“YOU TURN WORLDS UPSIDE DOWN”: THE POLITICS OF REVERSAL IN TERRY PRATCHETT’S NATION

MARIA BŁASZKIEWICZ

Terry Pratchett’s novel Nation (2008) offers potential interpretative reversals of the motifs of island and shipwreck. The novel’s plot is dominated by two islands and three shipwrecks, the importance of which depends on the perspective imposed by the cartographic representation, which becomes only apparent with the reversal of cardinal directions on a map placed on the book’s last page. One island, Great Britain, belonging to the political centre of the world, is juxtaposed with the tiny island of Nation which, as a result of a momentous reversal of fortune of both the heroes and the nations they represent, becomes the world’s centre of science, incidentally occasioning a partial destruction of the traditional dichotomy of science and religion.

This essay explores the possibilities offered by the interpretation of Terry Pratchett’s alternative history novel Nation1 in terms of its pattern of structural, symbolic and ideological reversals centred on the motifs of island and shipwreck understood both literally and allegorically. Nation differs from the majority of Pratchett’s novels in several ways. Firstly, unlike practically everything else published in the last fifteen years, it does not in any way refer to his sprawling Discworld series. Secondly, it is significantly less comic (but not less ironic) and more directly involved in various ideological concerns of the real world than anything he has ever written. Thirdly, unlike most, especially later works, Nation is very consciously and artistically structured. It is also the only2 novel by Pratchett set in an alternative version of our own world.3

1 Terry Pratchett, Nation, London: Doubleday, 2008 (all references given in parentheses in the text). 2 While Pratchett’s most recent novel, Dodger (2012), shares Nation’s disentanglement from the Discworld series, it appears to be a historical novel. 3 It is the middle of the nineteenth century. Small details suggest a slightly different

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From the very beginning, the narrative alternates between several focalizers stressing the polyphony of perception to settle down later into a duet of two main character-focalizers (Mau and Ermintrude/ Daphne), concluding with a modern coda offering an evaluation of the earlier events narrated from the point of view of Mau’s descendants. The novel focuses on two main characters whose development will be shaped by the reversals of fortune they share with their two home islands, Great Britain and Nation, otherwise called “The Island Where the Sun Is Born”, in the Mothering Sunday Islands. The importance of these two locations, placed practically on opposite parts of the globe, as will transpire in the course of the novel, depends on the perspective partially imposed by the cartographic representation. Moreover, the novel’s plot is dominated by three shipwrecks, two metaphorical ones and a literal one, which in a variety of ways contribute to the two islands’ more and more intertwined fates. Ermintrude Fenshaw departs from Great Britain to join her father, a newly appointed governor of Port Mercia, the capital of Rogation Sunday Islands. As a result of an exceptionally powerful tsunami and a most spectacular shipwreck, she becomes a castaway on one of the Mothering Sunday Islands. There she encounters Mau, the only survivor of the local population which was wiped out by the same giant wave. Due to an unexpected turn of events she later succeeds her father on the British throne to be returned to the tiny island only after her death. This short summary focuses on the important events from the point of view of Ermintrude’s imperial homeland she initially unquestioningly shares. Her stay on the island she learns to call sequence of historical events: On the Origin of Species has just been published, which would suggest that it is the year 1859, but “The Royal Navy Hymn”, composed a year later, is already well known to every sailor. There is, however, nothing to indicate that this alternation is supposed to influence the interpretation of Pratchett’s novel. Geographically, there are not many differences between Nation’s world and Earth and with only marginal consequences for the story, for example the map features such places as the Russias or The ReUnited States, countries that remain practically names on the map. In the final section of the book the heroine’s formidable grandmother becomes an ambassador to the ReUnited States, which serves as a dignified way of getting rid of this highly disagreeable character. The actual destination does not really matter as long as she is away from London. A notable exception to this rule is Pratchett’s Pacific, the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean with its archipelagos named after more obscure liturgical calendar names, and Australia, split into two separate giant islands evocative of a major natural disaster in the past.