In
1993, Terry Pratchett wrote Ankh-Morpork, “the city which features in
many of the Discworld books would have to be unmappable because I’d
made it up as I went along.” The irony of this statement was that it
appeared in the introduction to Stephen Briggs’s The
Streets of Ankh-Morpork, a map and gazetteer of the city. Twenty
years later, Pratchett and the people at the Discworld Emporium have
updated the map and expanded the gazetteer to book length.
The
focus of both projects is the large fold-out color map of Ankh-Morpork,
with the new map providing two different views of the city, one on each
side. Essentially the same,
a close examination of the map does show that over the last twenty years
part of the city have seen some renovation, such as New Brickfields,
which twenty years ago was the site of the Dragon's Landing
Redevelopment Site. This is a nice touch since it treats Ankh-Morpork as
a living, ever-changing city rather than a stagnant literary creation.
Furthermore, while the earlier map named the major thoroughfares, and a
few minor ones, all the streets and alleys of Ankh-Morpork now have
proper names.
The book connected to the map also gives Pratchett a chance to flesh out
many of the ideas he’s had for Ankh-Morpork that he hasn’t been able
to work into a book. Some of
these ideas have previously appeared in other ancillary projects, such
as the series of Discworld diaries that appeared n the early
twenty-first century. Many of the entries, particularly for businesses,
restaurants, or street names, are brief one-line jokes which don’t
appear to have the ability to sustain anything longer, and are therefore
appropriate for this sort of work.
As
mentioned above, this project shows the changes in Ankh-Morpork, and
this is also evident in the text, which refers to the changing
reputation of such Discworld stalwarts as the Broken/Mended Drum and the
Shades, neither of which are quite the same rough-and-tumble places
their were when Pratchett first introduced them.
Another way the book really brings Ankh-Morpork
alive is through the three walking tours of the city which are
provided. When read in conjunction with the map, it really helps
bring the city together in a naturalistic manner, showing how the
neighborhoods and places are related to each other and providing an
inkling of the way the citizens would interact. It is a clever
idea and moves away from the idea that the map is just a way to plot out
the places Pratchett has mentioned in his writing and then filling in
the holes with random streets and buildings. There is now a
purpose for all of those places.
Even more than the original Streets of Ankh-Morporak, The
Compleat Ankh-Morpork sets the design and location of the city in a
reasonably permanent manner. However, as Pratchett has
demonstrated over the past twenty years, having Ankh-Morpork laid out on
a map doesn't stifle his creativity or resourcefulness, but rather it
can be used to spur new ideas as he examines the most complex of all the
characters he has created for the Discworld, the Patrician's city of
Ankh-Morpork.
