Prior to reading Mort, I’d never touched a novel by Sir Terry Pratchett. I only knew of his work through word-of-mouth.
I had heard of this particular novel: many people recommended it as a starting point in Pratchett’s massive Discworld series, which contains 40+ novels.
A starting point is important, when the series is structured a little bit like this.
I was able to finish Mort in about 8 hours, thanks to the Penguin audiobook.
To state that the late Pratchett is a well-loved author would be a monumental understatement.
There is no need, in 2024, for anyone to write a review of Mort. That would be a fool’s errand.
Therefore, please enjoy my spoiler-filled review of Mort.
Plot
I like stories where the hero makes a blunder, and then must correct this mistake. There’s something cathartic about a story centred around fixing a mistake.
Mort is a strange boy, and his family are eager to give him away as an apprentice.
Death turns up and offers Mort a job.
Mort reluctantly accepts, and is taught the basics on how to reap mortal souls. Then Death decides to take a holiday, and leaves the job to Mort.
Mort’s first day on the job is a nightmare of blunders and uncertainties. He fails to end the life of a princess who is due to be assassinated, because he’s fallen in love with her. Instead, he kills the assassin.
Mort must then try to correct this error as all of causality breaks around him, and he slowly turns into an embodiment of death, in the absence of the real Death.
The story could have become a rambling tale where Mort the boy ends up saving the world. It could have overstepped its reach easily within the first hundred pages.
But Pratchett carefully reigns the plot back to its central characters and their conflicts again and again, to ensure it is grounded in people and their relationships.
Another great example of this is A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. In that story, a wizard named Ged accidentally summons a demon while fighting his classmate. The demon continues to tirelessly stalk him for his entire life, and Ged spends his years trying to undo his mistake.
So, in the broad strokes, the set up of Mort, and its complication, works really well. However, I felt the novel tripped at the finish line.
The novel builds towards an epic confrontation between Mort and Death, but ends suddenly. This is perhaps the only key flaw I found in the plot. Everything is fixed in an instant, and it’s somewhat anti-climactic.
Characters
In the titular Mort, we see the most consistent characterisation and motivations and this is what holds the plot together. His decisions make clear sense due to the duality in his very nature:
| Desire | Flaw |
| Wants to please everyone | Is misunderstood and reviled by others |
| Wants to do the “right” thing | Doesn’t understand the world well enough to know what the right thing is, and ends up causing more problems as a result |
| Wants responsibility & hates being called “boy” | Isn’t ready for the responsibility thrust upon him |
We organically learn the above information through a mixture of narration, dialogue (from those around him and his own words), and Mort’s own actions and agency in the story.
However, other characters are far less clear in their motivation.
Ysabell
Death has an adopted daughter named Ysabell who lives in his small kingdom outside of time. Ysabell states that she doesn’t want to marry Mort.
She eventually falls in love with him, and he with her, but not enough time is really given to explain why or how she fell in love.
Albert
Albert, Death’s manservant, plans to kill Mort and Ysabell. It isn’t clear why. They thwart his attempt to do so, and he never tries again.
Albert also tries to betray and kill Death, but Death somehow doesn’t realise this despite Albert screaming out his intention to kill.
Death
After Death brings Mort into his kingdom, Ysabell explains this is because Death wants Mort to one day marry her.
However, at the end of the book Death is furious that Mort has “seduced” his daughter. He then attends their wedding.
However, I think ultimately I can hand-wave these anomalies. People fall in love for unknown reasons. Perhaps Albert and Death were just having a bad day. Perhaps Death was actually upset about how Mort had failed at his task in Death’s absence.
However, when a plot is grown organically from character decisions, it does break the believability of the characters somewhat.
Part of what saves this from being too much of a negative is that the novel’s genre strays closer to fairy tale or moral tale, instead of epic fantasy with political intrigue.
Setting
The setting of Discworld is constructed over 42 novels and more short stories, so summarising it is particularly difficult. That was probably the point: it is a world where anything that serves a good story can occur.
It follows the general patterns of human history: there are pyramids, small city states, snowy-capped mountains with Eastern monks, and sprawling empires. There’s even a few books dedicated to a magical-industrial revolution. It is the immense size of this setting that made me want to write a review of Mort in the first place.
Death’s small kingdom outside of time is particularly well-described, as are the mechanisms in place for tracking life and death: sand timers, books that write themselves, pages of prophecy written in a codex that must be deciphered.
