The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett – 2001

Greetings all! My apologies for not having updated in the last month, but having finished a show, post-show blues combined with the onset of a good old-fashioned cold left me feeling really crap for a while – certainly not up to writing analysis of what I was reading. Far worse, due to how spaced-out I was, I wasn't even feeling like reading, particularly as I am currently in the midst of a mighty SF/F classic tome – which will be reviewed once finished – which requires a fair dose of concentration to keep up with most of the time. However, during the worst of the cold, I looked up at a shelf, saw a beloved book, lifted it off and began to read. That book was Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

If you do not already know it, then perhaps my introducing it as a book that I read while feeling ill and unfocused, compounded with the fact that it was released as a children's book, may give the impression that the book is a simple one, entertaining without being challenging. In a word, no. If you are even slightly familiar with any of Pratchett's work, you'll understand what I mean when I say that this is Pratchett on his very top form. Hogfather form. Witches Abroad form. Reaper Man form. The only allowance he makes for his younger readers is that although The Amazing Maurice is set on the Discworld (shaped like a disc, resting upon the backs of four elephants - oh, you know! Or you should!) it is an entirely self-contained story, not featuring any of the vast array of superbly drawn characters he had created over 27 (at the time The Amazing Maurice was published) Discworld novels. None, except of course a brief cameo from Mr ALL-CAPS himself (again, you should know!) but then again, if any story goes on long enough, he'll be a part of it sooner or later! This is the novel that rightly won Pratchett the Carnegie Medal, giving him just a small amount of the critical praise he had been owed for so long.

Bad Blintz is a town, somewhere in Überwald, a sparse, mountainous region of the Discworld, and into this town comes Maurice, a cunning, conniving alley-cat, and the tribe of rats who now travel with him. All of these animals have recently found themselves to be suddenly sentient and as the rats collectively deal with their new-found consciousness in different ways, they are convinced by Maurice to participate in a scam, based around the well known fact that rats infest towns, and pipers come and get rid of the rats. Along with them is their pleasant if rather dim human, Keith, who really only wants to be able to play his pipe in peace. However, in Überwald they not only encounter Malicia, the mayor's story-obsessed daughter who constantly re-invents the story of her own life as it pleases her, but slowly discover the evil at work within the town, embodied in Spider, a monstrous Rat-King, formed of dozens of rats with their tails tied together. Before they know it, the fledgling community is plunged into a war and looking to Darktan, their resident trap expert, and Dangerous Beans, the closest thing they have to a religious leader, for guidance, while Maurice is forced to confront the fact that being conscious may also mean having a conscience. And all the time, the threat of the real piper's arrival hangs over their heads...

Like many of Pratchett's best, at the heart of The Amazing Maurice is a fascination with story. As you may have guessed, the book is Pratchett's riff on the Pied Piper legend and, as always when Pratchett riffs on established folk-tales, he treats it as exactly that within Discworld. Not only is Maurice's initial scam inspired by his understanding of the power the story of the piper holds, but when the professional piper arrives towards the end, we learn he himself is trading off the legend, allowing the rumours about him to build from 'the council didn't pay him and he played his special pipe and led all the kids up into the mountains'1 to 'Over in Klotz the mayor kept the piper waiting too long and he played his pipe and turned him into a badger'2. When he is secretly questioned about this at the end, the piper simply states 'It always pays to advertise, kid'3 and even admits 'Half the things people say I've done even I didn't make up'4. While this is a gently satirical point from Pratchett about the gullibility and tendency of people to exaggerate, there is also a more serious point about the importance of story, which is why Maurice's plan to deal with the piper is better than Keith and Malicia's proposal; because it more narratively satisfying.

A more serious demonstration of the power of story comes in the form of Mr Bunsy Has An Adventure, an illustrated children's book about talking animals who wear clothes and occasionally interact with humans, that the rats carry with them as an almost religious text. When Malicia accidentally reveals the truth about the book, dismissing it as 'stupid stuff for ickle kids'5, Dangerous Beans suffers a crisis of faith, devastated that what he believed to be 'a vision of some bright future'6 is actually just a children's story. Once he has emerged from his confrontation with Spider, the epitome of rat-kind’s despair and hatred, however, he counters the assertions that Mr Bunsy is just a lie, or a pretty story, with another idea ‘Perhaps it's a map'7.

If this process of evangelical belief, betrayal at the essential lies, then deeper examination of the truths mirrors the progression of a religious text within a civilisation, then Pratchett goes still further in showing the power of religion and faith within the rat's fledgling society. At the start of the book, the rats are beginning to develop the idea of the Big Rat Underground 'who made everything'8 - though of course, this being Pratchett, the essential absurdity in serious topics must always be noted, therefore the rats’ dismiss the idea of there also being a Big Human who made the humans as 'just being silly'9. It is these primal, new-born beliefs that Spider attempts to pervert with his claim that 'I am The Big Rat That Lives Underground'10, which Dangerous Beans refutes, along with Spider's cruelly Darwinian desire that the strong rats shall grow stronger, feeding on the weak, by stating that 'If there is a Big Rat, and I hope there is, it would not talk of war and death. It would be made of the best that we could be, not the worst we are'11. Given his role as the spiritual leader of the rats, Dangerous Beans is a somewhat messianic figure, yet it is Darktan who returns from the jaws of a mousetrap and bears 'the marks of the Bone Rat's teeth on him'12, and uses this reputation to anoint his followers with his blood, binding the terrified rats together into an army capable of surviving the night. In fact, though an actual sacrifice of a death so that another may live does occur, it comes from the most unexpected character, so I will not spoil it, except to say that it features one of the most poignant encounters with Death throughout the Pratchett canon.

None of this covers the wit and warmth, and only some of the depth and power of this wonderful book; it is a tale by Terry Pratchett on top-form and there's not much higher praise than that. No punches are pulled for his younger readers, although it is worth noting the brilliant stroke of Pratchett's, in writing for children, to subvert the things that they will be most familiar with – talking animals, Enid Blyton style adventures and a legend they will know. Of course, the subject of Pratchett's always precise, often affectionate and occasionally razor-sharp satire is not the story of the Pied Piper, but of life, from consciousness to civilisation; the rats are a microcosmic reflection of the human society above them. He also rigorously if subtly defends the place of story and of philosophers, storytellers and thinkers in the world. I will leave you with two examples from late on in the book: when Darktan and the Mayor talk together, both tired, irritable and the leader of their respective worlds, they begin to discuss Mr Bunsy, which the Mayor loved as a boy, and 'man and rat talked, as the long light faded'13 united by a story. And secondly, the thoughts Darktan, recently returned from near-death, has about Dangerous Beans, whom he had 'never talked much to'14, as he 'liked people who were practical'15: 'But now he thought: He's a trap-hunter! Just like me! He goes ahead of us and finds the dangerous ideas and thinks about them and traps them in words and makes them safe and shows us the way through. We need him'16.

Link to Penguin's website where the book is available: https://www.penguin.co.uk/puffin/books/1005046/the-amazing-maurice-and-his-educated-rodents/

1 Pratchett, Terry. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Corgi, 2002. pp. 230
2 pp. 233
3 pp. 242
4 pp. 243
5 pp. 161
6 pp. 48
7 pp. 257
8 pp. 90
9 pp. 90
10 pp. 204
11 pp. 209
12 pp. 263
13 pp. 266
14 pp. 179
15 pp.179
16 pp. 179