Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

At the beginning of Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explains the theory of narrative causality:

‘Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the re-telling…stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.’

Stories, Pratchett says, take a shape and ‘pick up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.’

Witches Abroad is one of these flapping ribbons. It’s a story in its own right, about witches and fairy godmothers. It is also a story about the nature of stories, and it is a story that contains, is shaped by and borrows from all the stories that came before it. In pointing to its artificiality, it invites you to marvel at how the narrative tricks are done whilst also somehow bestowing us with the gift of belief in magic as a tangible thing, where all this impossibility is not only normal, but desirable and real.

While it is a book stuffed with wands and pumpkins, it is also a story about the human condition. Witches Abroad is a fairy story about real life, which is about fairy stories that are about real life. Our lives, after all are just stories we tell ourselves and all fairy stories have a kernel of truth within them. Pratchett invites us to examine the tales we tell ourselves, the thing we believe to be true about ourselves and asks whether a happy ending is truly what we desire and if it is, what that might really look like.

This is a story that doubles and reflects, that multiplies itself over and over. Witches Abroad is so meta, so fractal, so quantum, it mirrors itself in virtually every page. In describing the fairy godmother, Lilith and her magic, Pratchett says:

‘The mirrors were themselves in the centre of an octagon of mirrors, open to the sky on the highest tower of the palace. There were so many reflections, in fact, that it was only with extreme difficulty that you could tell where the mirrors ended and the real person began.’

Lilith exploits mirror magic, creating reflections of power that ripple through the mirrors and bounce back into reality, distorting what is really there. Lilith’s magic is fed by what she wishes to see, not what is. Lilith’s magic is neat and pretty. In Lilith’s world there is always a happy ending. But that happy ending comes at a cost and it is not for everyone. Lilith’s stories don’t reflect reality, they mask it and her magic is not powerful enough to banish it entirely. Brutality and violence keep the less savoury elements of reality in line. An axe to the neck is a far more efficient way of keeping the streets free of criminals than a bit of mirror magic.

Lilith’s magic exists in the space between two mirrors. Magic has the most power in liminal spaces and Lilith exploits that. In the normal realms of story, that would be more than enough to succeed, but in the fractal space of the novel, liminal spaces are everywhere. The witches exist on the fringes of society, shifting between being seen as harmless old ladies, matriarchs and wielders of powerful magic. Genua, where the main action of the story takes place is liminal too. As Nanny says: ‘Seems to me the land and the water round here can’t decide which is which.’ The swamp itself is home to voodoo priestesses and the restless dead, and even Mrs Gogol’s house wanders around on duck feet. Animals and people are interchangeable here and what they look like on the outside is the least of it. Death himself appears at the masked ball at the denouement of the book, mistaken even by the witches as a person in a really good costume.

In the thinnest of thin places, where multiple versions of reality merge and blur, where all the edges converge, Pratchett explores what happens when the power of story hops boundaries between real and imagined, known and unknown and reflects itself over and over again.

To me, the conclusion he comes to is that real magic is not in the wand or the mirror, it is in the beliefs of the person that wields it. It is in the understanding that change is possible and the deepest, most powerful magic comes not from the swamps of the supernatural but from the depths of the human soul. Real magic, he posits, comes from the inside out, not the outside in. When we use it the wrong way, it makes us thin, splitting us from our true selves. When we use it the right way, it comes from our guts and it makes us more real, not less.

Once upon a time, I was married to a man who wanted to be a guru. He told himself that if he became a guru, he would be happy. Once there was a man who became a guru and when he did, he lived happily ever after. That was his story. He started his journey to guru-hood studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP is a story too. It’s a story that tells you how to harness the power of the mind to create change. One of the key tools of NLP is hypnosis. What I learned from living with a proto-guru was that hypnosis is also story telling. Now we’re three stories deep.

Stories are about patterns. Brains are also all about patterns. First this happens, then this happens and then this. Here’s a beginning. Here’s the middle. Here’s the end. We learn and store patterns of behaviour that are primed and ready to go no matter where we find ourselves. We tell ourselves the story of every situation, whether we actually know it or not. Those stories help us operate with certainty in an uncertain world. We look for what we recognise and then we build a story of sameness out across the chasm of unknowing. Most of this sorting and story telling happens in our unconscious mind.

A handshake is a beautiful example of this process. We meet someone we don’t know, they stick their hand out, we automatically shake it, without a conscious thought. It takes us from uncertainty to the firm ground of certainty. A story is a handshake, a handshake is a story and both are patterns that help us map the unknown.

