(And he isn’t always at his best, he isn’t even always good: how could he be with the amount of books he writes? Night Watch, for example, isn’t one of his best). Yes, that is how good Terry Pratchett is, when he is at his best. And there are even less influential writers around than there are original ones. He is as influential as influenza he is catching. I know I am not alone among writers in having, at the bottom of my hard-drive, a story I wrote many years ago, where his style can be found in every sentence. He does the multitudinous texts incarnadine. His style gets under the nails, bleeds into books far from his own. Terry Pratchett is an original, and there are not many of them about – neither human personalities nor writing voices. The cadence of his humour, his comic rhythm, his timing, his tone of joke. Not his writing style, but his comic style. There, in the comic situation Zadie Smith was setting up, I found Terry Pratchett’s style. ‘But it’s Terry Pratchett,’ I cried, ‘the man is everywhere’. I read the first few pages, only to put it down, stunned. Once the hype had died down, and only 15% of people I saw on the Tube were reading it, I finally decided to give White Teeth a go. There are many reasons for this, including jealousy, ennui and Terry Pratchett.
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