‘The Last Hero’ – Terry Pratchett (Gollancz)

I used to love the Discworld books when I was (a lot) younger, up to and including deliberately losing the family Christmas game of Monopoly just so I could get back to whatever the latest paperback was. As I got older though, and the lens of the Discworld turned on our world instead of the fantasy genre, I gradually stopped reading. If I wanted to see the real world, well… I’d just look out of the window.

And then it all turned full circle. The last (utterly horrible, yes I’m looking at you 2017…) few years have seen me go back to the early Discworld books for some comfort reading and a few friendly chuckles with some old friends. They say you should never go back but that clearly doesn’t count with Discworld books, you should always go back.

So I’m all about the re-reading then but when I saw a copy of ‘The Last Hero’ in the Cancer Research shop, I had to have it. I’d never read ‘The Last Hero’, and was keen to give it a go, but a whole book about Cohen the Barbarian? I love Cohen the Barbarian. The purchase was a foregone conclusion then.

He's been a legend in his own lifetime. He can remember the great days of high adventure. He can remember when people didn't tell you off for killing dragons. But he can't always remember, these days, where he put his teeth.

Now, Cohen the Barbarian is going on one final quest. He's going to climb the highest mountain in the Discworld and meet his gods. He doesn't like the way they let men grow old and die. The last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole. With a vengeance.

That'll mean the end of the world, if no one stops him in time. Someone is going to try. So who knows who the last hero really is?

I shouldn’t have stayed up so late last night but I had to finish ‘The Last Hero’, it’s one of those books where I find that I just have to keep reading until it’s done. It helped that ‘The Last Hero’ is only a hundred and fifty four pages but there is so much to see (and so many little notes) to read in this edition. Josh Kirby will always be ‘my Discworld artist’ but Paul Kidby isn’t far behind on the strength of what I’ve seen here. The artwork is just gorgeous.

What about the story itself though? The switches between POV were a little bit too sudden and the story bumped and jolted along a little too much for my liking. That’s the only complaint I had though with a story that was light on the laughs, for me anyway, but incredibly deep in contemplation about growing old with so much left to do and not a lot of time left to do it all in. That’s not to say ‘The Last Hero’ didn’t make me laugh at all. The ‘Catch 22’ reference caught me totally by surprise and taught me anew the pleasures of the ‘surprised laugh’ while Truckle the Uncivil’s comment about Mrs McGarry’s dumplings reminded me that although we all need to grow up, we don’t need to grow up all at once (in fact, we definitely shouldn’t). It’s good to be able to chuckle at something, especially these days, so thank you Terry.

So there weren’t that many laughs but, for me, that wasn’t a huge deal as it saw Pratchett really step things up in terms of the story itself. We all know Terry Pratchett the humorist and Terry Pratchett the font of general knowledge (I could read his books for years and still never pick up all the references) but ‘The Last Hero’ is all about Terry Pratchett the storyteller, in more ways than one.

Pratchett tells a gripping story so subtly so that you don’t even know that you’re along for the ride until you’re at least halfway there. His voice isn’t overpowering at all, he makes it all about the characters and their interactions; that’s the way it should be really. ‘The Last Hero’ is also a story all about stories, how they’re told, how they can echo down the ages what that really means for characters who take on a life all of their own. It’s kind of sad thinking about this now because that’s what we’re living when we pick up a Discworld book these days… You can’t help but read though and that’s pretty much the point when you think about it.

‘The Last Hero’ isn’t going to trouble my top five favourite Discworld books (‘Guards Guards’, ‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Eric’, ‘Mort’ and ‘Witches Abroad’, not always in that order) but I suspect it’s a book that will stick around in my head and make itself known every time I find another white hair in my beard or moan that I’ve lost another hair off the top of my head. And that will do nicely.