My kinda town...

I'm reading Terry Pratchett...slowly, creeping on through this book that took DB two or three days to read. I think my creeping has more to do with the amount of other things I have going on right now than the book itself, but there is also the matter of Ankh Morpork, Pratchett's fictional city.

I never really want to leave this city when I'm in it. Even if it's admittedly dirty and smelly like the worst version of early Victorian London you can imagine, I love it. It makes me want to run around in my big fictional cities and make them into places that are as visceral as Ankh Morpork. Thus, I find myself wondering what it is that is so brilliant about Pratchett's vision of a big, crowded, diverse city.

He has taken the time to make it seem real. This seems obvious, perhaps, but I think, so often, fictional cities are little more than collections of buildings that characters pass through. Pratchett has given his city class strata, and we get to know characters from each end and all the in between.

Related to this, he has recurring characters that are never main characters, but faces everyone in the city would know.

I'm thinking of a woman I used to see in the mall regularly when I worked at Crabtree. She's wire thin, clutches her purse tightly to her chest, has this back swept beehive of white hair, and she tends to yell at people only she can hear. She once came into my store and brandished a bath brush at me and promptly stalked out again. I still see her in various places around the city and wonder if she walks everywhere or if she becomes the crazy bus lady from time to time.

My sister tells me New Haven is full of these interesting individuals, who make everyone wonder after them: "What's your story?"

Unlike what you might think if asked "What makes a fictional city real?" Pratchett doesn't really give his readers much sense for the geography of Ankh Morpork. There's a bridge and a river and a university and the Patrician's mansion and all these landmarks, but I couldn't really tell anyone which was north and which was south, nor really what the construction of the place is like. What he has done, is give the reader details, so that one can feel the city. Maybe it helps that I've been in cities that have gone through six or seven incarnations since 1000 CE, but I get that when you dig in Ankh Morpork, what you find is more Ankh Morpork. I understand the streets that are not grid-system perfect 'cause they're avoiding a river. The buildings are close together, and the feeling of community (not necessarily in a good way) is more intense in the working class areas of town.

It is helpful, at least for this writer, to have a map of the city in which one is working, but I'm not so sure it's necessary for the reader. I kind of prefer to just sort of feel my way around a city...which is so completely opposite to my real life passion for my iPhone map function. (Seriously, so many panic attacks have been averted thanks to that little device.)

The other thing Pratchett does to make his city feel real, is make it multi-ethnic. Granted, in Ankh Morpork, we're mostly talking dwarves and trolls and Igors, but he does throw in other countries, often giving us obvious reference points. Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer, comes to us with an Uberwald accent that is pure Deutschland. I believe it is Klatsch that gives us very spicy food reminiscent of a curry. The dwarves come in many varieties that anyone living in today's West headbutts the Middle East over and over again society can recognize. Some of them are ok with human culture (i.e. the women won't shave their beards, but they at least want to be feminine), and some of them refuse to come above ground, and find the feminizing of their women to be immoral and terrible.

There are also zillions of conflicts that have come from other countries all trying to live cheek by jowl with each other in the crowded streets of Ankh Morpork. He doesn't shy away from the real conflicts that happen in the ethnically and economically diverse metropolis.

I love it. It's gritty. It's real. Anyone who's lived in or been to a large city (a really big one) gets Ankh Morpork.

My challenge now is to take this "checklist" (and anything else I observe because this is by no means complete) and apply it to Sibraldin, Norfine, Marrowfort, Embrinessa and Fiyoness. The last two haven't yet had the time to become crazy-big, but trade with other countries is certainly happening. The middle class is on the rise, and all those things that gave birth to Europe's first large cities are starting to occur in Ni'Essla as Armina and her friends are living there. Rak and Dane live in a time when rail travel is well-used. Empires have been born and died and left their bits and pieces everywhere. My opportunities are certainly available, and I'm excited to reassess with this new perspective.