The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 139: Nation Pt. 1 (Never Windsurf on a Crocodile)

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order.  This week, Part 1 of our recap of “Nation”. A Wave! A Ship! A Dead Lobster in the Flour! Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - everything we know - TechRadar Classic FM Interview 25 Year Nation - YouTube  Terry Pratchett Interview: How He Wrote Nation - YouTubeTerry Pratchett's 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Award Speech for Nation - The Horn Book  Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes - Penguin Rule of three - Wikipedia  Eternal Father strong to save  Samson - Wikipedia Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup rebrand drops dead lion - BBC News Psychopomp - Wikipedia Omnibus Episode 587: The Guano Islands Act (Entry 554.PS10407)What are some standard fairy tale opening lines in your language? - r/AskEurope The South Sea Project - Jonathan Swift - The Literature NetworkHermit crabs are 'wearing' our plastic rubbish - BBC News   How Ada Lovelace Constructed Her Wings - Noble BloodCourse Change - Futility Closet [article about the Berouw]Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester - Goodreads  Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com  

I nearly just ignored the link you sent me because I put on my YouTube musicals playlist while I was waiting and Santino Fontana singing Settle for Me had just started when you sent me the Zoom link so yeah, I'm sure you understand. I was just putting on a bit of makeup listening to Hollywood Undead. Oh god, I haven't listened to them in years. When I start drinking, my Dicta, oh, my dinkit. I think is the perfect tone to go into this fairy-series podcast episode. What's the nerd news?

We've had trailers. Trailers for things are coming. It's going to be Hot Nerd Autumn. Hot Nerd Autumn, Dragon Age. Hot Nerd Summer, yeah, the Dragon Age Dread Wolf trailer is full reveal promised in June. Oh, a trailer trailer, huh? Fingers crossed. It's been 10 years, Francine, since the last game. It's been a decade.

I'm hoping if they're doing full reveal this summer, the game will be out by the end of the year. Definitely won't replay the other three. I will absolutely replay the other three before it comes out. All three, huh? Yeah, I haven't played the first two in ages. And by that I mean since lockdown. Yeah, that's ages. That's fine. Oh god, it is now.

I finally bought Stardew Valley. Oh, fun. On the iPad, yeah, it is fun. It is very immersive or very engrossing for me anyway. So that's nice. I'll be wasting quite a lot of my life on that. I haven't played too much yet because I got it day before yesterday and I had to do the reading and the research for this. So you have saved me from my usual head first, there goes my entire week. I'm so glad the podcast has saved you. I finished playing Tomb Raider 2 and the Tomb Raider remake that came out.

I've just been watching Jack play that. It's so fun. It's bringing me joy. I'm on Tomb Raider 3 now. Oh, you might have been on Tomb Raider 1, actually, because she didn't have a ponytail yet. Yeah, that's Tomb Raider 1. Because he's playing on the old graphics.

Yeah, yeah. I'm mostly playing on the new graphics, but occasionally switching to the old for nostalgia. And I think he's gone back to tank controls rather than the new ones as well. Yeah, that's what I've done. I admittedly grew up playing it on PC rather than PlayStation, but it's still the new ones are just not intuitive at all. It's a very bad control design.

Apart from that, it's a really fun remake in that it is literally just they've taken the original and made it look a bit nicer. And I think they've maybe taken out some of the bugs, but they've definitely left a few in and some intentional weird things you can do that you're not technically meant to be able to do. CHARLEYY Oh, nice. GERMES And that's it. There's no like, we've added lots of cutscenes and story. It's exactly the same game. CHARLEYY Is there a gaming term for an Easter egg that wasn't on purpose? Is it still an Easter egg? I don't know. The term Easter egg has been really, really kind of changed from what it

used to be because Easter eggs used to be, they were specifically built into DVDs and it was called an Easter egg because you would have to hunt it. And it would be things like you do a certain button combination and it would give you this little thing. Yeah, yeah, that's how I understood it in a game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was DVDs first. And now the term Easter egg is just like,

there's a reference. Oh, yeah, not a huge fan. I know we use the term all the time when we're talking, get home instantly. Yeah, yeah. I guess at least that was still a hunt. Yeah, as a fun- Like the Easter eggs we were talking about were like- Spot things. Yeah, But I guess at least that was still a hunt. Yeah. It's like the beast drugs we were talking about where like spot things. Yeah. Yeah. The hat and the portrait and the

yeah, I don't think it's a problem that the meaning has changed a bit. But yeah, so I don't know what unintentionally Easter egg and I guess you'd still call that an Easter egg. Yeah. Click cheese, whatever we should. That sounds like a little mini rabbit hole one day. Oh yeah. We do a little small quick bonus-y what the fuck's an Easter egg? This has now reminded me of a conversation on our Discord that one of our lovely listeners recommended to a friend and the friend's immediate response was wow this is full of tangents but like I think positive. Yes, the truth. It took them 15 minutes to get to the point. Correct.

Look, if I'm never going directly to a point, I want to meander. Going directly to this point, I think, is irresponsible. It's like if you change pressure too fast, right? You get the... The bends. The bends. Do you want us to get topical bends? Topical bends. Band name, drag name.

Or something like disease the sheep. A village in Essex. Speaking of getting to the point, do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to The Tree Shall Make You Fret, a podcast in which we're usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one at a time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And we're on a break from the Discworld this month, we're talking about Nation.

This is part one. Which is a big deal. Big deal. So excited. Yeah, me too. I've been hyped for this for a very long time. Now on spoilers before we get started, this is a spoiler-like podcast, heavy spoilers for the book Nation, but we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series, past Unseen Academicals, the book that we did previously, and we're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us.

D.K. Strapped to the wheel of a ship, improvising a new verse to a famous hymn. J. Excellent. A couple of quick bits of follow-up from the Discworld. According to DJ Ellis, I was nearly perfect in my description of the offside rule, so we're calling that I did what I set out to do. Well done, you. Yep. PD reminded us that the actor in Vendette Light Beckham, whose name I couldn't remember, is Jonathan Rhys Myers, who was also the lead in a TV adaptation of Gormenghast. Oh no. It haunts us.

Much like Gormenghast maybe has hauntings, who knows? Because I still don't have a copy. Which I believe was my New Year's resolution for last year was to acquire Gormengast. I failed. I failed. It's the curse of Gormengast, maybe. Probably. I don't want to read Gormengast, I just want to keep making up what happens in Gormengast. Yeah. Oh, and Soda Vogel, our resident language expert, has pointed out that the German in Unseen Academicals is proper grammatically correct German, it's just not relevant.

Oh, super. So there are sentences about things like, and it would make a lovely vanilla cream topping. Wonderful. I think we need more vanilla cream toppings in our Rebawaldian psychology. Jessi Yeah, I think it would cheer everybody up a bit. Jessi It would. Right, let's talk about Nation. Francine, do you want to introduce us to Nation? Francine Yeah, sure. So, Nation, it was published in September 2008, so we're back in time a little. It was Terry Pratchett's first non-Discworld

book since Johnny and the Bomb in 1996, although it was published near Discworld's 25th anniversary. Ah. Perfect. Which was November of that year. 2008. 2008, not 1996. Terry Pratchett's descriptions of writing Nation are fantastic. There is a video interview and transcript of his speech where he accepted the Boston Globe Horn Book Fiction Award, which I will link to both of those. But paraphrasing, kind of clipping his quotes a bit, he said,

I really don't know where Nation came from. I woke up one morning with an image in my mind of a young man standing on the beach with a spear and he was incredibly angry. He said he had Krakatoa in mind when he started putting together the story in his head, but the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami hit while he was still internally assembling the story. So he decided not to write it for a while, obviously not the time. However, after a couple of years, the pressure, as he said, to write it was too great. It was filling my head. I had to get this damn book down on the page. In the 2009 speech, he said, in short, I nearly drowned under the force of this book. In my mind,

it is still totally visual, a sequence of images rather than words, as if I was getting a glimpse of the movie that was yet to be made. Although it was never and probably will never be made, because as he explained, it did the rounds of Hollywood but apparently it's not of interest because it doesn't leave enough room for hilarious, wisecracking animals. We must be grateful for small mercies. I mean, we've got a hilarious, wisecracking parrot provided you find swearing funny, which we do here at The Truth Show. You said that writing a non-Discworld book was quite hard because

Discworld has a toolbox that he knew how to use. This is an intrusion fantasy or a low fantasy rather than a high or epic fantasy as Discworld technically is. It is set in, as he put it, the get out of jail free parallel universe. So he got to make the changes he wanted. But yeah, he said it unrolled before him. He knew how it would end, but a lot of extra bits fell into place as he wrote. And it was well received, of course. It was showered in accolades. Pratchett said in the same speech I've quoted before that, I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will write. And yeah, I know that Rob Wilkins wrote about this a fair bit in his biography of Pratchett. I forgot to look back on the exact wording.

