This will be my last entry. They have breached the outer castle defenses. Thirty lords have leapt over the inner wall…. Great artists steal. He felt it before he saw it, the terrible familiar heat that heralded its coming. It had no need for horn or claw; the searing wind of its approach alone licked at his hands and weeping face, burning and flaying the skin as it came. Hi everyone. Let me first state that I do not write to defend Sir Terry Pratchett or any of his extraordinary work.
That has already been done, and done very well, by Sam Jordison in a delicious rebuttal this morning. The notion that Sir Terry needs a defender, particularly in the form of a writer and satirist, is absurd. Writing in defense of Terry Pratchett is like serving as bodyguard to Bruce Lee—an honour, of sorts, but an utterly redundant one. Its Austen-like qualities, its grim sly humour driven, as Neil Gaiman has observed, by an engine of immense, loving, and righteous, anger , are so undeniable that the only possibly defense against their excellence is not to read them at all.
Even for a well-informed critic, this would be a classless move, in extroardinarily bad taste given its timing: a few months too late for Sir Terry to offer a rebuttal of his own, but soon enough that his grieving family and fans suffer the maximum possible amount of offense from it. But let no one confuse Jonathan Jones for a well-informed critic. At the appearance of this line, any reader with the capacity for reason should stop reading.
Again, this is not so much a defense of a great writer as an indictment of a phony. Will they take articles from their Technology section from a writer who openly boasts he has avoided all contact with computers?
Do they buy Travel articles about the French Riviera from writers who have never set foot there, yet boast before an appalled public just how much they despise the French? The primary role of art critics, at any level of journalism, is to be informed about the material with which they engage.
