Ankh Morpork I Love You (But You’re Bringing Me Down)

I have a lot of sympathy for those people who became depressed after watching Avatar and realising that none of it actually exists. They can never visit Pandora, never run with the Na’vi, and never live in Hometree. The Avatar universe, though vivid, can never be real, at least not in an ‘I’m just nipping over to Pandora for a few days’ sort of way.

It’s practically metaphysical, this longing for a fictional world.

It’s how I feel about Ankh Morpork. Ankh Morpork, greatest city on the Disc, The Big Wahoonie, City of One Thousand Suprises! Oh that Melbourne should have such a reputation.

I accept that Terry Pratchett’s writing is not literary, whatever that means, and the humour is often more silly than actually funny. He uses cliché with wild abandon, and almost everything is the discworld is essentially parody.

But he is clever too. Terry Pratchett is a master of the ‘logical conclusion’. When he invents something, he knows how, when and why it was invented, and how it will go on to affect everything else. And his writing has the solidity and readability of long practice. And he likes wordplay. A lot.

Above all he understands tropes and their pull on our psyche. Sure, Sam Vimes is a cliché. He’s the quintessential hard-bitten cop with a heart of gold. He’s clever, streetwise and cynical, but forgiving, kind when it’s called for and utterly incorruptible. He gives more than half his pay the widows and orphans of dead watchmen. He always wins out in the end. He is a Character, capital letter and all.

But that doesn’t explain why I hear Sam Vimes’ voice in my head when I read the City Watch novels. Or why I know every line on his face, every expression and gesture. Or why I love him so much.  Those things only come when a piece of fiction stops being enjoyable and starts feeling tangible. It’s one thing to want to know what happens next, it’s quite another to want to be there when it does.

People sneer at fandom, particularly that breed of fandom that eschews the ‘real world’ for an invented one. I don’t really understand this, or, even if I do I don’t like it. I do understand the boredom of the non-fan (you may well be experiencing the sensation right now) when forced to endure the full catalogue of the fan’s knowledge (I’m getting to that bit). But sneering at the very idea of escapist fandom seems narrow, hypocritical and frankly mean spirited. So it’s not ‘real’. What are you, the real police?

I’ve never been to Ankh-Morpork. But I’ve never been to Berlin either. And I know Ankh Morpork considerably better now than I’m ever likely to know Berlin.

I know that Elm Street and Treacle Mine Road border The Shades, and that you don’t go into The Shades after dark. And it’s always after dark in The Shades. I know that Treacle Mine Road is named for the Treacle mines that were once a great source of wealth for the city and that Treacle deposits are the fossilised remnants of prehistoric sugarcane fields.

I know that there’s a new Watch House in Pseudopolis Yard (after the old one was burned down by a dragon from another dimension) and that the cemetery next to the Temple of Small Gods is where watchmen are buried in the glorious expectation of nothing very much (because after you’ve been in the watch for a while, it’s hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone you can’t see).  I know that the river Ankh is so thick that “even an agnostic could walk across it”.

I know that The Assassins Guild shares a wall with the Fools Guild and that The Particulars once had their headquarters on Cable Street. I know that’s where Sam Vimes first learned what people look like after they’ve been tortured. Most of all I know the names: Lobbin Clout and Dolly Sisters. The Shambling Gate and Misbegot Bridge. I know Nap Hill and Dimwell. I know which side of the Ankh you live on if you’re a toff.  I know Sator Square and Scoone Avenue. I know this city.

It’s as old as Rome and political as Florence. It’s as mythic as New York and chaotic as Mumbai. Mostly it’s London—erratic, teetering, comic London. But it’s really the every-city, the epitome of urban clamour, sucking in people and raw materials from the whole world and spitting out culture, thought, invention and ideas.

When I think about Ankh-Morpork, and the fact that no, I’ll never physically go there, never ‘proceed’ with Sam ‘That’s-Mistah-Vimes-to-you” Vimes, I am undeniably sad. I’m as sad as those Avatar fans. But maybe our sadness is better described as a kind of ‘nostalgic homesickness’. I feel the same about Ankh Morpork as I do about other places I’ve loved and had to leave. I long for its streets and smells and people and sensations just as people long for the town they grew up in, or the city they worked in for a year when they were 18. In both cases, these places exist in our minds and memory completely independent from any physical entity, or lack thereof. Physical existence is not a test these sorts of places have to pass.

Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Sam Vimes is major-league silver fox.

(P.S. for bona fide Discworld fans, listen to LCD Soundsystem’s New York I Love You but mentally substitute in Ankh Morpork. It’s uncanny: “Your mild billionaire Mayor’s now convinced he’s a king” “The cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime”)

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