Yeah, he's got a lot of really beautiful stuff to say about it. In the book when he writes about it, I think Terry Pratchett was working on Nation when he first got his diagnosis. So there was very much a response from the diagnosis of, I've got to finish the book and by the book you mean Nation. Yes. Yes. I think he said the first draft had been done. And then the rest of it was still, yeah. Because yes, one of the different interviews I was listening to actually, Classic FM I think it was. Oh. Yeah. Oh, actually, yeah, this one sticks in my head because they were talking about Discworld and the 25th anniversary of Discworld coming up. And then the interviews tone changed

slightly and practically stopped her and went, you're slowing down. You're going to talk about Alzheimer's, aren't you? I really, it was really good hearing him call her out. Like obviously she wasn't being a dick, but like, yeah, it's just really satisfying to get to, yeah. And they left it in the edit. So obviously, like, yeah. But yeah, he was saying that, yeah, basically the doctor reckoned it had not taken hold, but had been a factor for at least a couple of years. And so, you know, I wrote the best book I've written while this was taking hold. So, yeah, he didn't say that. But yeah, Rob's talked about he agrees that it's, you know, Terry Pratchett's best book. He's called it his masterpiece.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. Again, I like to differentiate between best and favourite, but I do think this is his best book. I think it's incredible. And it's not just the recency bias. Obviously, I've just recently read it because we're talking about it on the podcast. Well, we said it before. I'm sure we said it before. But yeah, I've sure we said it before. But yeah, I've been really intimidated working our way up to this one, which is partly I wanted to talk about it within roughly where it was published in Discworld. We've switched this Nunseen Academicals just because of how the year fell. But also partly I was putting it off until

we got to late in us doing the podcast because I wanted to make sure we were ready to talk about it because it is intimidating. I feel ready. It is. I feel less intimidated than I did by Nightwatch. Yeah, I think Nightwatch holds such a special place in so many people's hearts. I feel like I don't think nation's underrated, but I don't think it comes up in best lists as often as it should because it's not- It's a lot more controversial as like a top project. Whenever it's brought up in one of the groups, there's always at least a decent faction of people saying they didn't care for it, which is not the case with No Watch really.

I think part of that is just because it's not Discworld. Yeah, they say the same about The Long Earth, which I think are fucking fantastic. So we'll get there one day. We will eventually get there. Yeah, but first. But first, nation. Nation, yeah. So we did the first five chapters, right? Yeah, we split this up very nice and easy. Five chapters, five chapters, five chapters, and a little bit on the end.

Do you want to tell us what happened this time then? In this section, this first section, first, Imo makes the world, which is good of him. Otherwise we wouldn't have much world to have a story in. In chapter one, there's snow on the docks and plague in the air and Captain Sampson is instructed to sail on disinfected seas to Mercia to fetch the latest king in his heir, accompanied by the gentleman and the dreaded mother. At the other end of the world, Captain Robert sings to a burning sea and sails through a forest, crashing into a fig tree. R.I.P. Mao has become a man and is going home until the sea takes control and the wave comes. He wakes among the wreckage and makes it home to an empty nation. In the morning, the rain

tastes of ashes. Mao dreams while his grey body puts his people to rest in grandfather's demand ritual. There's a plate with a mango and Mao stays away from the low forest for the night. In the morning, after firewood, Mao climbs a cliff, sees the trail of a ship, and hears almost singing. The crying trouser woman gives Mal fire, sort of, and he tries not to remember. In chapter three, Daphne's worried she's gone sane relative to the world around her, and writes Mal an invitation, confusing him with gilded edges. Meanwhile, Mal brings beer to the grandfathers. At tea, Daphne's got the scones wrong, and Mal doesn't understand anything but eats politely nonetheless. Daphne asks for help and Captain Roberts gets a sea burial. Daphne

grabs the hat but sinks and Mal fights Lahaka for her life. He guards the beach until morning. In chapter four, Daphne wakes from a conveniently expositional dream and the grandfathers harangue. Mal dives for two out of the three god anchors that he can see and with ornithological assistance he and Daphne slowly come to an understanding. A new canoe arrives at the island with an old man who can't stop talking, a woman who won't speak at all and a baby going hungry. But Mal has a plan. In chapter 5, Mal gets milk from a drunken pig and will speak no more about it and Daphne chats away as he begins to mend fences. She's sure her father will come looking any day now, but Mal's worried about the raiders.

More of the stranded arrive at the island, this time one is a woman in labour and Daphne's needed for the delivery, hopefully with a good song. Oh yeah and that's where I did the same thing again where I couldn't stop myself from really going to. Yeah, no, it was difficult. So helicopter and loin cloth watch. Go on. So helicopter, tree climbing, octopus, obviously I'll be taking no questions. Very nice. Tentacles, you see, much like helicopters, what's it? That's what I've always said.

I should really learn what they're called. Right, so for loin cloth. Rotor blades. I should really learn what they're called. Right, so for loincloths. Rota-blades. So I should learn, not that I want to learn from. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Educate me on this podcast. Sorry to clarify your already very clear metaphor. Tentacles, right. Loincloth.

Loincloth. We've got two options here, right? We could take loincloths as read for this book, since they're very clearly present. We have loincloths, we know we have loincloths. Or I could ignore the obvious loincloths and find something obscure to call a loincloth each week. What would you prefer, Francine? Obscure loincloths, please, Joanna. Pantaloons, birds, feathers then. Excellent. Yeah. The pantaloons, birds, trowels, or feathers.

Do we know what kind of birds the pantaloon birds are? I wasn't sure if they're like vulture or something else. I felt like there was an element of dodo implied, but could fly. Something like that, yeah. I know obviously a lot of the species are altered or made up. Yes. But yeah, yeah, no. The tree-glamming octopus though, completely real.

Oh yeah, obviously. They're shape-shifting a lot in my mind, the grandfather birds. They're a little bit shoe-billed bird at the moment, you know? Honestly, I'm kind of imagining just Gonzo from The Muppets, but with wings and frilly trousers. I see we've gone very different directions on this. Very nice. Yeah.

I think yours might be more accurate. This is such a weird book to podcast about because I'm so used to throwing in jokes, we're talking about Discworld and then this one is just so much heavy stuff. That's a good point. We probably should have talked about Tone before we started, but let's do Admin Live. I think let's try not to Tone Police ourselves too much because this is still ... This is still Terry Pratchett. There are still funny moments. It is still Terry Pratchett. It does have funny bits in it.

And I don't think just because it's a really good book, we need to talk about it in hushed reverent tones as if we're scaring the book. No, exactly. We managed to be twice through Night Watch. We can do it again. How dare you? Accurate, but how dare you? Right then. Quotes, do you want to go first? Yes. This is when Mao is floating in the ocean. He's found a tree with the axe he'd used embedded in it floating alongside him. It should have worked. With his last mighty heave, the axe should have come free. That's how it should have been in a perfect world. But the swirl and wood had gripped it firmly.

And I like this. This is a little nod towards the narrative of it all. And it is especially important I think in a children's book. We haven't mentioned, have we? This is of course a children's book. A young adult at least. Yes. Yeah. I like it. It's a little nod towards despite the fairy tale aspects of the story, this is not. Yes. This is not a fairy tale. The third heave does not free the axe from the tree.

