The Carpet People

Terry Pratchett is just what you need after a day of red tape. He makes the mondane funny. Carpet People lets you imagine the world we live in played out in the rug under your feet. Are we living in someone else's carpet? Maybe

Terry again creates an imaginary world to amuse and delight us. This world could be under our own feet. We were able to figure out many of the dangers and monsters, but disagreed on the identity of the major threat to this carpet community.

I'd heard good things about Terry Pratchett, and had a little knowledge of his work, bits of which I'd come across from reading "Scientific American" many years ago. So I decided to begin reading his works, taking the early ones first. Carpet People was originally written in 1971. Pratchett came back to it and re-wrote a lot of it, which was a good idea, because even after the rewrite, I don't find it an amazing read, particularly after hearing from so many people that Pratchett is a witty and capable author.

The story is about tribes and animals living in a carpet (unsurprisingly), and of course there are parodies of everyday objects which impact upon this two-dimensional world. The characters are a bit basic, and the character development is little more than minimal. The plot is very linear and the surprises which occur are situations rather than sub-plots impacting on the main theme.

Tony Robinson does a good job of trying to accentuate the (sometimes marginal) differences between the tribes and characters. From a humour point of view, there are a few vaguely amusing witty comments and some situations which brought a rather pained smirk to my face.

In a nutshell, a slightly amusing fantasy novel. Pratchett was pretty young when he wrote this one. In no way will this slightly flat balloon put me off reading his other works. 3 stars... barely.