Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 1 April 2010.
A writer who had more titles on the BBC’s Big Read Top 100 than any other living author, only Charles Dickens matched him. At the start Pratchett was categorised comic fantasy for he sets his Discworld books in an alternative universe and peoples them with witches, wizards and the like. It is a stage upon which he places his players in situations that enables him to mirror our world and therefore pinpoint its faults, idiosyncratic traits, ludicrous bureaucracy or just plain prejudices, injustices, stupidity and the like, i.e. he has developed into one of the most important satirists writing today. This astute masterpiece tears into the postal service. Truth did the same for the newspaper industry. Monstrous Regiment is one of the best books on war and gender you are likely to come across. He is a man who needs reading. His next Discworld, Thud, comes into hardback at the same time.
The post was an old thing, of course, but it was so old that it had magically become new again.
The post office is an ailing institution belonging to the olden days. New technology overshadows its mind-numbing bureaucracy and the creakingly slow pace of change. You can call them nostalgic, but there are still people who believe in the post: in the beauty of stamps and cast-iron pillar boxes, and the dignity of the postman braving hail, wind and troublesome dogs. And sometimes it's worth standing up for what you believe in...