No. How about yours? Light died in the West. Night and tears took the nation. The star of water drifted among the clouds, like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime. Ooh. Again, it's very early on in the book, but it's just, God, what a line.

G'night and tears. Yeah, he's very good at that particular rhetoric device, which name I've forgotten now because it was so long since we talked about it. But yeah. Yes. Characters then. Let's talk about Mal. Oh, right.

Yeah, he is, I think, fleshed out very well quite early on, just in terms of talking about how he was on the boys' island. Yeah, and this idea of the horrible kind of creeping dread that starts this early on of it's his last day as a boy but with the setup of on the day the world ended. Yes. And this idea he hadn't rushed his last day as a boy, his father had told him not to. Yeah, he'd taken care of his canoe, he could have made a serviceable one very quickly. Yeah, but he made the most of his time on the boys island. I do really like when Pratchett introduces a character alone and we get to spend a lot of time just with them and their perspective. Yeah, even when it's such a dramatic happening very quickly.

Yes, but it's all from him. And yeah, the whole creeping dread of this opening section with Mal, this idea of the Shining Silver Thread and eventually losing it, as you talked about the not being able to pull the Alaki from the tree. Yeah, yeah. And then straight away after you've met him as a boy, and I know the point is he doesn't immediately become a man as he sees it, but he is immediately faced with this tragedy that completely changes this character. Yeah, he suddenly becomes an entirely different person to who he was on the boy's island in a different way to how he was supposed to. All of the description as he goes through

this tragedy is kind of beautifully abstract. This realization when he's on the island that he is the only one left and his role in that because they would have all been on the beach waiting for him specifically. It's like the book doesn't want to spell it out like that. It almost wants to give him a tiny bit more innocence in the narrative, just let that last a tiny second longer. MS. Yes, definitely. And yeah, oh god, obviously the scene I think that sticks in a lot of people's minds of the clearing up and becoming grey male. MS. Yeah, he felt himself become two people. One of them, a grey body made of mud, began to look for the bodies that the wave hadn't taken. It did it as carefully and gently as it could,

while the other male stayed deep inside, curled in a ball doing the dreaming. I've talked a lot about how Pratchett writes grief because he does it so incredibly well. And I think this is one of the very best just pictures of the horror and the hugeness and again, the abstractness of it, but also the way protecting yourself. Yeah. I mean, this is just on a totally different level to anything he's written before on the scale of it, isn't it? Yeah. Of what one boy dealing with the loss of everybody, literally everyone in his world.

Literally his entire nation. Yeah. But yeah, just incredibly done. And the little, again, yeah, the abstractness, the little hints of Daphne as the ghost girl who tried to talk to him. JG The moment of his body telling himself, no, not this one, this one you feed and take care of, and you realize he's about to just follow everyone he's put into the water. ADELE Yeah, and the care he takes, the cutting the spirit holes and tying them properly and giving them to the sea properly.

JG Oh, God, but he finds the piglet and it can't be food, not this sad, betrayed thing. And the idea of betrayed that early on before Mel's really started actually processing it and coming to the place he gets to with his relationship to the gods. He says, let the gods sort it out. I'm too tired. Yes. Piglet's going to heaven. Sorry chaps. Yep. All becoming a dolphin, one of those. Yeah.

But then you get this contrast when he saves Daphne and he gets his refrain that becomes his for the rest of the book, this does not happen. Yes, this does not happen. And he starts sort of fighting back against the horror that's happened by not letting more of it happen. Does not happen. Daphne does not die. Does not happen. Sticks so much that he does the thing with the pig to keep the baby alive. He's not going to let the baby die. Does not happen. Emma P Yeah. Although it begins cataclysmically, it seems like still a fairly slow beginning

because you get the scenes scene by scene at the start. And I do like that. And it doesn't fast forward a couple of weeks till later. Yeah, you're with him every moment of him processing this and surviving and doing all these things that have to be done and it's another really good grief thing of just, okay, I can process one small thing at a time. I can't really deal with the fact I've lost everyone I've ever known but I can deal with the fact I need to make a fire and the description of building the fire is so beautiful and methodical, he makes the piles and the small one and it grows and grows and he feeds it. Yeah and like the grey wall crumbling and letting the memories earth god yeah just

beautiful beautiful we can go through it line by line but we won't don't worry listeners you do have to read the book yourself. A bigger picture thing with Mao I noticed and I noticed it with the conversation he's having, the real conversation he's remembering with Naui and Naui says I could see you thinking, not many people do and when they laughed old Naui you didn't want to but you laughed anyway to be like them and it's something Pratchett writes really well is this character who's not even necessarily more intelligent but just thinks in a different direction enough. Like Brother is another one. I can't do a non-disclosable book without comparing characters sometimes. It's a sickness.

Well, no, I'm sorry, but there's a lot of small gods in this book. Oh, there's so much small gods in this book. I think Brother's very fair. Obviously in a very different level of the gods talking back obviously in a very different level of the gods talking back. Yeah, very different flavor of the gods talking back. Very chatty was on. The chatty little daughters. But as well as brother, this idea of like the ones who think in the different directions, slightly more intelligent, it's what Vimes looks for in

the people he employs. He wants the people who don't just go, oh, there's the footprint outside and therefore that's the murderer. Jessi Mm-hmm. That's what Granny sees in Tiffany a lot of the time. Ange Yes, very Tiffany. Jessi Like, I can see you thinking. I'm better at it so I know what you're thinking, but I see it. Ange Yeah, I love it as a theme for what she does

and I love my own as a character. Jessi Tying in with Nawee, just, yeah, you're right, it does. It's a lovely setup for showing like a parallel almost, just as a here's somebody else who thinks in a tricksy way, or a tricksy way, but who can see outside of the boundary. Yeah, the particular way that most of the people of the nation have sort of stuck to certain beliefs. But yeah, more on that later.

More on that, and many much on that. Many and much. You think I'm not going to talk about belief, lads? Oh, maybe the power of belief, perhaps. Surely not. Call that power of belief. It's not power of belief. That's a spoon.

Joanna's very serious. But erm, ermontrude. Slash Japhne. I get why she's not happy with ermontrude as a name, but I love the name ermintrude. I do like the name ermintrude, however once practice said it sounded like somebody who just piss about getting the scones wrong, he's not wrong. No, yeah, absolutely. Ermintrude is the name of someone who got the scones wrong. It's not entirely her fault that there was a dead lobster in the flower to be fair.

No, that whole bit makes me laugh so much. It really does. He kept a lobster to keep the worst of the weevils out. It didn't sound right to her. We meet her from Mal's perspective and it takes a minute to get into her head. So we have her as the ghost girl and then this thing offering him fire with things on her feet like black pods with no toes. One of our favorites, the defamiliarization. Also something Pratchett does really well in this, I love, is you have two people speaking two different languages but it's written

in English for the reader and Pratchett is really good at differentiating when they're understanding each other and how they're using these different terms and different languages. LW Yeah, it is weirdly unconfusing. JG Yeah, and it's a rare writer, because you do see stuff like this in books, because you've got lots of people who speak different languages, but it's a rare writer who can do it like this well. And it's a really nice detail. Anyway, yeah, with Daphne, we get fun etiquette stuff, which we know I love. She's worrying about having a chaperone, which is so she's got a sweary parrot and a corpse.

Yeah, I think between them. Yeah. On chaperone. That adds up to a chaperone. She's worried about how to politely address an invitation while on a desert island. She's getting emotional over tea. Mal clearly can't understand a word she's saying and this huge sort of breakdown and ending with, oh dear, and I completely forgot to lay out the napkin rings. Whatever must you think of me? That really was, you know, nail in the coffin, wasn't it? Big grief. Oh, and there's a slightly laser in this section. There's a great moment when she comes running up to Mal with the book, she's realised they could use this to learn to speak to each other.

