01 Jun 2012 01:43:21
One wrote comedies of upper-class English manners, the other writes about a fantastical world set on the back of a giant turtle, but Terry Pratchett has nonetheless been deemed the author who this year best captured the spirit of PG Wodehouse.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse award is given to the book that summons up the "comic spirit" of Wodehouse. Pratchett was named winner on Tuesday for his 39th Discworld novel, Snuff, beating authors including Sue Townsend and John Lanchester to take home the literary prize, which comes in the shape of a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after the winning title.
Snuff puts Pratchett's regular character Sam Vimes in the middle of a country house murder while on holiday. Judge and director of the Hay festival Peter Florence called it a "comic masterpiece". He said; "Yes, there are little jewels of language and comedy, but it's the generosity of spirit throughout the whole project which makes it such a comic masterpiece," he said.
"And even after all these years he's spent in Discworld, he actually keeps refining it and making it sharper and clearer. That's an extraordinary achievement. You would expect a slowdown but there's none of that, and that, I think, is almost an unparalleled feat."
Pratchett has been shortlisted on three previous occasions for the Wodehouse award: the two authors, said Florence, are surprisingly similar. "There are so many things he does which Wodehouse did too.
"It's not just the playfulness of the language – he's also quite patently satirical in the way Wodehouse was," he said. "Wodehouse was really hard on fascism. He wasn't simply writing a comedy of manners, and neither is Pratchett … Both of their invented worlds are wrestling with the political realities of their times."
Although Pratchett's wizards, vampires and goblins are far removed from Wodehouse's butlers, toffs and parties, both, said Florence, are from fantastical worlds. "Wodehouse's society had no relation to how people actually lived. Both worlds are fantastical in different ways, and both are completely consistent within those worlds. Pratchett's is just a slightly more extreme and imaginative version."
The author's pig Snuff will join former winning porcines including A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Solar and The Rotter's Club.
"Comic spirit is something which is impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. And Pratchett's absolutely got it," said Florence, who was joined on the judging panel by the broadcaster James Naughtie and the publisher David Campbell.