The world has gods that Death is in communication with, but we don’t meet them in this novel. There’s a magical university that embodies all stereotypes of boarding schools and frat houses. Plenty of Tolkien races cohabit the world, although we are mostly focused on humans in this novel.
The main takeaway is that Pratchett’s world is clearly absurdist: with footnotes explaining with tongue-in-cheek seriousness the bizarre rules that “The Creator” has laid into the fabric of the Discworld.
Themes
Death
The novel Mort presents death as its central theme for obvious reasons. The world itself is ancient and unknowable. The gods are nowhere to been seen (in this novel, at least), and thus Mort witnesses death and its aftermath without much else to anchor himself to, other than the people around him.
The middle portion of the novel is interested in investigating the different responses people have to death. Souls abide by the rules of Descartes’ philosophy. At death, the soul is separated from the body and mind. Yet the soul retains personality and memory, and is able to comprehend death.
Some are scared and some are angry. Most are relieved. In Pratchett’s world, the afterlife is universalist. That is, it is whatever you believe it is. Perhaps this in particular is the most nihilistic thing about Mort.
The afterlife is somewhat unfair. An evil man who believes he will go to paradise does. A kind-hearted and good person who believes they deserve to be punished will be.
In this world, then, the soul constructs its own reality. This is why people usually cannot see Death and instead choose to ignore him. Mort and Death, in return, can choose to ignore rules such as “walls are solid”.
This melancholy underpinning the story is somewhat offset by Pratchett’s voice, but it feels as though here Pratchett was wrestling with something very sincere and human. Perhaps that is why Death’s response to this apparent unfairness is “there is no justice, just me.”
I think the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s message about death was this: “death is inevitable, so you might as well find the humour in it.”
Purpose & Meaning
Mort’s life is clearly given purpose through his apprenticeship. As he sees the vastness of the Discworld and his smallness against it, Mort is saddled with the Atlas-like weight of ushering souls into the next life.
In his desperate fumbling to meet the literal deadlines of each soul entrusted to him, Mort begins to mature and realise the responsibility and isolation Death must feel. Contrasted against this is Death’s joys as he takes a working holiday to pat cats and work in a restaurant kitchen.
Death eventually gives up the happiness of his job to respond to what he has been entrusted with: reaping souls without feeling.
Pratchett is more interested in raising questions than answering them (at least in this novel). When people stop living, they must die. But they cannot die unless Death or one of his emissaries visits to sever the link between body and soul.
In many ways this is a an exercise in bureaucracy, and that is the joke Pratchett is telling: this is a world where even Death has to fill out the necessary paperwork before he can get anything done.
I think this theme resonated with me a lot more coherently than the theme of death. Trying to find your place in the world and wanting to hide your mistakes is probably relatable for most people.
The story shines as Mort begins to take responsibility for his mistakes and seeks to correct them, and I think that’s because when a boy accepts ownership of his mistakes, he becomes a man.
Ysabell falling in love with Mort makes more sense in light of this character growth, and Death deciding to accept Mort’s relationship with Ysabell would also follow, if he realised Mort was now responsible-enough to care for her. It’s just a shame that the narrative doesn’t give enough time to unpacking this.
Summary
Sir Terry Pratchett’s greatest achievement here, is that he built an absurdist fantasy world that could accommodate any story he wanted to tell via his unique, tongue-in-cheek narration. The protagonist Mort and his growth to find meaning and purpose is a highlight.
The story’s conclusion felt a little rushed, and hand-waved a lot of the narrative threads that had been expertly woven throughout the story. Perhaps Pratchett felt he had provided enough explanation to the character’s interior workings, but unfortunately the relationships between the characters shift completely (and most of these dramatic changes happen in narrative gaps between the pages).
Mort is well-crafted and the novel is set a world with surprises around every corner. It’s a shame that the story didn’t lean more into its fairy tale roots and engage with the reader in unpacking why Mort was spared, and what changed about him.
Mort and Death even have a conversation after everything that happened between them, and that would have been the perfect time for Death to teach the moral lesson.
Instead, we are left to intuit why Mort was spared. We are told that he now stands a little taller and more confidently. He is now also given the title of Duke, and has responsibility. But in reality, these aren’t the changes that saved his life.
More likely, he was saved by this: Mort stopped running from his past mistakes, and instead he owned them.
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