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Johnny and the Radio
May. 21st, 2010 03:39 pmI've always felt the Johnny Maxwell trilogy was some of the more unfairly overlooked material in Sir Pratchett's oeuvre ... They're definitely intended for a younger audience, but not as self-consciously as the Tiffany books – instead of feeling obviously written for children, they're books that just happen to be accessible to children, and feel almost like the sort of books a young person might write if they were a really really good storyteller with a surprisingly mature perspective on the world. And they have a lot to say, without being obnoxious about it. A tricky game to play, all around, and well done.
They've read an abridged version of Johnny and the Dead on Big Toe Books this week – the link will take you to Monday's episode (which expires next Monday, of course) and there are links to subsequent episodes below it. The Johnny bit starts a little over halfway through, each day. It's got some unfortunate but not egregious kiddie music attached to it, and a recap after part 1 in case you got distracted by your macaroni art and missed something, but the integrity of the story manages to survive that.
The abridgment is admirably faithful; while losing the references to 'Thriller' and nearly all of Solomon Einstein, it preserves the bits about the importance of community history, respect for and awareness of the past, and brings a sort of – I dunno, peace? – to the concept of death and the dead. It's the sort of thing that would make ignorant entertainment industry executives go 'Ooh, I dunno, that's awfully dark, isn't it?' because it mentions the fact that people don't live forever, but the way in which it does so makes the idea of not living forever less frightening and horrible than it had been before. The dead aren't scary, they're just us. Johnny can see and talk to them but in his calm acceptance of this (as opposed to the expected terror) we see them that way too, in marked contrast to the more traditional 'talk to the dead' stories like The Sixth Sense. Mr Pratchett plays with ideas about an afterlife, or at least a posthumous existence of some sort, in a way that ... well, it's not exactly jolly, but it has a certain lightness that almost lends a degree of comfort, and which subverts ghostly phenomena into something humourous which would, in any other context, be fodder for horror films.
And of course the Blackbury Pals get me every time.
They've read an abridged version of Johnny and the Dead on Big Toe Books this week – the link will take you to Monday's episode (which expires next Monday, of course) and there are links to subsequent episodes below it. The Johnny bit starts a little over halfway through, each day. It's got some unfortunate but not egregious kiddie music attached to it, and a recap after part 1 in case you got distracted by your macaroni art and missed something, but the integrity of the story manages to survive that.
The abridgment is admirably faithful; while losing the references to 'Thriller' and nearly all of Solomon Einstein, it preserves the bits about the importance of community history, respect for and awareness of the past, and brings a sort of – I dunno, peace? – to the concept of death and the dead. It's the sort of thing that would make ignorant entertainment industry executives go 'Ooh, I dunno, that's awfully dark, isn't it?' because it mentions the fact that people don't live forever, but the way in which it does so makes the idea of not living forever less frightening and horrible than it had been before. The dead aren't scary, they're just us. Johnny can see and talk to them but in his calm acceptance of this (as opposed to the expected terror) we see them that way too, in marked contrast to the more traditional 'talk to the dead' stories like The Sixth Sense. Mr Pratchett plays with ideas about an afterlife, or at least a posthumous existence of some sort, in a way that ... well, it's not exactly jolly, but it has a certain lightness that almost lends a degree of comfort, and which subverts ghostly phenomena into something humourous which would, in any other context, be fodder for horror films.
And of course the Blackbury Pals get me every time.
