Book Review: Reaper Man

Death is a farmer. Snow globes are cities. Wizards are zombies. This is a whole lotta book.

And I love it. Well, half of it. The b-plot, about the snow globes and shopping carts and zombie wizard, I’m kind of eh about. Maybe there’s some big metaphor* about consumer culture and whatnot, but I just…don’t get it. Please enlighten me in comments if you do.

Anyway. We’re just going to leave the b-plot aside in favor of the a-plot which is…to die for.

Death, due to cosmic reasons of overly-enthusiastic Auditors (or Revenoors) thinking he’s gotten too attached to people – too people-like, if you will – is kicked out of his job and becomes a farm hand. A different kind of reaper. This is a very blunt** metaphor, but very reasonable. Death, after all, doesn't have a sense of humor. He is hardworking and tireless, so where better to be than a farm? How better to serve than as a reaper?

Though he doesn't really understand us until his time as the reaper Bill Door, Death doesn’t hate humanity. Rather, he loves us. He cares for us. Comes for us in our time but doesn’t see us as a game. We are his duty and his responsibility. We are to be loved and treated well.

Lord, what can the harvest hope for if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

Death delivers this line as part of a beautiful soliloquy/defense of humans to Azrael, the Death of Universes. Discworld Death is only a minor death, it turns out. Which I kind of love. Throughout the series of books, Death is a major player – he appears in nearly every novel, and has a whole subseries to himself. Death comes to everybody on the Disc, great and small, important to the plot or not. But even this giant skeleton who holds the timers of all life in the world, even he is dwarfed. There is something bigger, something more mysterious, something more final and more old, and that is the great Azrael.

Little girls rescued from fires, old women living in sadness, farmers worried about rain and food, old men drinking in a pub, shopkeepers looking to make a buck – these are the people Death encounters. These ordinary people are who inspire Death to challenge the Auditors, stand up before Azrael and say, Listen. See what I have seen. Feel what I have felt, as much as I could with my skeleton heart. Understand that these people matter, though their lives are so much nothing in the eons of eternity. Understand that Miss Flitworth, whose story of love cut short too soon, though only one of many, one of thousands or tens of thousands – it matters to her. And she matters to me.

Lord, we know that there is no good order except that which we create…there is no hope but us. There is no mercy but us. There is no justice. There is just us.

All things that are, are ours. But we must care. For if we do not care, we do not exist. If we do not exist, then there is nothing but blind oblivion.

And even oblivion must end some day. Lord, will you grant me just a little time? For the proper balance of things. To return what was given. For the sake of prisoners and the flight of birds.

Miss Flitworth gave Death some of her life-time, to battle the incumbent Death placed by the Auditors. Even life-time to grab a scythe with corporeal fingers and throw a monkey wrench (or rather, a three-eighths gripley) into the unfeeling machine of the Auditors’ puppet.

In return, Death goes to the end of Time to ask for her life back. To ask that she be given a gift in return for her sacrifice. Death teaches us to look out for our friends, with whatever means we have. And while no, it may not be entirely fair or orderly that Miss Flitworth gets her time as a young girl with her love back, since she had the one thing on her side that could approach Azrael and ask for it, it was kind.  And that is what's important.

Lord, what can the harvest hope for if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

xo, 

Devo

*which is like lying, only more decorative

** or rather, sharp