Book:Maskerade

Maskerade
Co-author(s)	{{{coauthors}}}
Illustrator(s)	{{{illustrator}}}
Publisher	Victor Gollancz
Publication date	November 1995
ISBN	0575058080
Pages	285
RRP	{{{rrp}}}
Main characters	Perdita, The Opera Ghost, Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax
Series	Witches Series
Annotations	View
Notes	Book #18
All data relates to the first UK edition.

Blurb

The Opera House, Ankh-Morpork ... a huge, rambling building, where masked figures and hooded shadows do wicked deeds in the wings ... where dying the death on stage is a little bit more than just a metaphor ... where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by an evil mastermind in a hideously deformed evening dress ...

Where ... there's a couple of old ladies in pointy hats eating peanuts in the stalls and looking at the big chandelier and saying things like: 'There's an accident waiting to happen if ever I saw one'.

Yes ... Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, the Discworld's greatest witches, are back for an innocent night at the opera.

So there's going to be trouble (but nevertheless a good evening's entertainment with murders you can really hum)

Characters

• Perdita
• Christine, a parody of Christine Daae
• Walter Plinge
• Mrs. Plinge
• Salzella
• Seldom Bucket
• Dr. Undershaft
• The Opera Ghost
• Enrico Basilica
• Nanny Ogg
• Granny Weatherwax
• André

Locations

• Lancre
• Ankh-Morpork
  • The Opera House

Annotations

• This book parodies The Phantom of the Opera

p291, Corgi PB (British) The bowl of caviare flew out of his nervous fingers and caused a Fortean experience somewhere in the stalls.

Fort was an American journalist who made a lifetime's study of weird and strange events, searching newspaper archives in both the USA and Great Britain for anomalous stories that could not easily be fitted into any known category. He started out merely suspecting, but later came to believe, that contrary to what we are all continually told, science cannot explain everything that happens, and quite often, the scientific explanation for a strange event, when analysed, will be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. One of the earliest newspaper clippings that confirmed his belief that weird, random, and seemingly impossible things happen, and the explanations advanced to explain them can often be less than convincing, is the one described as the Phantom Fishmonger of Cromer.

One day in 1897, the good folk of Cromer, Norfolk, were awoken by the steady patter and rattle of what felt like hail. To their consternation, a steady fall of whelks, mussels, prawns, crabs and some lobsters was apparently coming out of the sky, as the out-of-plaice seafood was rattling on roofs and falling from the roofs into the street.

As Cromer is a fishing port with a speciality in shellfish, the first explanation advanced by Authority was that a fishmonger had taken leave of his senses, and in a temporary madness had been running the streets of Cromer throwing his stock up onto peoples' roofs, with such intensity that many slates were broken and caused to fall. But nobody had seen this mad fishmonger, and in any case, the sheer volume of shellfish was too much for one man to carry. and as Fort pointed out, all the fishmongers of Cromer were hard-headed and very sane small businessmen, who would not have dreamt of disposing of valuable stock like this. When an alternative was proposed, that a freak tornado might have begun out in the North Sea and passed inland, disgorging the sea life it had picked up as its intensity faded, this was laughed at as being utterly incredible... despite the fact East Anglia is England's answer to Tornado Alley in the USA. (British tornados are smaller, slighter, and more genteel)

The term "Fortean Experience" has, since Cromer, passed into the vocabulary largely to describe mysterious rains of fish from the heavens... mysterious rains of fish also occur in Jingo and Good Omens.

Cover Artwork

• In the touring exhibition The Art of Josh Kirby, which at the time of writing was in the Walker Gallery in his home town of Liverpool, the full cover art of Maskerade is annotated with a direction to look out for the private jokes the artist built into his work. At least one member of the Opera House audience has realised he is being watched, and is looking not at the action on stage, but directly up at the artist who is drawing the scene... this is visible only on the cover of the hardback book: on the paperback, the relevant section is obscured by a highly inconvenient publisher's blurb.

Btw, the original artworks for the covers are a lot bigger than the books and apparently are reduced down several times for publication. You would be surprised.

External links

Maskerade Annotations - The Annotated Pratchett File

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