Discworld Re-Read: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett (2001) 304 p.

It’s arguable that the Discworld books were always sort of YA, before YA became a marketing term: certainly they’re not difficult reads and I hoovered up the entire extant series between the ages of twelve and fourteen, as I suspect most fans did. For that reason – and because despite its short length it’s a genuinely good book – I can’t really name a meaningful difference between The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and any of the other Discworld novels, apart from the fact that it’s shorter and that it was marketed to younger readers at the time but subsequently seems to have been subsumed into the general sequence. Unlike The Last Hero, I think that post-facto rearrangement into the canon is deserved.

Animals straying too close to magic and becoming self-aware and capable of speech is at this point an established trope in the Discworld, largely because of Gaspode the Wonder Dog. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodent takes that concept and applies it to a mean old alley cat, a whole bunch of rats, and a maybe-not-as-dumb-as-he-seems kid with a musical pipe. The story begins well into the existence of an ongoing criminal racket in which Maurice, the titular tomcat, has established a scam which travels from town to town. The rats infest the joint, the kid shows up as the convenient Pied Piper, he gets paid off and dutifully shares it with his four-legged conspirators, and they all move on to the next town. The first problem for Maurice – both for himself and his business venture – is that sentient thought comes with lots of other problems, like the development of conscience and doubt and religion, and this applies both to himself and to the increasingly diverse society of rats. The second problem is that these issues are just starting to bubble over as the “Clan” arrives in the town of Bad Blintz, where in the classic Discworld fashion of “this is a funny book but there’s also a great mystery and dramatic story here,” something very mysterious is occurring. There are dry old traces of rats in Bad Blintz – nests and spoor and scent and traps – but there an no actual rats, anywhere in the town…

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a solid book, as we’ve come to expect from Pratchett at this stage in his career. It’s probably only because I knew it was originally marketed (and probably at least partially conceived) as YA that I noticed slight differences. A longer book might have included more flashbacks about how Maurice and the Clan first established themselves as swindlers, and also expanded the role of the real Pied Piper who ominously swaggers into town on horseback in the third act like the man in black in an old Western. It’s rare to see a book (even, I have to admit, a Pratchett book) which I think could have been expanded rather than cut down, and interesting that in this case it’s specifically because the publishers wanted to market it as YA.

Nonetheless, it works very well as a solid and enjoyable entry in the series. Maurice in particular is quite a good main character. Pratchett’s sympathetic protagonists in his one-off novels often run to a groove (Keith, the piper boy, is his familiar Sensible Voice of Reason character in this one) but Maurice retains enough of his inherently catty nature to be interesting. As Granny Weatherwax observed some ten or fifteen books ago, “if cats looked like toads everyone would see them for the cruel bastards they are,” and Maurice’s instinctive selfishness battling against his burgeoning empathy is fun to read. The rats themselves are also sketched across enough of a diverse spectrum to be interesting as individual characters. The elderly rat leader Hamnpork (as they gained the first magical stirrings of intelligence, the rats took their names from the labels of discarded cans in their rubbish dump; I thought this might have been cribbed from the musical Cats but apparently not!) is a particularly interesting one: an unintelligent and angry old rat who’s suspicious of change and bitter about the younger and smarter rats supplanting him as leader, but who still has a brave and admirable end to his story arc – he may be a grouchy old man, but sometimes society needs grouchy old men. I also really liked the supernatural villain of the piece (which I had no memory of from my initial read back in the day), the genuinely unsettling way that villain speaks to the characters, and the way Maurice manages to – at least briefly – figure out how it works and outwit it. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is one of the best kinds of Discworld novels, like the Witches or City Watch arc: one which is funny, sure, but is mostly enjoyable because it has a really good and interesting fantasy plot.