And he's sitting down on a tree stump or something or a rock and he stays sitting. On the anchor, I think. Oh yeah, on the god anchor. And he stays sitting when she comes running up and she does a meaning little cough. And then catches herself and realises she's being really silly. Yeah, yeah. Like how could you possibly? And you get a lot of her backstory, all this intelligence and curiosity, which is a character trait we love growing up going to the Royal Society, which gives us the great line, it turns out that a nine-year-old girl who had blonde hair and knew what the procession of the

equinoxes was, could ask hugely bearded scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you can have the whole universe? It's far more interesting. You didn't have to muck it out once a week. But we get a lot of foreshadowing in this section. Obviously we'll talk about this more in a later section, but Daphne's own relationship to grief and her father's to an extent as well. This is quite classic children's story, isn't it? You get the growing up in the wealthy household with a doting mother and father, you get the sudden death of one or both of the parents, and then you get the sudden change in lifestyle. Yes.

Yeah. It's, the parents are dead in Narnia, but the evacuation is a very similar thing. All the Disney's. All the Disney's. All the Disney's. And I'm sure Disney took the trope from a million tales. But yeah, the bit, yeah, no, I don't like talking, you know, I hate it when people learn childbirth and things. Yes, I am aware you hate it. We will talk about it more next week, but there's a line in her remembering her father arguing with his mother about going away, taking this position. And he shouts, perhaps

at the other end of the world, there is a place where the screaming can't be heard and I might find it in my heart to grant God absolution. And it's such a great parallel to Mal's grief and how these ideas of loss and faith and how they interact with each other. Jess There's a lot of parallels, I think, between her father and the two kids. Obviously she inherits a lot of it, but between Mao as well with the too many questions and not winning the argument against the person who believes. Yes. Yeah.

With, you know, the grandmother in this case, who's refused to let Daphne learn anything helpful because Daphne is 139th in line to the throne. Her father being, no, she'd be 140th. 138 people have to die for her father to become king. So he would be 139th in line and she's 140th. Sorry, live maths on the truth shall make you fret. I was about to say, this is a bit Napkin Rings on the shipwreck. It's important. Napkin Rings on the shipwreck I like as a replacement for deck chairs on the Titanic, by the way. Yep, Napkin Rings on the shipwreck.

Her grandma. And of course, she has no business looking at the means of Jupiter, whose home life was so different from that of our own dear King. Such a great line. A lady should never lift anything heavier than a parasol and should certainly never set foot in the kitchen unless it was to make economic charitable soup for the deserving poor. Economic charitable soup, my favourite. The thing is I can really picture like a mid-19th century cookbook with a recipe titled economic

charitable soup. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Daphne in general, we've talked about Pratchett's writing of young women and girls before and how he just can't seem to find it in himself to write them as anything but very stalwart and smart. And he said something about it in the speech I was quoting earlier actually. He said, she would have to be prim and by the standards of the trouser wearing peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, well brought up. But under those stiff Victorian clothes, she would be as tough as nails. I took that as a given because my creativity always fails

me if I try to write a soppy girl. I just can't. You could poke me with sticks and it would have no effect. Oh, a girl can sometimes start out soppy as anything, but as soon as she finds out it doesn't work, she tends to become a reasonably close relative of Miss P. CHARLEYY I see Magrat donning the armour. Wonderful. So yeah, speaking of the grandmother, her introduction when she gets on the ship, Mr. Black's description of her, a mixture of Bodasir without the chariot, Catherine de Medici without the poisoned rings, and Attila the Hun without his wonderful sense

of fun. Don't play cards with her because she cheats like a Mississippi bust out dealer. Keep Sherry away from her, do everything she says and we might all live. And obviously I dislike the grandmother trying to take away all curiosity from Daphne and I don't agree with anything she stands for but at the same time slightly goals. CHARLEYY That one little paragraph description was a little bit like weather wax on the canal boat coded. GERMES Oh very. Something about Pratchett, he puts an old woman on a boat, she gets really good at cards.

CHARLEYY That old trope. GERMES If I had a quid. CHARLEYY It would be nautical women card jarks. G card sharks. I mean it would only be two quid, but it's weird that it's happened twice. Oh fuck, what's that, a Tumblr post? There's so many. I want to just get a line about that in my new book. Oh fantastic. Little drop there. Little plug corner.

So Ataba, I'm going to save Kale and Pilu and Milo for next week because we just meet them at the end of this section. A little drop there, little plug corner. So, Ataba, I'm going to save Karley and Pilou and Milo for next week because we just meet them at the end of this section. But Ataba, who arrives on the island with the women and baby and he's absolutely unable to comprehend what's happened and that everyone's gone. Yeah, it takes a little while to, what does it turn it the right way to fit into his head? He wondered how many times he would have to say this before the old man managed to find the right space for it in his bald head. It's an interesting conversation because for Mao every time he has to say it, he has to relive the grief, but for this guy he has

to get there, he has to get to the point to grieve. He becomes a really interesting foil for Mao, he becomes this religious foil. He gives Mao something to debate with and he gives Mao something other than himself to push against, which helps him settle into how he's feeling and what he's starting to believe more. Yeah, I like how he was set up for the first like, page or two of dialogue as just this like stupid overly religious man. But then Mao calms down for a second, apologises and the guy said, we'll shout at the gods. Yeah, I shout at them every morning.

Obviously he's still human, he's going through shit. We're seeing it through Mao's view as well and we have to remember that Mao is going to see him as worse than he is for a second there. Yeah, it's during one of the conversations with the turbo where he starts saying, you know, you don't have a soul, you're a demon. I don't know what's behind your eyes. And there's a great line about the I don't know what's behind my eyes, but it's angry. Okay.

Yeah, in case you haven't mentioned Pratchett's really good at writing anger. Come out once or twice, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. This is a particularly fiery one. Yes, and a beautiful depiction of it. Now we, I know we talked about him earlier, I wanted to mention briefly the shark idea, the word that stops the shark. He tests it three times. It's very taking a scientific hypothesis and testing for proof. And that's a nice-

And at the same time, lovely fairy tale three times. Yes. Rule of three. Rule of three, scientific method and fairy tales. Once more for luck. Yeah. In fact, I think I talked about that. Oh, this might have been a rabbit hole actually, but when I talked about how threes became

such an important prominent number, part of it was testing is once could be random, twice could be random, three is the beginning of a pattern. Emma P Yeah, I think this is really interesting, taking a character who is so deeply invested in God and faith and showing his death in the opening act of this story about gods and faith. Yeah. And in a completely sympathetic, the book is not laughing at him for having this belief. No, it's showing him as this wild hero almost.

Yeah, tied to the helm, singing. Yeah, laughing at the face of death while singing to God. Yeah. He was holding the helm as an act of faith to show God he would not desert him. There's some great descriptive moments. I found myself wanting to read the description of the ship going through the forest over and over again. One short line I picked helped branches crack like gunshots under the keel. Oh, God. It is beautiful. And yeah, the description of him singing and I had to go and look up the original hymn so I had a better idea of how it and I had to go and look up the original

hymn so I had a better idea of how it... So I could read it again with the tune. I had some as well, it wasn't one I know. No, many years ago actually, apparently it's really well known but it's a naval hymn. These days I think sung by the Navy quite a lot. Yeah, I don't go to a lot of naval masses. Again Francine, I'm not the most nautical. No, I know, I know. And that's why you never cheat at cards. Yes. Oh yeah, and Hale rattled off his hat. St. Delano's fire glowed on the tip of every mast and crackled on the captain's beard. Yeah, no, he's just this fantastical figure. Well, at the same time being completely

human. Yeah, very human. Yeah, no, he's got the way Captain Samson is sort of, oh, Roberts and everyone has to go and swear in a bucket of water. Yeah, yeah. He's got to be for, I think, ratio of screen or book time to awesomeness. Memorability. Good memorability. He's very high up there, high ranking. High ranking side character. High ranking Captain Roberts. So Mr. Black and the Gentleman of Last Resort. Again, it's

just a really nice world detail. This idea of serving the crown and having the crown as an entity. Yes. Having a Mr. Black. Let's be insufferable with this world parallels. Very nice. Thief of time. Yeah. There's also some subtle hints of veterinary and how Mr Black very calmly, quietly gives Captain Samson his entire life story as an intimidation tactic. It's a very nice detail. And speaking of Captain Samson, I just wanted to mention him for this line of Captain Samson had a mental picture of what would happen if Mrs

Samson ever found out he had turned down the chance of her becoming Lady Sampson. It didn't bear thinking about that fixable energy. Yeah, fixable energy. The best kind. I support it. Ugh, that whole scene was fucking mental, isn't it? It's such a great introduction to this world that's not quite our world. Yeah, yeah, it's actually, yeah, it's really good. Like, here's where we're at. Yeah. And it sets it really well within history. If you're going with the parallel of our world history, you've got things about saying like the situation in Crimea, so we know it's 19th century.

