The Shepherd’s Crown review – Terry Pratchett’s farewell to Discworld

Terry Pratchett was never so witty, direct and generous as in this, his final Discworld novel

All the best-loved authors, it seems, now leave a last book, to be published posthumously – Joan Aiken, Agatha Christie and (supposedly) Stieg Larsson, to mention just a few – and now, with The Shepherd’s Crown, it is the turn of Terry Pratchett, who died in March 2015. Works from beyond the grave give fans one final entertainment but they can also act as a covert last will and testament in which what an author really believes is made more explicit.

Of all his many heroes and heroines in the 40 novels of the Discworld series, the one Pratchett chooses for his envoi is Tiffany Aching, first encountered in The Wee Free Men. That novel, which drew on both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the fairy paintings of the Victorian parricide Richard Dadd, is one of his most interesting: for in fantasy, those with magical powers are more than usually avatars for the author, and the struggles they undergo tend to grapple with the stuff of fiction itself. Pratchett, with his sardonic inventiveness, social satire, play on language, deep feeling for landscape and love of what is best in human nature, had less critical praise than he deserved. His heroes and heroines are not royalty in disguise, but thieves, con-men, shepherds, soldiers and midwives. In his championing of the ordinary, the sensible and the slightly silly he went against the grain – and never more so than in creating Tiffany Aching.

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