I was one of those pubescent boys who read a lot of Terry Pratchett. I used to hide this fact, and concentrate on my reading all of Dickens, or my other literary exploits. But now I can be more honest, and admit that Pratchett’s writing shaped me and my thinking profoundly, often leading me to new ideas that I have now, many many years later, recognized as an inspired transposition of political philosophy into a world of dwarves, golems, vampires and a multitude of humans.

I’d stopped reading Pratchett by the time of his death, but it still touched me deeply. I even tried to write a blogpost about it at the time, but couldn’t find the words. I’m not sure that I can find them now either, so instead will simply retell a small part of one of his stories, refracted through my own experience.

The first Pratchett novel I really loved was Maskerade. At eleven years old, I didn’t get all the parody of opera (or even of Andrew Lloyd Webber), but I remained captivated by its story, which recounts a young woman’s arrival in the city of Ankh Morpork, her successful audition for a place in the opera’s chorus-line, and her entanglement in two contrary, murderous plots to restore the opera house to its glory. There are a few deaths, and soon both the city watch and a group of witches from the heroine’s hometown get involved. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my introduction to both Samuel Vimes and Granny Weatherwax, whose own stories – particularly Weatherwax’s – constitute for me the best of Pratchett’s writing (I still can’t stand the Rincewind novels and mourn for those whose first experience of Pratchett is The Colour of Magic).

I read Maskerade as a child, and have probably read it around twenty times since then, the last when Pratchett died. True to form, my favourite part of this now extremely dog-eared book is its most philosophical. Right at the end of the book, there’s a showdown between a masked phantom and the evil theatre management: the mask is ripped from the phantom (I won’t spoil his identity) and he deflates. Saving the day, Granny Weatherwax sees that the phantom is given an ‘invisible mask’ and when he puts it on, he snaps back to life and all is resolved.

I still think about that invisible mask. I thought about it when I first read Apollinaire’s Alcools and its mention of people who are only “des masques sur des faces masquées”, and it comes back to mind upon many occasions, as do a host of other Pratchett moments. But they are for another post.