SPOILERS Reaper Man Discussion **Spoilers**

[swreader]

Well, if the new Death isn't an Auditor, then why does he always speak in the plural, if not in order to avoid becoming an individual? I don't know how it looks in the English edition, but in my book the lines spoken by the new Death have exactly the same characteristics as the ones spoken by the Auditors. And the Auditor acting as Death's answering service, and the Auditors congregating to show support at the confrontation, certainly demonstrate the fact that the new Death, on the off chance he is not, in fact, an Auditor, is certainly their creature. IMHO.

The New Death is not an Auditor, nor is he created by the Auditors. At the beginning of the book, three Auditors come to the consensus that DEATH must be replaced ("There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure.) They make their case to Azrael, who merely nods. He is the creator of the New Death insofar as it has a creator. But the New Death is a megalomaniac personality who sees itself as ruling. Consequently it uses the royal "we".

We will enjoy this.
ENJOY?
The new Death advanced. Bill Door backed away.
Yes. The taking of one Death is the same as achieving the death of a billion lesser lives. ...
We detect a trick. We do not listen. The reaper does not listen to the harvest.

When the New Death raises his cowl in preparation for the blow, there is no face, no skeleton--"Smoke curled formlessly between the robe and a golden crown." It is because DEATH has taken such an interest in Miss Flitworth that she is wiling to give him some of her time that DEATH is able to grasp the harvest scythe and destroy the new Death.

The striking thing about the way Terry weaves the two major stories together(the Death story and the Windle Poons/mall story} is that those who think only of their own glory and/or enjoyment either perish or are totally enthralled by the Mall Queen. Those (like DEATH and, ironically, the undeads) who are concerned with others are the ones who succeed. Azrael affirms this when he gives DEATH more time because, "LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN."

------------------
Edit - Italics are used in both the British and American editions.

 

[alicenanjing]

The royal "we". Now that makes sense.

 

[cabbagehead]

What I don't understand in the plot of Reaper Man is on what time was the little girl living? At first Bill Door shares his time with her, which allows her to keep living in a coma state, but what happens when he beats the New Death and she goes back to breathing normally? Where did the new sand in her lifetimer come from (surely she has one)?

 

[Tonyblack]

What I don't understand in the plot of Reaper Man is on what time was the little girl living? At first Bill Door shares his time with her, which allows her to keep living in a coma state, but what happens when he beats the New Death and she goes back to breathing normally? Where did the new sand in her lifetimer come from (surely she has one)?

That's a good question - and I don't know the answer.

She certainly seems to have survived. The last we hear of her, Miss Flitworth says that she's sleeping now, normally. And that's it. :think:

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[Tonyblack]

You have just one week to read or reread Lords and Ladies for the discussion starting on Monday 6th February.

 

[Bouncy Castle]

Oooooh, I love it when he gets stern!

 

[raisindot]

Oooooh, I love it when he gets stern!

Me, too. Always fun to see when Tony gets out of his mellow, let-it-all-hang-out mode every once in a while.

 

[Bouncy Castle]

He will be putting on the high heeled shoes, and polishing up his whip before we know it!

 

[Dotsie]

What I don't understand in the plot of Reaper Man is on what time was the little girl living? At first Bill Door shares his time with her, which allows her to keep living in a coma state, but what happens when he beats the New Death and she goes back to breathing normally? Where did the new sand in her lifetimer come from (surely she has one)?

That's a good question - and I don't know the answer.

She certainly seems to have survived. The last we hear of her, Miss Flitworth says that she's sleeping now, normally. And that's it. :think:

Anyone got any ideas?

I think it's within his power to bestow more time, but he never does because of the trouble that would cause. He wouldn't have saved her in the first place but for Miss Flitworth, so we can assume that he doesn't agree with it.

In Mort,

Spoiler

Presumably if he hadn't saved Ysabelle she would have died, but when she went back into the world she had a few years left. They must have come from somewhere, not to mention Mort's extra time.

 

[Hvitveis]

I read Mort much later than Reaper Man and the other death/susan books, so for some time I assumed the girl he rescued was ysabell, Susans mother..

Anyways, I really like the whole of the book and has never been able to look at trolleys nor compost heaps in quite the same way.

I am not sure I agree with the concept of auditors not being able to become individuals: when they take a shape as wolves or humans they become individuals, but I am not sure if the new death would be one of them. At the same time, looking at how they behave when they take human form, in Theaf of Time, the flamboyant new death is not that different in the sense of having a huge ego.
hidden for those who have not read hogfather

Spoiler

How long would it take for the void of death to be filled with someone else? MAking comparisons to the Hogfather, how long before new household gods turn up when the hogfather "leaves"?

