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Mort Book Review

Mort is a 1987 comic fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett. It is the fourth entry in the Discworld series and a flawed, but ambitious one.

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“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever.

Have you thought of going into teaching?“

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This is the first book about Death himself as he takes Mort to be his apprentice and accompany him on his job duties. This is the basic premise behind this very ambitious and dark story, one that is different than all of its predecessors for better and for worse. It’s stronger than the first two books, but I found ‘Equal Rites’ to be more interesting in characters, plot and tone to me personally.

This is a surprisingly mature and dark novel in terms of its subject matter and themes. It’s all about death for sure, but it’s also about the inevitability of death and how you cannot really change that outcome when it naturally arrives. There is a lot of comedic sensibility to this novel as is the case with all Discworld books, but for the most part it was darker in tone than usual, which took me by surprise. I prefer the lighter tone myself, but I did admire the effort here.

The conflict that arises in the first half of the novel is fantastic and very well thought out. But eventually how it was concluded wasn’t the greatest. It fell into that Marvel-like problem of focusing too much on different timelines and realities, which made that ending a bit messy in my eyes. But the fantasy ideas here worked and were quite unique for the time.

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The characterization is pretty slight in this instance. Yes, Death is an iconic character. I found the dichotomy of his colder side and his more human side that is present at times quite interesting. He is by far the best reason to see this book and some of his lines were not just fascinating, but also genuinely funny.

But Mort himself was quite uninteresting and weakly developed. He is the protagonist of the story, yet he felt distant and thinly realized. Others are also underdeveloped with Albert having a solid arc, but being underutilized. Ysabell is also nowhere near as interesting as the author thinks she is and that relationship was rushed, though it had its moments.

Mort was actually incredible in its first hundred or so pages. Had it retained that level of uniqueness, engagement and coziness, it would have been my favorite entry in the series published up until this point. But it did not sadly. The second half was messier, structurally uneven and featuring way too many characters, plot points and action that cluttered it way too much.

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The descriptions are excellent, though. The imagery is frequently outstanding. The ending worked as it hinted on growth for the Death character and it was just a beautiful, earnest way to conclude the story, one that I did not see coming but enjoyed nonetheless. It’s not a well paced novel at all, but it does feature phenomenal dialogue and writing from Pratchett, who always excels at humorous lines too. Those aren’t in abundance here, but the book did make me smile at times for sure. The attention to detail and world building were great, but more care should have been put into the plot and the characters.