger readers, or perhaps not. The faeries are gone, the vampires have all taken the pledge and the barbarians are dealing with their problems like grownups. It's not just the setting either. 'I Shall Wear Midnight' opens with Tiffany intervening to prevent first the lynching and then the suicide of a man who has beaten his pregnant daughter so hard that she miscarried. The Discworld of Tiffany Aching is a tough, earthy place and Tiff is a tough, earthy girl.

And then 'The Shepherd's Crown' deals a great deal with loss, and in its way with the loss of its own author. The death which begins the novel leaves a gaping hole in the Discworld, as if the whole crazy place can't sustain without a rational centre, and it probably couldn't.

Am I rambling? Perhaps so. Perhaps I don't want to finish this review, because it feels so final. Perhaps I don't want to say that I felt that the rough edges showed a little too much in 'The Shepherd's Crown', or perhaps I only felt that way because I wanted it so much to be something sublime and it was only good.