 

[Tonyblack]

I'm going to comment on this after three years. I have been recently watching Mark Reads Reaper Man and I have some new thoughts about the book. I apologise if I am repeating anything that has already been covered.

The Discworld up to this point, has been rather like a Medieval world, but it's starting to change and Terry is introducing us to that change. We are moving into the Industrial period of that world. We see this in two ways. In Ankh-Morpork we see the first glimpses of an urban spreading. The Mall represents the move away from the traditional market economy and we see a shiny temple of commerce trying to form. It doesn't altogether work, but in future books we start to see less individual craftspeople and more mass production. We see a rise in multiculturalism along with the stresses and advantages that can bring to a city.

Then we see the beginning of the death of rural life. Where a whole village would join together to bring in the harvest, we see the future where one man and a machine can do the work much quicker and more efficiently.

Both of these are a reflection of our own world. The workforce that once brought in the harvest are moving into the cities where there is industry. Our world suddenly needed iron, steel, coal and oil and the workforce to get them.

This is the start of Discworld's Industrial Revolution. I don't think the world is ever the same again after this. We move from Medieval to Victorian really quite rapidly over the rest of the series.

 

[Aquamarine]

The Discworld up to this point, has been rather like a Medieval world, but it's starting to change and Terry is introducing us to that change.

I think the change began earlier with the attempted infiltration of Moving Pictures, an early 20th century invention trying to take over a medieval-style world. Going from The Colour of Magic to Eric, the stories focus on medieval, medieval-esque, or even older civilizations in a fantasy setting, with their conventions getting subverted and parodied to the sky and back. Moving Pictures seems to me the definitive moment when modernity began its campaign against that world, though that particular one dissolved almost as soon as it arrived. Like Moving Pictures, the industrial advances of Reaper Man were beaten back and/or outright sabotaged.

Then again, Moving Pictures changed the Discworld game in a lot of ways; ushering in the Ridcully administration at Unseen University, shifting Dibbler and Detritus from one-off extras to recurring characters, introducing Ponder Stibbons and Gaspode the Wonder Dog, ending the "Dungeon Dimensions are invading" plotline, and so on.

Apart from Death's character development, I think Reaper Man's main role was to crystallize many of these pre-existing elements. For instance, I think it's the first novel where you really get an idea of what the Unseen University faculty's group dynamics are like, which I think was relatively downplayed in the prior book.

And, of course, it introduced Reg Shoe into the mix, which is a big plus.

 

[=Tamar]

This is very belated but I just recently thought of it (July 15 or so, 2015). Note: I read the book when it first came out and have read it too many times to count since then.

In Reaper Man, Death not only got a life. He got a parent. Miss Flitworth took him in, gave him a name (or at least suggestions for one), fed him, and taught him what was expected of him in life. At the end, instead of at the beginning, she literally gave him life.

Death has a Mum.

=Tamar

 

[Tonyblack]

Oooh, I like that idea!

 

[Catch-up]

I've been re-reading all of the books (I have to admit to skipping the first two), and I've just finished reading Reaper Man. I'd forgotten how much I loved this one! And, I was delighted to discover that I took this one to a signing. I'd forgotten that too.

Loved what most people here mentioned loving, Death working for Ms. Flitworth and being in the village. Windle Poons! Loved him too. Hated the mall entity. But, I kind of think we were supposed to.

Got a kick out of rediscovering many favorite quotes and the foreshadowing of The Amazing Maurice and Ned Simnel.

 

[pomertronix]

Hi All,

Have been slowly making my way through the DW books (in a vague sense of order) and just finished reading Reaper Man.
After reading Mort and enjoying it, I was excited to be reading this one.
However out of the dozen or so DW books I've read, in my opinion this would have be the weakest.

Firstly it's a book about Death that barely features the character
I understand he wasn't entirely the focus of Mort either but he was involved, whereas in this book his entire story feels like a b-plot to the main one featuring Windle Poons and the UU wizards. Not sure how this is classified as a Death story when he's only in about 20% of it..!

The UU wizards seem to do the same thing over and over
Just before I read this book I've read The Last Continent, Interesting Times & Equal Rites so maybe I'm getting a bit of burn-out on the wizards but they seem to be doing the same thing everytime. They bumble around stumbling into various problems and/or situations while the Archchancellor gets increasingly frustrated with the Dean and the Dean keeps doing things that are either annoying or idiotic.

Subplots that went nowhere
The combination harvester is probably the best example of this although the Death of Rats is another one that could've been further developed. I understand that both of these lines progress further in later stories in one way or another but I'm not sure the whole industrial revolution cameo was necessary and it definitely felt like it had shoe-horned into the book.

