The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett

The Shepherd's Crown came out in August (UK) and September (US) of 2015. It is the only book of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series to be published posthumously and is the last of the series, or at least I will always take it as definitively the last book of the canon of the series, as it is the last for which Pratchett himself had the structure and writing done by the time of his death (it is reportedly not in as complete a form as he himself had hoped to get it before publication, but he is directly responsible for what is there and what is there is complete, just not as filled out and polished as he would have liked).

First of all, let me say that I was saddened beyond expression by Pratchett's passing and will miss him terribly. Although I would disagree with him on some, maybe many, matters of metaphysics and philosophy and faith I am sure, he had a beautiful imagination and managed to embody great and deep themes with which I do agree in his fiction, particularly the Discworld series. His final tweets, which appeared within hours after his death and were probably done by him for tweeting after his death by his daughter, were heart breaking: his beloved DEATH character taking Sir Terry by the hand and leading him, to borrow the word used by Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ... on.
(I hope Sir Terry won't begrudge me borrowing from the series that unseated him from being the best selling work in the UK, but it is truly a great line and I think he had a huge heart.)

I am not going to review specifics of The Shepherd's Crown itself, but rather ponder its role as the final book in the series.

When Pratchett came out with Raising Steam, the novel before Shepherd's Crown, in 2013, it was the 40th book of the series, and I wrote a post considering what the shape of the series as a literary work would be like if it (Raising Steam) was to be the final book of the series, both because I like 40-book series numerologically and because of the unique place to which the specific content of that book brought the series. That post contains a sort of summary on my part of the major protagonist strands in the series and is available here.

The posthumous release of another book that was, in the main, done by him, might, of course, seem to negate my thoughts on Raising Steam as the final book. But I prefer neither to accept that verdict nor to argue that Shepherd's Crown is somehow illegitimate, making my reading of the finale of the series "win." I would rather see them as two versions of the same thing, or as two books as two halves of the same finale. Both of them are winners as series closers to me.

In the post on Raising Steam, I emphasized how it had taken a theme with which Pratchett had begun the series, that of magic, and brought it full circle in bringing the magic-technical aspect of the discworld as close to our real world technology as possible. Steam locomotion is actually real world technology, but it is discussed as the combination of the four elements of the classic four-elements cosmology (earth, air, fire, water ... which is also used in the four-house system of Hogwarts as actually revealed by Rowling in an interview way back when), and that cosmology of "natural philosophy" as expounded by Aristotle and the Greeks is the furthest back reaches of magical thinking as such (focusing on the actual workings of it and not just the deus ex machina intervention of the gods via invocation etc in the mythology, which becomes the sort of darker magic in some strains of the magical traditions).

The reader can go to that post to see all about how Raising Steam is such an apt closing to the series if they wish. What is important to note is that, while the biggest richness of the series is in the characters such as Sam Vimes and Granny and Death and Moist and (let us never forget) Lord Havelock Vetinari, the idea of magic is that with which Pratchett began the series in The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic and it runs the whole way through the series as a meaningful backdrop and subtly and deeply interwoven theme.

What I want to point out here is how  The Shepherd's Crown really does the same sort of closing of the magical theme, but this time from the perspective of his other seminal character strand, the witches. The first two novels of the series (Colour and Light) were Rincewind and the Wizards. And then, at only the third book into the series, Equal Rites, Prathcett introduced Granny Weahterwax, who would be the base character for the witches until Tiffany Aching, the central character of The Shepherd's Crown, came along in Wee Free Men (I love the Feegles so much), and with whom Tiffany would interact more deeply than any other character (Granny is one of his deepest theme characters, standing on the edge between the light and the dark, protecting the light from the dark).

And in Shepherd's Crown, we see Tiffany engaged in the same key project in which she was engaged from her first appearance and that we saw Granny engaged in in Lords and Ladies: protecting their world from incursion by the fairies. Ultimately, what calls for the time of setting the boundaries between the fairy world and the regular world in Shepherd's Crown is the same thing that brings the magical world closest our own real world in Raising Steam: the railroad.

(And, of course, for Terry Pratchett as for JK Rowling, a humanitarian theme is always important, and so the goblins whose plight is introduced to us in Snuff play a decisive role in this final installment.)

So, Raising Steam was the closing of the magical theme (magic as another way of thinking even the material interactions in our own world) that began in The Colour of Magic with Rincewind and the wizards, and The Shepherd's Crown is the closing of the theme of magic in relation to our own world by setting the boundaries between fairy-land and the regular world. And both involve the railroad (a technological achievement, but also a source of employment for the poorest of the poor, goblins). They form a wonderfully imaginative double-ending to an incredible series that enriches everyone in the reading.