Hub_82 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi

Nation

reviewed by patrick mahon by Terry Pratchett

Doubleday

rrp £16.99

The first thing to say about Nation is that it is not the 32nd Discworld novel. The second thing to say is that you shouldn’t hold that against it. It may not be the next in that repeatedly inventive series of fantasy

novels. But it is nonetheless a fantasy, this time based on a parallel Earth that recalls Britain’s imperial history during the mid-19th century.

At the beginning of Nation, we meet Mau, a young man returning to his island home in the middle of the Great Southern Pelagic (read Pacific) Ocean, having spent the last month alone on a nearby island for his coming-of-age rite. He is looking forward to seeing the whole tribe on the beach, ready to welcome him home, now he’s a man.

Disaster strikes when a massive tsunami crashes into his canoe – but, being in a small boat, he survives. When he regains consciousness, he manages to find his way back to his island. But nobody is there to welcome him. His family, his friends, everyone he knows – all have been drowned by the tsunami.

For a novel aimed at young adults, this is a very hard-hitting start to the story. And, for many of us, it will immediately bring to mind television pictures from Boxing Day 2004, when hundreds of thousands of people were killed by the tsunami that hit South-east Asia – although Pratchett has been keen to stress that the idea for Nation pre-dates that tragedy by some time. Regardless, there’s some very strong imagery in here.

While Mau is tidying up the wreckage of his village, which mostly involves burying bodies at sea, he comes across a large boat which has been shipwrecked by the tsunami. And – paralleling his situation – the only survivor from this ship is a young English girl called Daphne, who panics on his approach, and tries to shoot him, thankfully with a waterlogged pistol. After this inauspicious start, Mau and Daphne become friends, and set about … surviving.

As time moves on, a few more survivors from nearby islands arrive, and so the task of building a new Nation falls to Mau and Daphne. But at every stage, Mau is haunted by voices in his head: the dead village elders, telling him what to do, demanding that he pay tribute to gods that he no longer believes in, and trying to stop him from doing things his way. But Mau will not be cowed…

An issue explored throughout the book is how religious faith is tested by natural disasters. For Mau, any faith he might have had is destroyed with the Nation: he is angry with the gods for killing almost everyone he cared for, and sees no reason to pay them any further attention. But one of the other survivors is an old priest called Ataba, whose faith is reinforced by this demonstration of the gods’ power over the elements. I felt that the arguments between Mau and Ataba, as they slowly learn to respect each other’s point of view, were some of the best written exchanges in the book.

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