I just didn't like the shopping trolley-mall story
I thought this story would be about Death and the parts of the book he was in were mostly good. The heart of my problem with this book is that it's about snow globes that turn into shopping trolleys that eventually merge to become an 'Akira-style' living mall.
Where were the other Deaths that came into existence?

To me this one was really disappointing and definitely feels like a missed opportunity to flesh-out (pun intended) the world of Death and how he acts and thinks. Windle Poons was a good character and I did enjoy the Fresh Start Club but this just felt like a wizard story with a slightly larger than normal Death cameo while the main storyline was a crazy concept about a living shopping mall. Even if it was a tongue-in-cheek poke at consumerism (ala Dawn of the Dead) it just missed the mark a bit for me and I'm a bit perplexed why people love this one..?

 

[raisindot]

Pomertronix, I agree with a lot of your criticism. I, too, found the whole wizards/shopping mall subplot to be totally uninteresting. If that subplot had focused more on Windle Poons and the consequences of "delayed deaths" it might have been more interesting. I get the feeling that Pterry had always wanted to work in some kind of "shopping mall monster" subplot into a book and he clumsily put it into Reaper Man.

In terms of the amount of narrative devoted to Death, you'll find that in the Death series he is never really the main character. He'll generally have one subplot--usually one that provides comic relief--to complement a main story involving a certain "gifted" human character. I'll say no more about that. But in Reaper Man I felt that the scenes with Death in them were very effective and often quite touching. Pterry made the most of Death's limited "page length" in this book, whereas in some of the later Death books his narrative sometimes gets stuck on one-joke riffs.

I do agree with you wholeheartedly about the repetitiveness in the wizards books, especially those with RIncewind as the main character. Since it doesn't seem you're going chronologically, if you're getting overloaded on wizards you might want to delay reading the next two books in the Death series and either read some of the more "non-series" books (Moving Pictures, Pyramids, Small Gods) or go through the Watch series, which mostly can be read on its own without needing to read all the other books written around the same time.

I would also say that Reaper Man is one of those books that gets better (at least the Death story) when you read it a second time. You might want to go back to it once you've ready everything else.

 

[Tonyblack]

Welcome to the site, pomertronix!

I would say that some of Terry's books take a few readings. Some of his books that I didn't much care for on the first read, have becomes top favourites on later reads. The shopping centre thing is an odd story arc and I would agree that it doesn't totally work.

 

[=Tamar]

Reaper Man was published in 1991. As Tony said, it often take a few readings. It took me quite a while to see a way that the two parts fit together.

I think the primary plot is "someone finds out what living is like." It has certain similarities to Wings of Desire (1987), a European film that showed how an immortal entity, after studying the development of life on earth for eons, took the plunge and became human (as an adult) and learns how to be human. (More specifically, someone learns what is expected of a (northern European 20th century culture) male role - get a life, get a job, rescue people in trouble, share a life.)

Here's my thinking about how the rest developed: Since the setting was Discworld, there were repercussions - little deaths appeared. The rest follows logically. For decades before 1991, there had been concern about the inner cities dying because of the "flight to the suburbs" for assumed safety, and for cheaper prices*. For that reason I think, one of the deaths had to be the Death of Cities, symbolized by the enclosed shopping mall (which was also the death of the small-town local store).

Since Death wasn't collecting, someone who would have expected him to show up in person had to object to his absence, and it was previously established that he showed up for the royal and the magical. The princess in Mort used up the royal option, so that meant a wizard or witch, but Discworld witches participated in life. UU wizards didn't participate much in normal life, so the parallel story became a wizard learning what he'd missed - again, "someone finds out what living is like". Death came to temporary life as a living skeleton, and Windle Poons came back to temporary life as the living dead.

*Friends of mine who lived in New York City would travel to the next state once a month, because they saved so much on food prices that it was cheaper to do that than to shop locally.

 

[pomertronix]

Hello again - thanks to all for the responses (and welcomes ), it's great to get some different points of view.
To be honest I hadn't really thought about the book in any serious existential sense, I was more annoyed about the plot!
Will have to contemplate that line of thought in more depth..
With regards to Death's involvement, I just felt he had more direct input into the story in Mort whereas here the wizard/mall plot is the primary focus with Death's adventures in the countryside being a completely separate story that served more as a punctuation point.
In terms of reading order I've actually read most of the Watch books but due to the way I got them I've read them slightly backwards and am only now reading Guards! Guards! with Men At Arms to follow. I've also got Pyramids and Small Gods sitting on my shelf to read next.
And for the record I'm only 50-odd pages into Guards! Guards! but love every page so far. Have to stop typing now to read more