The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett: a sly, darker Discworld fairy tale

Review Body

Discworld book 28 is a strange little beast, even by Discworld standards. It is technically standalone, it leans younger than most of the series, and it starts with what sounds like a joke Pratchett might have tossed off in a footnote. A talking cat, a boy with a pipe, and a group of unusually intelligent rats are running a Pied Piper scam from town to town.

Then, very quickly, it becomes much sharper than that.

Maurice himself is a brilliant creation. He is vain, selfish, suspiciously practical, and just moral enough to be annoyed by the inconvenience of having a conscience. The rats are even better. Dangerous Beans, Peaches, Hamnpork, Darktan, and the rest are not just cute comic sidekicks. They are trying to build a civilisation while still working out what civilisation even means. Their arguments about names, stories, traps, food, death, and whether the book Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure is a sacred text or complete nonsense are funny, but they also do proper philosophical work.

That is the trick Pratchett pulls here. This has the shape of a fairy tale, complete with a sinister town, corrupt rat catchers, a child who thinks in stories, and something nasty under the floorboards. But underneath the fairy tale machinery, it is about consciousness, manipulation, belief, and the uncomfortable moment when creatures stop being part of the scenery and start asking what they are owed.

It is also much darker than its younger reader label might suggest. Not in a grim or gratuitous way, but in the old fairy tale sense. Bad Blintz feels damp, hungry, and wrong. The rat catchers are comic grotesques until they are not. The horror elements are handled lightly enough for the tone, but Pratchett never pretends that traps, poison, and fear are harmless because the protagonists are small.

As a Discworld novel, it sits slightly off the main road. After the huge mythic send-off of The Last Hero, this feels smaller and more contained, but that suits it. There is no need to know the Watch books, the Witches books, or the industrialising Ankh-Morpork thread to enjoy it. If anything, it is one of the easier Discworld novels to hand to someone who has never read Pratchett before, especially if they like clever children’s fantasy with teeth.

The one thing I missed a little was the sheer density of the best adult Discworld novels. This is very clever, and often very funny, but it is also more streamlined. Some of the supporting humans are deliberately broad, and the plot has a fable-like neatness that makes it feel less messy and alive than Pratchett at his absolute peak. That is not really a flaw, more a consequence of what the book is trying to be.

What lifts it is that Pratchett never writes down to the audience. He trusts younger readers with fear, ambiguity, death, ethics, and jokes about narrative convention. He also trusts older readers to enjoy a story about talking rats without needing it to be winking irony all the way down.

I liked this a lot. It is not my very top-tier Discworld, but it is inventive, humane, creepy in places, and much more emotionally serious than its premise suggests. A proper little sideways Discworld gem.

Rating: 4/5

The Audible UK edition is narrated by Ariyon Bakare, with Rob Wilkins, Bill Nighy, and Peter Serafinowicz, and runs to 8 hours and 7 minutes.