Yeah. And then a little bit later, we get to talk about Darwin. Yes, we get Darwin and Newton. But it's, yeah, I think having that scene is a really nice introduction of, okay, so it's sort of our world, different history, bit parallel before we go to the island which could be realm world or could be Discworld. Yeah. It's the Russian flu and it has done much more of a number than the Spanish flu did in our world. And pink disinfectant, I don't know whether that was a thing or not, but I like it. It's a thing in this one.

Yes. And of course, Samson's biblical. Yes. Probably in a relevant way. But he's having it looked at. Samson and Delilah, Samson is, I think that's the one who had to cut all his hair off. That sounds right. Sorry, we're recording on Good Friday. Don't expect me to remember. Don't worry about it.

It means sun is the last one of the, was the last of the judges of the ancient Israelite. He's an Azerite, immense strength, cut off the hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one. Massacred a Philistine army with a donkey's jawbone. Yes, yeah, he did do that. He's got something to do. He's stermonic. I'm sure he's got something to do with

the dead lion on the golden syruptans. Yes, he killed the lion. Sampson's fight with the lion is a horrible painting I'm now just looking at from the Wikipedia page. All right, I'll link this and we can stop talking about horrible Sampson. I'm not giving listeners any more context. We've talked about the golden syrup tins enough. Yeah. I think that was in the beginning of a rabbit hole. I'll link to it. Don't worry. Right. Sorry. Gods. Let's talk about the gods quickly. Imo. Imo. In my opinion.

Imo? Yeah. Imo. Imo. Yeah. We get this incredible creation myth. It's all very beautifully written, but we have this idea of an eventually absent God, he sets things up and he leaves and throws a few gods kind of over his shoulder as he goes to keep an eye on things. But they still talk to him. Yes. This is part of the creative myth that he's absent, but they still blame him, talk to

him. Yeah. He's believed in despite a lack of presence. Yeah, which is again a very practical thing. Yeah. See also Nuggan. Yes. Om for most of them. And yeah, as a contrast, we have La-Kaha, I think.

La-Kaha. La-Kaha, one of those. God of Death made from like very different flavour of psychobomb. Yes, not a psychobomb, I would argue. Kills. Doesn't just guide people to the next life, decides when people die. Kills people. I think it's a very, very different type of death to write about, which is very fun. Yes.

It is more aggressive, but I don't think he always kills. I think he is also there to see to the next life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He somewhat sits in judgment. You have this from the opening bit of The Creation Myth. When I find a creature who was driven, who has become more than the mud from which they were made, then I will open a door for them into your perfect world. And they will no longer be creatures of time, for they will wear stars, which is just a great line. Yes. Yes, he's a psychopomp and a death god all mixed up together.

Yes. We do like a psychopomp and a death god all mixed up together, don't we? We've always had to. Yeah, I've got it on a mug. Locations! Location, well, nation. Name of the thing is a thing. It is the location. It is the location. But it's a concept as much as it's a place. People would live and die but there would always be a nation and this ties into the belief stuff again. Mao

needs to be the one to remember so that nation remains. I like how it's fleshed out a little bit with the, this is the strong island in the area. It's made of stone. It has fresh water. It's like this little Eden. I felt that was, the way that was written was really interesting. So you have this list of all the things that makes nation the strongest, that as you say, the stone and the water and the pigs and the vegetable ability to have all the different vegetables. And at the end it says, and so nation is the richest and strongest and people said it was blessed and it had the god anchors. So it's this, here is why it's strongest, people therefore believe it is blessed and that's why it's strongest.

And it plays into those two. Yeah, secular logic. Yeah, it's great. It's very cool. As a sense of space, I think we establish how much this place was an anchor to Mal really quickly when he's going through this early grief thing. Find food, find water, find shelter. These were the things you had to do in a strange place and this was a strange place and he'd been born here. It says so much about what

the wave has done to the place. Yeah. And just right away he goes into the river, which is no longer clean water. Everything above a certain point is more or less the same still. But yeah, just this this whole bit he'd lived in the village, it's gone, the beach is fucked up. And he can see the overlay of where he might replant at some point, which is a lovely little visual. Towards the end, he's starting to put up fences again and construct it into a physical place.

Little shout out to the maps at the beginning of the book, by the way, love a little map. Oh, I do love a map. We have the woman's place within the nation as well, which is so much interesting writing about. The way it becomes so, partly because he's scared of his wingo being falling off. This place he can't go, which is described as like the moon, he knew where it was, but didn't even think about going there. Emma P all of the women's secrets. Yes. And then the sudden realization that, oh, fuck, we don't know the women's secrets. We don't know the women's secrets. Maybe we shouldn't

gender everything lads. Sorry, that was just me slipping out there. But then you have the small moment when Otabu and Carly have turned up, not Carly, the unspeaking women have turned up and Daphne sits with her in the blankets and the mouth looks over, they're making a woman's place. I thought that was a very sweet moment. It is sweet. Yeah. Bigger picture, it was very weird talking about this. I've been catching up on Omnibus podcast today. So I literally just listened to the episode about the Guano Islands and the colonization of the South Pacific via bird poo. Obviously we're not in the South Pacific here, we're in the South Pelagic.

CHARLEYY PELAGIC Pelagic. Very different. CHARLEYY PELAGIC Or parallel. Or a little bit over there. CHARLEYY PELAGIC It doesn't matter. Get out of jail for eating parallel universe. Very a wizard did it since then, doesn't it? CHARLEYY PELAGIC Big wizard did it and ran away. CHARLEYY PELAGIC Parallel universe. Thief of time messed everyone up. It was the gasoline season. All right, should we take a break? Yeah.

So, little bits we liked. Do you want to start, Francie, and you're right at the beginning? Literally the first line, in the time when things were otherwise and the moon was different, as we know, big fan of fairy tales starting in this kind of way. Yes, a long time ago, when, or once upon a time, when. And I love how it's different in different cultures. And I did my usual like looking for examples thing. And I found this Reddit thread from Ask Europe, which had some a couple of cool ones I hadn't seen before. So in Belgium, somebody said, around here it's basically once upon a time, sometimes followed by very long ago when animals still spoke and or in a land far away from here. Cooler still, from a Romanian folk tale. Once upon a time, as it has never

been, if it hadn't happened, it wouldn't be told. When the poplars grew apples and the willows grew wallflowers, when the bears fought by wagging their tails, when the wolves and the lambs grabbed each other by the necks and kissed, becoming friends, when the fleas got horse-shoed with 99 kilograms of iron and jumped into the glory of the sky, bringing back stories for us, when the flies wrote on the wall, he who doesn't believe it is even more of a liar." Wow. Maybe it goes hard. Yeah.

Didn't we start, I think we've had a conversation about this story opening before and we started like writing our own, didn't we? Yeah. I've got a notes file full of them every now and then. I still add to it. Yeah. Love that. Fucking love it. Not as good as that. Now I feel like I can step up my game with like whole paragraphs of bullshit. Yeah. Go Romania. It's affectionate. Let's not have an international incident. We've got to finish the podcast. Not again. How about that Magna Carta, eh? Yeah, speaking of international incidents. I love this idea.

Intranational. You don't think barons who could hardly write their own name could come up with a complete set of sensible rules for the proper running of a large country for the rest of history, do you? Their clerks put together the full working Magna Carta a month later. It's 70 times bigger, but it is foolproof. Unfortunately, the French have a copy." Jess 1 Mm. Jess 1 Practically does have a healthy respect for Clark.

