Twoflower has come, full of excitement, to see everything he’s read about in his dull life as a clerk: the heroes the barfights magic and maybe even a dragon or two. The traveller, Twoflower, is from the fabled Agatean Empire and is a species that no one in Ankh-Morpork has formerly encountered: the tourist. The wizard tells the rogues the story of how Ankh-Morpork came to be in flames – how he was minding his own business one day in the Broken Drum (one of the city’s most notorious taverns), when this foreigner appeared. And what’s that strange shadowy thing in the darkness behind them? Two rogues watch the conflagration from a nearby hilltop, and are soon joined by a curious pair of travellers: a stressed-looking wizard and a peculiar foreigner. And it’s here that The Colour of Magic begins, on a dark night when the city is being consumed by a fierce inferno. The greatest city on the Disc is the twin city of Ankh-Morpork, divided by the river Ankh, one of the most pestilent watercourses known to mankind.
It’s a world shaped and powered by magic, and is home to a whole range of fantasy creatures, as you might expect. The Discworld is a flat, circular world that moves through space in an utterly reasonable fashion: balanced on the backs of four enormous elephants, which in turn stand on the shell of a vast intergalactic turtle called Great A’Tuin. Let’s start at the beginning, just in case there’s anyone who has never read the books. But it’s important because it gives us an introduction to Pratchett’s tongue-in-cheek fantasy universe, and to two characters in particular who cast a long shadow across the rest of the series, even if they don’t appear that often: the hapless wizard Rincewind and the Luggage. Part of that is because it feels very different to the books which would succeed it. The Colour of Magic is the book I’ve reread least in the intervening years. So I decided to embark on a structured reread, book by book, of this much-loved series. And, in the aftermath of the existential gloom of The Evenings, that’s exactly what I needed. I still dip into the books now and then, when I need something light and cuddly. Then there was the series of Discworld maps the quizbook the art book the companion guide and the three computer games ( Discworld Noir was brilliant: I’m still sad that it won’t work on current editions of Windows). This was The Colour of Magic, the first in a long line of Discworld novels that would appear for birthdays and Christmases, and which would soon become a defining feature of my teenage years. About twenty years ago, I found a secondhand book in a charity shop or at a jumble sale (it was 35p, according to the scrawled pencil inscription in the front).
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