Our brain is always ahead of us. Our unconscious mind reaches the end of the story before our conscious mind does. Hypnosis operates in the gap between the two. What happens for example, if when someone puts their hand out for us to shake, we don’t take it? In that momentary gap where our brain struggles to make sense of what is happening instead of what should happen, hypnotic suggestion can slide in and create other, more malleable pathways. This is called a pattern interrupt. It can happen with an unfulfilled handshake. It can happen with a story that we know well, but which suddenly veers off course. A handshake is a story. A story is a handshake.

We cannot leave a story or a handshake hanging. Something must step into the gap and complete it. Hypnosis is a way of gently jolting the brain out of the repeated grooves of the stories it tells itself and opening up new, neural pathways. Stories can do the same. Here’s the story of the man who used hypnosis to tell himself he was no longer a smoker. Hypnosis interrupted the narrative of being a smoker and now he’s someone else.

Witches Abroad is a deeply hypnotic book because it is a story full of pattern interrupts. Layering pattern interrupt on pattern interrupt as this book does, only deepens the power of the stories and the novel. This structure, of story within story, where endings are left open to allow more stories to sit within each other is another tool of hypnosis called nested loops. The deeper into the loops you go, the more stories you stack, the more powerful the potential to subvert the original narrative becomes. The only way to close all the loops is to create a new and different ending.

What happens if the princess doesn’t marry the handsome prince? What happens if the wolf doesn’t really want to eat grandma? What happens if a cat eats the vampire bat? What if an old lady hits Gollum over the head with an oar? Witches Abroad is one story that contains a multitude of other stories, beginning and ending in unexpected ways. All feed the main narrative, which we find ourselves simultaneously recognising whilst not knowing where it will take us at all. What Pratchett does is ask what happens when the mess of real life runs smack bang into the neatness of a known, safe story and starts unravelling it?

Magic is the answer. But the powerful, hypnotic story we have been told about magic is that it doesn’t exist outside of stories. Magic, we have told ourselves, is not real. Magic and real life are not compatible.

Pratchett argues otherwise. Granny Weatherwax is arguably the most pragmatic figure in the whole of Discworld. She doesn’t believe in magic like she doesn’t believe in nudity. She is a woman who always has three vests on. She practices what she calls ‘headology,’ and in this book it drives Magrat Garlick, the youngest of the witches, mad. Magrat is desperate to believe in and use magic, despite the fact that her wand only churns out pumpkins and the most powerful thing she achieves is when she uses her own, pent up anger to punch someone in the face. Magrat believes magic is helpful to people. She asks Granny: ‘Why harm would a bit of magic do?’ to which Granny replies: ‘…it’d never stop at just a bit, you stupid girl.’ Granny says:

‘Stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference -’

What matters here is perception and in a world of endlessly reflecting mirrors and land that moves like water, that’s hard to pin down. Granny’s magic is not the romantic, star dust sprinkled, fairy tale power that Magrat dreams of and that Lilith practices. Granny, despite her claims, is the most powerful witch on the Disc. She understands real magic and the optimal word here is ‘real’ not magic. Real magic thrives in the very circumstances that most people dismiss as too mundane to think about. She expands on this in A Hat Full of Sky:

“Now that’s what I call magic—seein’ all that, dealin’ with all that, and still goin’ on. It’s sittin’ up all night with some poor old man who’s leavin’ the world, taking away such pain as you can, comfortin’ their terror, seein’ ‘em safely on their way…and then cleanin’ ‘em up, layin’ ‘em out, making ‘em neat for the funeral, and helpin’ the weeping widow strip the bed and wash the sheets—which is, let me tell you, no errand for the fainthearted—and stayin’ up the next night to watch over the coffin before the funeral, and then going home and sitting down for five minutes before some shouting angry man comes bangin’ on your door ‘cuz his wife’s havin’ difficulty givin’ birth to their first child and the midwife’s at her wits’ end and then getting up and fetching your bag and going out again…We all do that, in our own way, and she does it better’n me, if I was to put my hand on my heart. That is the root and heart and soul and center of witchcraft, that is. The soul and centre!”

Granny’s magic puts power where it should live, inside a human being. Granny’s magic shows us how to operate and recognise magic in real life, the life we have, not the life of a story we told ourselves, or worse, that someone else told us. Magic is understanding that we can change the narrative of our lives because once we take the power out of the story, we can claim it for ourselves over and over again.

Magic is a pattern and a pattern interrupt. Magic wakes us up to our real selves by hypnotising us with stories different than the ones we normally tell ourselves and asking us to choose the real one. Magic may live in a story, but stories are reflections of real life and we can decide in this fractal world which bits of it are real and which bits of it are story. Magic is how we tell and understand story. Magic is how we choose. Magic is how we see and how we look. Magic is who we tell ourselves we are. Magic is a pattern and a pattern is a handshake and a handshake is a story.