Jess 1 He does have a very good respect for Clark. Magna Carta is tied to our local history as well. Some of it wasn't signed here, it was drawn up here. Bits of it were at the Abbey. But yes, I just like the idea of someone quietly going and being competent about it later after all the shouting's been done. And I like jokes about the French. The idea of someone French becoming king. We're best of the chums with the French government on this one. They don't want a Frenchman on any throne. Who wouldn't do for our Gallic brethren? No. They killed the last one. We can't be having with this. Kalintir.

Kalintir, yes. Kalintir. Kalintir. Genius that I am while reading the book. I saw the chapter title as Kalintir. Went and looked up Kalintir. I need to realize it's explained on the next page. I've done that so many times in practice. I can't even tell you because I've got the fucking orfs obviously. So quote from here is sailors got calendar when they'd been becalmed at sea for too long. They'd look over the side and see instead of the ocean cool green fields. They'd leap down into them and drown. This is a concept I've definitely

come across before. I think maybe in a Narnia book? Was it in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Yes, there is something like that. And then when I was just doing a quick Google, Jonathan Swift mentions it in his poem, The South Sea Project, a couple of standards, which I thought were cool. So, by a Kalintir misled the mariner with rapture seas on the smooth oceans as your bed, enameled fields and verdant trees, enameled with little apostrophe there, little shout out to Captain Roberts. With eager haste he longs to rove in that fantastic scene and thinks it must be some enchanted grove and in he leaps and down he sinks. It's a very good poem overall

actually, I'll link to that as well. Yeah, get a bit of Jonathan Swift. Anyway, love that concept. Don't know how often it happened or whether it's like this, you know, exaggerated. Nowadays, I think if used at all refers to some kind of tropical fever madness rather than specifically sailors. Yeah, specifically sailors hallucinating fields. Yeah, yeah. What a shame. I like it being overly specific.

I feel like it's a word that Tiffany Aking would really like. Yeah. Somebody get that on a postcard to The Chalk. I hate that I'm so fucking into this world now that I was like, oh yeah, we should tell her. We should tell Tiffany. Yeah. Just for a second there, my brain was like, oh yeah, how do I? Oh. She's a fictional character. Never mind. Why do I live? Reality. I'm getting rid cully here. Anyway, Flora and Fauna. We've got lots of fun, Flora and

Fauna on this wonderful island. We've got the little crabs and we've got the pigs and we've got the pantaloon birds, obviously. But yeah, the series of footnotes that delighted me, obviously, I've already mentioned the tree climbing octopus, octopus arborei, found on the island where the sun is born in the Mothering Sunday Islands, extremely intelligent and cunning thieves. We have the sailfin crocodile, Crocodilus perosus maritimus. So Crocodilus perosus is the Latin name for saltwater crocodiles. So Crocodilus pyrosus is the Latin name for saltwater crocodiles. Travels immense distances on the surface by means of a large skinned cartilage sail to which it can by some extent steer which is actually very horrifying and I realise I hate the word cartilage. Yeah, there was some ancient reptilian, either dinosaur or a synapsid or something that had

one of those sails not for steering with. Wasn it wasn't that. I forgot what it was now. You couldn't windsurf on it. No. And if you could, you shouldn't. It's disrespectful. Ask politely before you windsurf on a crocodile. It's the original draft of Never Smile. It didn't really fit into the meeting. Or the rhyme. And the lonesome palm, which is possibly the funniest joke in the entire book, Cocos, Nucifera, Solitaria, comment over most of the pelagic, unusual in that the adult tree secretes a poison in its root, which is deadly only to other palms. So it's not unusual to find

only one such palm on the smaller islands and a thousand cartoons are therefore botanically correct. Fucking fantastic. Just working backwards from... Child-storing. Now why would this be? Beautiful. Speaking of flora and fauna actually, hermit crabs? Hermit crabs, love me a hermit crab, love me a hermit crab metaphor. Very nice idea of having to crawl between shells as a soul. It was not good to be between

souls. He'd be like, Milhegawi, the little blue hermit crab, scuttling from his shells with new one once a year, easy prey for any passing squid. I've been reading a lot about hermit crabs recently because of their adventures in human litter when they wear bits of rubbish on their backs instead of a shell. Because I found that idea very fascinating. I was going to do like a bunch of drawings of them. But then I kept reading about it. And it's really sad because a lot of them, especially certain species, actually get stuck in various bits of litter and then they die and there's been like mass die-offs. And I was like, oh, this is less fun than I thought it was. So yeah, as was this little bit I liked, now I come to think of it. However, little

blue hermit crab. And the nice parallel between the little blue hermit crab and the little blue bead that Mal had for a day's protection. Yeah. I like the idea of exploration dates on the sole protection beads. Well, it makes sense. You can't just have an everlasting sole protection bead. No, exactly. I wonder by what kind of experiment you come up with. 24 hour. Is it like the size of the bead so you can't have one that lasts longer because it'd be really heavy? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Huh. Anyway.

Well, soup. We'll think about that later. Soup on the beach. Come on everybody. I love this scene so much. This is after Daphne is nearly drowned and she wakes up and Mao has made this soup for the two of them. He probably wouldn't have made it just for himself. It was some whitefish off the reef and a handful of shellfish and some ginger from the woman's place and some taro chopped up fine to give it all some body. And Pranchard doesn't write tons about food compared to like other fantasy authors. He's not one for big depictions of feasts. Quite often when food is talked about it's used, it's a punchline.

There are some beautiful evocative moments. Obviously we just did Unseen Academical and we had the pies and the peas pudding. But often it's a punchline. It's the sausages in a bun, it's the weird uberwaldian in the food that unlike the weird Angk Moor pork food, it's the vines and the BLTs. And here it's a really beautiful moment of food being so much more than food. Because A, Mal wouldn't have made it for himself, but because there's this other person to take care of, he would have eaten something, but he's made something with flavour. He's made something that took a certain amount of care. He's added the taro root to it. He's made it more substantial. They sit and eat it together and he spits out the fish bones and she's trying to be as genteel as she can with her napkin and they start laughing. This beautiful line, sometimes you laugh

because you've got no more room for crying, sometimes you laugh because table manners on the beach are funny, and sometimes you laugh because you're alive and you really shouldn't be. And everything about the scene is so beautiful and Rob has talked about and talked about the talk he did at the British Library with Neil Gaiman, how he sees a certain amount of romcom in Nation and this is one of those beautiful scenes you start seeing the warmth and understanding grow from him. There's so much more to it than just food. It's him caring. It's him making something. Being able to care in a way he can't quite for himself. And then it's about them finding this shared thing

before they've learned to speak to each other, being able to laugh together. One of the human things is what to food and laughter shared across all cultures. So, yeah, that scene just I want to sit in it. Hmm. That's it in the soup, Joanna. It's not tidy. No, and I don't really want to sit on the sand because it's coarse and irritating and it gets everywhere.

Metaphorically. Metaphorically. Let's go on to the bigger stuff then. Do you want to start? Yeah. So I'm going on from that nicely, actually. I really love the two characters and how Pratchett's done this, especially in the context of like a children's book. The protagonist personality of a children's book are even more important than in a normal book because you are, I don't

think he's trying to impart any moral lessons particularly, but it's got to be framed in a way that has a bit of sense and justice in it because children really have an internal clock for that that I think we'll lose a little bit as we grow up. We have two children here that are perfect for the job. They're both thinkers, they're both puzzlers and that's illustrated really well in this first third of the book. You get all the bit about Daphne slash Ermin Trude being the little scientist. And then after that's taken away from her, you see her like, okay, then let's puzzle out eavesdropping on everybody from a dumb waiter. Heather Miedema Yeah, she finds her in a solar system within the house.

Emma Cunningham It really reminded me of, I was just listening to Noble Blood's episode on Ada Lovelace. Have you listened to that one yet? Emma Watson No, I haven't. I know a fair bit about Ada Lovelace. We talked about her when we were talking about Byron and the What's It's. Emma Watson Yes, exactly. Yeah, but her mother was overbearing in a different way, wanted her to be very scientific, this and the other. She reveled in her creativity. But then when her mom was away a lot, she would like to try and build this set of wings for herself and it's all written about in her letters

and everything. And I won't spoil it for you or the listeners, but I'll just link the episode in the show notes. Very cool. Anyway, she reminded me of that. And then of course you have Mao, who not only do we see puzzling out the survival basics after he's in this horrible situation. But again, you get the flashbacks to him actually thinking and thinking with questions and that being recognized by another man who's in a kind of similar brain space. And he's like, you know, with the shark thing, but that's cheating. I was like, everything's a trick. Yeah, everything's a trick. It's cheating. I was like, everything's a trick. Yeah, everything's a trick. It's great.

