Nation (Terry Pratchett)

Nation
Terry Pratchett
Doubleday
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: As a plague ravages the civilized world, the English monarchy stands in tatters; the nearest living member of the royal house is half a world away on some barely-charted island, maintaining the presence of civilization (and the English flag) among the natives (and lands that other nations might want to plant their flag upon). Commandeering a ship, special agents for the crown hurry with all due haste to track the unlikely heir down - but it will still be months before they can get there, and who knows what will happen to the world in the meantime?
Half a world away, the boy Mau has just completed his rite of passage into manhood, surviving alone on an island and carving his own canoe to return to his village. There, he will finally get his first tattoo and take a man's soul, maybe even find himself a wife. But his voyage home is interrupted by a massive wave - one that destroys his family, obliterates his village, even displaces the god stones from the beach, and no force of man or nature can possibly displace a sacred god stone. The storm also leaves behind a most peculiar gift, of sorts: the wreckage of a great ship of the "trouser men", the strange pale folk rumored to visit the islands now and again (but which Mau has never seen), and a girl white as a ghost among the ruins.
Ermintrude was traveling to meet up with her father, stationed halfway around the globe in service to His Majesty. She's eager to see the wider world and get away from a home that held too many memories to be happy (not to mention holding too much of her stern and traditional grandmother, who keeps insisting she's too close to royalty - only a hundred-odd heirs potential removed - to do anything so strenuous and unladylike as cook, study, or - heavens forbid - think). But the voyage is anything but pleasant, rocked by mutiny and foul weather and ending with a crash into the heart of a tropical island. As the last survivor, she thought herself alone, until she found the storm-battered native boy. Her grandmother's etiquette lessons never covered anything like this situation, but she's too English to give up all hope. (Besides, if nobody else is around to say otherwise, she can at least be rid of her horrible name... and she always did like the sound of Daphne better.)
Together, and with more refugees trickling in from other devastated islands, Mau and Daphne begin rebuilding what was lost - but will the nation they create from so many mismatched and broken parts be stronger than the old, or will it fall apart at the slightest challenge?

REVIEW: I had to think about this one for a while before deciding how I felt about it, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if not always a great sign. Being a work by Terry Pratchett, it has some humor to it and some buried (and not-so-buried) barbs, taking place in an alternate 19th-century Earth just as Darwin's controversial theories were hitting the science scene and people (well, some people at least) were beginning to rethink long-held assumptions about the world. For Mau, his own long-held beliefs in his gods and the way the world had always been and would always be are literally wiped off the map by the wave and its grisly aftermath. He and Daphne (as she calls herself for most of the story) both have their worlds turned upside-down more than once, plagued by anger and fear and doubts and the struggle to balance tradition with needed change. The role of storytelling in preserving and twisting truths, and the conflicting human needs for both faith and reason, comforting lies and hard truths, gods to explain things and questions to challenge those explanations, come into play in various ways. All the while, as Mau grows into an unlikely leader and Daphne finds a place among the islanders, the inevitable arrival of more Englishmen looms, at least as great a threat to the new nation as the raiders who worship the death god who must also inevitably come to challenge them. The story has some ups and downs, but the plot generally clips along decently. The ending stumbles a bit, but I see what Pratchett was going for, and the final chapter offers a glimpse of what comes after for Mau, Daphne, the island nation, and even the world as a whole, outcomes underlain with a certain sadness at the necessary sacrifices of growth and moving forward. A reasonably solid story, all in all.

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