17 September, 2003
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett (270 pp, MMPB, 2001)
I've been getting behind on my Pratchett-reading. This is actually a good thing; it means I don't have to get them in hardcover, which would be just way too expensive. I finally got around to reading this one, which was published a couple years ago.
This is a Discworld novel, but it differs from the others in that it's marketed as a kid's book. Fortunately, this doesn't mean that Pratchett has dumbed himself down. In practice what it means is that it's shorter than most of the recent Discworlds, the main human characters are children, and it's got more talking animals in it than usual.
The premise is similar to that of one of my favorite Zelazny stories, "The George Business." There's a pack of rats who became sentient after eating something out of the wizards' dumpster. Maurice is a cat who's suffered the same fate. The rats, the cat, and a stupid-looking kid are running a Pied Piper scam-- the rats invade a town, cause meyham, and the kid shows up and plays the pipes to drive the "plague of rats" away-- for a fee. Maurice is the mastermind.
But, as these things are wont to do in novels, the scam goes bad in Bad Blintz. The rats come in, and set out to do the usual, only to discover that there's something seriously wrong in that town. For one thing, there are no other rats. Not a one. This hasn't stopped the local rat-catchers from cashing in on the bounty for rat-tails. The town is on the brink of starvation, and there's something eeeeevil stirring in the sewers. In the end, it comes down a standard Discworldian conflict between the forces of civilization and the forces of darkness, albeit on a smaller (rodent-sized) scale than usual.
Other people have remarked that The Amazing Maurice is "darker" than the average Discworld novel. While this may be technically true, I think it's like saying that tan is darker than beige. On the full-range darkometer (mine goes to 11), this barely even registers. Even as far as kids' books go, Maurice is nowhere near the latest Harry Potter book, or the Series of Unfortunate Events, let alone something like Pullman's His Dark Materials.
I really liked this book; it's entertaining, well-written, and easy to read. It was a perfect choice for travel-reading (which is good, 'cause I read it while slogging back and forth across the country a couple weekends ago). Plus, it's got talking animals. For some reason, I was really big on talking-animal fiction when I was in, like, fifth and sixth grade. (My favorites were Watership Down and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.)