Yeah, I really love that. And then obviously, the bit of them then working together and working out the language. And this is after the comedy moment of the spear. The spear through the window, which I thought was very nuclear semiotics, by the way. How do you draw something in such a way? It's so clear to Daphne, and he's also very clear to Mal, that he should throw a spear at the shipwreck. It's like, okay, I guess. I can't see any other way to read this. Anyway, love that. There's another rabbit hole, by the way, listeners. Accidental plugging of the Patreon all through this episode. But yes, and then in contrast to that, they find the common ground of the birds. I'd say that's another almost universal

thing. Everybody loves a bird. And he finds something to really respect about the trials of men in the colours that they can use. Yeah, it becomes this joint thing. You see Daphne building respect for him. After first working out the words that they have in common. I love that whole thing, the idea of working out this cipher together. It makes sense but you'd end up probably doing this kind of thing over weeks or months, but in reality, but we've got two very smart children, almost, teenagers whose brains are still very elastic and who can work all this out and they're like almost supernaturally clever just for this bit. And then the little, the thud bit at the end of the laughter where he draws the curve and it's the sadness.

Yeah, she says, I think all of that means sadness. It was a wonderful curve if you didn't know what it had done. And then you kind of get pulled out of that depth just a little bit by her drawing herself next to him. And I just say, yeah, it's really lovely. And you also, I think, get to see Mao as this very anchored and methodical person. Like, for instance, the way he managed to move the god anchors by just going down again and again, moving it a little bit, going down, moving it a little bit, and then went getting the canoe in from the bit where it was imperil on the reef. Yeah, going in and sailing into the harbor.

Imperil automatically here, I'm going all Roberts. It was imperil on the reef. Yeah, going in and then sailing into the harbor. Imperil automatically here, I'm going all Roberts. It was imperil on the... What he ran was reef, don't worry about it. Panic wouldn't help here. You just had to pull it out of the churning mass of water a few inches at a time with long patient strokes, which got easier as you drove it free

until suddenly it was in calm water and moving quickly. This whole bit, all of the stuff that Mao does in all these impossible physical feats that manages into small bits and calmly reminds me very much of my husband, which I like very much. Yeah. Because of the personality trait of his, because it's very not me. And it's why Mao and Daphne play off each other so well, because he's so not given to hysterics and she is so given to crying over not putting out the napkin rings. But there's both, it's an avoidance tactic for both of them. He is being so methodical rather than confronting this big horrible thing that's put in a box in the back of his head. She is crying over napkin rings because otherwise she's got to cry over the

fact that she is lost on an island in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, and I hadn't written it down anywhere actually, but as well as the, I'm liking this emerging theme of like the basics that everyone crowds around with the food and the laughter and the basics of language and the baby and the fire, and the other one, everyone heads towards the smoke. Yes. And so it becomes a beacon, but you have this- But a threat. Yeah, but a threat. You have this underlying fear of the raiders.

Yeah. What kind of goodies have you got prepared for us? Well, I want to jump back to your point about it's all a trick, the thing with Naomi and the thing. Oh yeah, cool. Because, so you have these really strong traditions and we have, mal-delting them and as I said, this idea of belief, less power of belief so much in this, but I love crisis of faith in storytelling and what it can mean for a character and absolutely no personal relationship whatsoever there, seeing nothing.

Yeah, as far as I know, you've never had any complicated relationship with religion. Not at all. No matter what your poems say, don't listen to them, slander. Wrote my own slander, it's efficient. So you start with all of these stories of traditions and the like just really easy beliefs that Mao has, because why wouldn't you? So you have this tradition of the Boy's Island and before he goes Mao isn't certain how he'll get back in the allotted time, because he doesn't really have much in the way of tools and this seems like a kind of impossible task, but he knows he will because all the other

men of the nation have and then he gets there and he discovers the trick, the alaki and this men help other men. And it's in no way a betrayal of faith. The trick is part of the belief. It's assistance. It is a trick, but it doesn't take away from the belief that all the men who have done this are men. It's a beautiful final lesson to learn. And he now starts processing what it is to have lived with these rules and these beliefs. So he worries about going into the woman's place. And you know, you don't do that. If you do these things, you shouldn't do if these things happened. That'd be the end of everything. And then he catches himself. He's like, well, how much more of an end could everything be? There's no more people, how can there be rules? Rules can't float

around by themselves. And then later when he does go into the woman's places, oh, there are rules because I brought them with me. They're in my head, which is a very great prajati theme. Very great, Jesus. Very great. And he has the story of a Ghanu later, the chief who fought the raiders in single combat and the boys try and lift the axe and they can't and then they're told the story and then they can lift the axe. And was it really because the story made boys stronger and all was it did the old men have a trick? Was there some way of making it heavier?

Yeah. And Mal gets those doubts, but he doesn't have what he had earlier in the book, which does it matter? Like he's starting to now think that maybe this stuff does matter. So when you see him early on, he has this very easy faith, the shining silver thread would work like a God anchor. And then he goes into this numbness dealing with the bodies, which I won't dwell on because we've talked about it a lot. And it's a great, it's an incredible piece of writing, there's stuff to talk about. And the numbness slowly grows into anger. He's being shouted at by the grandfathers, which is-

Yeah, we haven't even talked about that, have we? Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to trip over the grandfathers. And yeah, they shout at him and some of it's frustrating. It's, where's our beer? Why haven't you done these chants? You must do the things that have always been done. And then it becomes more abstract. Everything, the nation was, you are, well, you are the nationese. And you realise that just as Mal starts getting angry and that brings him out of his numbness, the grandfathers, or this idea of the grandfathers, whatever it is, his mouth starts getting angry and that brings him out of his numbness, the grandfather's or this idea of the grandfather's whatever it is, there's fear there. Because if the nation goes away, if the nation isn't remembered, they're not remembered. And if we think of

this as a power of belief thing, if they manifest through being believed in, then yeah, there is that fear. It's the fear of, it's Om's fear of being forgotten. It is very Om and brother, isn't it? So Om and brother. I kind of prefer Om to the Grandfather's, not gonna lie. Yeah, he's more of a likeable antagonist. But then alongside this doubt, Mal starts thinking of it in relation to being a child versus being a man because he's stuck in this limbo, liminal space. Liminal.

Yay, I managed to squeeze some liminal in. Check. We need a bingo card. Yeah. It's a powerful leaf. Liminal space. Footnote. I can't believe our listeners haven't made a true show make you fret bingo card yet. Yeah. I'm going to yell at you like the grandfathers. Where's Joanna's beer? Where's our bingo card? So you have this tradition of keeping the nation alive. Mal remembers when he's a kid, the boys going up to the grandfather's cave and then running away. And then he lay in

this corner while the boys recounted how scary it was and how brave they were and wondered how many times this had been done, the story had been told to make big boys feel brave and little boys wet themselves. Yeah, yeah. He sees how a story is made. Yes. And he starts thinking about what else might be a story. So he starts thinking of these theological questions. Why do things end? How do they start? Why do good people die? How does a dead man become a living dolphin? That one was particularly interesting because he bounces off it almost doesn't he? Like,

no, I need to believe this one still. Yes. How does a dead man become a living dolphin? But that was a child's question, wasn't it? The kind you shouldn't ask, the kind that was silly or wrong. If you ask why too much, you were given chores to and told that's how the world is. And I think this is really interesting. The idea of being questioning, of being curious, of not just continuing in the same cycle and doing things is considered childish behaviour. It's not lies to children in the science of Discworld sense, but it is. It's a little crab-buckety.

