★★★★☆ When you break rules, break ‘em good and hard

Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett

Here is how Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters begins:

The Wind Howled. Lightening Stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills.

The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’

There was a pause.

Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday.’

The three hunched figures are, of course, the Wyrd Sisters. They are Nanny Ogg, Magrat, and our old friend Granny Weatherwax, all witches. I believe Wyrd Sisters is the first appearance of Nanny and Magrat in the Discworld. Granny we met in Equal Rites. You will, of course, recognize the opening from Macbeth.

Wyrd Sisters has what, for a Discworld novel, counts as a complex and fairly coherent plot. It is, in fact, something like the story of Macbeth. But the story of Macbeth is not a story of a Scottish king. It is a story of a playwright who wrote a play about the murder of a Scottish king, and a company of players who built a theatre in London called the Globe. Of course, in the Discworld the theatre is in Ankh-Morpork and is called the Disc.

The skinny gist of Wyrd Sisters is that the King of Lancre enrages Granny Weatherwax, and there are consequences. Making Granny angry is never a wise move, although it is a better idea if you can manage to get her mad at someone other than yourself and stay out of the blast radius.

Wyrd Sisters is the sixth novel in the Discworld series. In my opinion it's tied with Mort for best of the first six. It's fun, but we have now definitely reached the point where Pratchett's claim that "The Discworld novels can be read in any order" should be ignored.

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