The Unfilmable Author Everyone Should Read This Summer

Will we ever live to see a successful screen adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel? The Amazon television series Good Omens, which ended this month, came closest—but that book, a comedy about an angel and a devil teaming up to avert Armageddon, was co-written with Neil Gaiman, and the source material ran out after the first season in any case.Pratchett is the funniest English writer since P. G. Wodehouse, with a sharp, satirical edge disguised by the trappings of the fantasy genre—vampires, dwarfs, witches, and wizards. Many fans thought the original covers of Pratchett’s novels went too heavy on busty maidens and strapping men with big swords, undermining their literary merit, and a similar problem has beset the various screen adaptations from Sky and the BBC. I suspect that casual viewers can’t compute the idea of watching something with the comic tone of a Charles Dickens or Tobias Smollett novel while being distracted by CGI trolls.To some extent, Good Omens bucked the trend because the chemistry between the lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, was so strong. (The pair enjoyed each other’s company so much that they even made a lockdown drama, Staged, filmed in their own houses with their own real-life partners.) But I worry that the persistent unfilmability of most of Pratchett’s work will mean that he fades out of public consciousness. At his peak, Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling novelist, but he died from early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015, and left clear instructions with his assistant that the hard drive containing his unfinished work should be run over with a steamroller. He therefore cannot be turned into the Tupac Shakur of fantasy literature, with his estate bringing out new novels to satisfy demand. So I’m begging people to try the existing canon.The literary novelist A. S. Byatt once suggested that all 12-year-olds should be issued a Pratchett book to get them into the habit of reading. Pratchett had, she said, “caused more people to read bo