It is a little bit crab-buckety. But like thought-c crab-buckety. It is a little bit crab-buckety. But like thought-crowed-buckety. But we think of, I think, maturity from our perspective as you grow up, you start to get curious, you start to ask questions because that's how you learn. I think that's partly because of how we were brought up. Yes. I think there are a lot of people who do see the because I said so is still the way to answer children.

Yeah. There was a TikTok video I saw very recently, this is very much an intersection of your interests. It was a stitch with this original poster, who was saying, I don't know why my kid keeps like, her 17 year old son keeps like challenging me on all this stuff. I keep telling him like, why do you always have to ask questions about sexuality and gender? And he asked me, why can't men paint their fingernails? And I say, because they don't, men don't paint their fingernails. Whatever. That's the way the world is. Why do you have to keep asking questions? And

it's so this. Yeah, it is absolutely this. But it's so ingrained in Mal, so he keeps pushing aside his own doubts even as we see them building and building. Why did he even wonder if it wasn't true that we were dolphins, Imo made us into man? If that wasn't true, there was just the dark water and nothing was anything. And that fear, that precipice of being on the edge of pushing past belief into curiosity is terrifying because at first is an abyss. Yeah, yeah. And it's not as solid as faith. Like you get this whole thing about Daphne's grandmother just not understanding somebody and drafting her. Yeah, because that's not a thing that happens.

Yeah. But no, no, I talk. I believe what I say is correct. So, let's work from there. She is completely unwavering. And this idea of loss of faith is really, because faith is so ingrained in comfort, in ritual, in I can do this and this will make things feel better. And as someone who has experienced belief and then lost faith, I can, you know, it is difficult you find yourself missing the comfort of ritual, but you can't find the comfort in it once you stop believing in it. Jess Something, something ex-Catholics turn into witches.

Jess Yeah, exactly. It is why ex-Catholics tend to turn into, tend towards something else ritualistic. And if you're going to go not Christian but has a lot of ritual, it's going to involve some pentagrams and candles. Jess And still less tedious than math. Still less tedious than math. Less like stand up, sit down, kneel, stand up, sit down, kneel. So much of that. That's why Catholics have got dodgy knees. Right, no, I'm wondering off. We're going to get back. We're going to get back. Dodgy knees and ritualistic tendencies go hand in hand. We've always had so.

So Mao is pushing aside these doubts. He starts getting really frustrated thinking about the god anchors and why the gods aren't floating away even though they live in the sky. And then he's thinking, you know, these are the gods that are meant to look after us because Emo made them. Would he have made useless gods? And then this great line, there it was, out of the darkness inside. Another thought that he wouldn't have even known how to think a few days ago and so dangerous he wanted to get it out of his head as soon as possible. And I think it's an incredible thing this book does from start to finish, but how much of it we get to see in this opening section because we spend so much time alone with Mao, as I said right at the beginning of the episode, that you watch grief turn to numbness, turn to anger and doubt, and you as a reader almost root

for the loss of faith just because you know if he could push past it into curiosity, there's so much more he could find. But at the same time, is this the time? Because you see the benefit in the ritual, you see the benefit in him having the ritual of cutting the spirit hole, of tying the arms to the body and of taking them to the water. He knows what to do. Exactly. And if he hadn't, that would have been a lot harder. Making the beer. And it's that same comfort of ritual is in him building the thwire methodically

and cooking for someone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cooking is very, methodical thing actually, isn't it? Yeah. As long as you don't pick something ridiculous. Learned that the hard way in the past. Yeah. If you've never made choux pastry- Rososso, perfect. Rososso, perfect, very methodical. Yeah.

Roasting- I haven't even tried choux pastry. Yeah, if you've never made choux pastry before, it's not a comforting process, like a first time thing. I say that someone who broke a piping bag earlier and had to clean quite a lot of chew pastry off the floor. I've gone on a tangent. Point is, what a good book. That was me, sorry. What a good book. Terry Pratchett. I've got some of it left still.

Which is nice. We've got quite a lot of it left. You know what? That Terry Bratchett, I reckon he wasn't a bad writer, you know. That is something we always say. Yeah. Controversial statement on The True Shall Make You Threat, a Discworld recap podcast. On episode 139 of The True Shall Make You Threat. We have decided. If you've gotten this far.

Terry Bratchett is quite a good writer. I was about to say, I hope we're on the same page, but for once we definitely are because it's a chapter. We are. Francine, have you got an obscure reference for me? I have and I think you'll like it. So the whole thing about the sweet Judy being propelled into the jungle, by the way, I practically mentioned in an interview that I listened to and then again the speech I keep quoting, that a steamship had, this had happened during the Krakatoa eruption.

Nice. That a ship had been propelled several miles inland. And so I went for a little look-see, came across a book called Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded, fantastic book title. Excellent. Which is a very cool book. I haven't finished it yet, but I did skip ahead so I could learn this bit properly. It was a Dutch ship called the Bero, maybe? Bero? That sounds a bit Dutch. And this is a bit of a long bit. I'll try and paraphrase as we go. But it says, any doubts about the power of this single

awful wave would be dispelled later by the discovery of a single compelling piece of evidence, the position of the Dutch steam gunship the Bero. The brief fame of this doughty little craft provides a singular measure of the ocean's ferocity. The ship, well and truly stranded but very little damaged, a mile and a half up the Kurapan River. Hunks of rusting iron remained in the jungle until the 1980s. And so the ship was lifted up on high by one of the 7.45 a.m. waves and then the moorings springed one by one. These are chains, heavy chains. The ship broke free of her buoy and was transported high on the crest of the mighty wall of green

water. She was swept westwards for a quarter of a mile until, as the wave broke, she was crashed down precipitously on the shore at the mouth of the Coropan River. It is thought that this fearful crash in which the vessel remained upright killed all of the crew, but it wasn't at the end of the ship's nightmare. A great wave of 11.03 a.m. hit. The ship was picked up once again and carried westward for the two miles. It crashed down when the wave was spent about 60 feet above the level of the sea. She lay a skew across the river, forming a bridge. She was upright once again in the carbon tomb for the 28 members of the crew. She was found and inspected the following months by the crew of a rescue ship.

She lies almost completely intact. Only the front of the ship is twisted a little to the port, the back of the ship, a little starboard. The engine room is full of mud and ash. The engines themselves were not damaged very much, but the flywheels were bent by the repeated shocks. It might be possible to float her again." But nobody tried because sliding all the way back to sea felt like a bashed up ship, not really. Yeah. Emma So the barrel remained where she was thrown,

lying as water the river for the better part of the next century, picked apart by scavengers over the years like a carcass rotting quietly in the steam and sun." Wow. Right? Incredible. This is a really cool book for this. This is something I've talked about before in the blind research little rabbit hole thing I did. But practice quote about this, I said,

it seems to me that I've always known that the tidal wave after Krakatoa sent a steamship a couple of miles into the rainforest. It's one of those things you remember. And ever since I heard it, I've cherished the word Callender, which ties back there. But he was saying that this whole book had been like this emptying out of a particular filing cabinet in his head of like all these various facts he knew about this, that and the other in this time period in the age of steam and this and that. And it's really cool. Yeah, so I think I'm going to be spot for choice for Orfs, but I thought that was particularly delightful when I came across it in an interview. I just say delightful, awful, obviously. Everybody died. But a very

OODA fucking thunk moment. Yeah. And there's something about the miles that puts it into such an incredible perspective. Right. Anyway, that's nowhere near everything we could say about the first five chapters of Nation. But we don't want to put out a three hour podcast. But we will be back next week with the next five chapters of Nation. So starting at chapter six, going through to chapter 10, inclusive. Until next week, dear listener, you can join our Discord, link down below, you can follow us on Instagram at The Truth Shall Make You Fret, on Twitter and Blue Sky at Make You Fret Pod, on Facebook at The Truth Shall Make You Fret, join our subreddit rslash ttsmyf, email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks and hermit crabs at the truthshallmakeyoufretpod.gmail.com

and if you want to support us financially go to patreon.com forward slash forward slash the truthsh the truth shall make you frail. You can exchange your hard earned pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. Until next time, dear listener, don't let us detain you. I'm gonna go make lobster scones. Okay, have fun with that.