Nation is a novel by Terry Pratchett, published in the UK on 11 September 2008 and in the US on 6 October 2009. It was the first non-Discworld Pratchett novel since Johnny and the Bomb (1996). Nation is a low fantasy set in an alternative history of our world in the 1860s. The book received recognition as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for 2009.
Development
Pratchett took his editors by surprise by writing it before the previously scheduled Tiffany Aching conclusion. He has said "I want to write this one so much I can taste it", and that he's been ready to do it for four years. Pratchett said in February 2007, "At the moment I'm just writing. If it needs to be Discworld it will be Discworld. It could be set in this world 150 years ago while still more or less being a fantasy. The codename for it is Nation."
Synopsis
Context
Written loosely in a third-person perspective, the novel is set in an alternative history of our world, shortly after Charles Darwin has published On the Origin of Species. A recent Russian influenza pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Except for the opening chapter, the novel's action entirely occurs in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (the fictionalised South Pacific Ocean) on a particular island known by its indigenous inhabitants as "the Nation".
The first chapter involves a subplot in which the Gentlemen of Last Resort, a secret society serving the Crown, urgently set out for Port Mercia in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean to seek the next man in the British line of succession: Henry Fanshaw, the unsuspecting governor of England's oceanic territories. Fanshaw's 13-year-old daughter, Ermintrude, is one of the novel's two protagonists. The other protagonist, Mau, is an aboriginal native of the Nation who is first depicted alone at neighbouring Boys' Island, where he has hand-built a canoe to complete his initiation rite from boyhood into manhood. Ermintrude, meanwhile, is travelling in a leisurely manner aboard a British schooner, the Sweet Judy, when mutineers, led by the ruthless First Mate Cox, are subdued and set adrift at sea, returning to the plot at a later time.
Plot summary
The main plot begins when an enormous tsunami carries the two central characters, Ermintrude and Mau, to the shores of Mau's home island: the Nation. Mau survives the tsunami in his canoe, while Ermintrude is the lone survivor of the Sweet Judy, which is run aground. The tsunami has killed all the indigenous villagers of the Nation, except Mau, who now angrily rejects the gods and believes that his interrupted rite of passage has left him soulless. Devastated, Mau carries all his people's corpses into the ocean, based on their religious belief that humans buried at sea become dolphins. Ermintrude timidly and sometimes recklessly interacts with Mau, but, eventually, the two start cooperating for mutual survival and establish some basic level of communication, though they are ignorant of each other's culture and language. Ermintrude introduces herself as "Daphne" and never reveals her given name, which she has always hated.
Three survivors from neighbouring islands arrive, including a cynical old priest named Ataba, who constantly derides Mau for his loss of faith. More survivors soon appear, including two brothers who can speak English moderately well with Daphne, speeding along the language-learning process for all. One of these men gratefully employs the reluctant Daphne as a makeshift midwife for his pregnant wife, Cahle. Meanwhile, Mau sleeplessly keeps vigil, obsessively looking out for local cannibals who are known to strike without warning. At the same time, he frequently hears the pestering, disembodied voices of the Grandfathers: ancestral spirits who make angry (and often incoherent) demands. They insist that Mau replace the "god anchors", carved white stones traditionally said to have "anchored" the gods before the tsunami displaced them. Mau discovers the anchors in the Nation's lagoon alongside an additional, previously unknown stone, but Ataba attempts to destroy it, purportedly because it is heretical. Mau then rescues Ataba from the lagoon, but his resulting hypothermia and exhaustion lead to a coma; Daphne accepts a lump of poison from Mrs. Gurgle, a shaman who is one of the refugees, that successfully lets her travel in her mind to the land of the dead in order to rescue Mau's consciousness.