Some people live such lives of integrity, honour, wit and compassion that their absence leaves a voice in the universe that cannot be easily filled. When one such person on the Discworld dies, triggering continent-wide remorse, their enemies find that hole and pour through. The elves are back, and they have unfinished business...
In an interview in 1995, Terry Pratchett said he found the idea of writing "the last Discworld novel," to be disconcerting. Though he always underestimated how many ideas he could mine from the setting (declaring in The Discworld Companion in 1994 that he doubted he'd still be writing regularly in the setting five years hence), he always saw it as a toolbox and a world he could continuously return to even after hiatuses. In the event, there were no (or very brief) hiatuses, and he would only reluctantly write "the last Discworld novel," its forty-first installment, a full twenty years after that statement.
The feeling permeates The Shepherd's Crown that Pratchett knew, or strongly suspected, this might be Discworld's final hour. He usually had multiple novels in progress, but though he had ideas for several novels beyond this one (famously crushed under a steamroller after his passing to prevent cashing-in by other writers), he hadn't really advanced far with them at all, but instead poured everything he had into getting this book into a publishable state. Facing mortality, he made the choice to go out with a (politely) raised finger and one of his most epic books.
The Shepherd's Crown opens with the death of one of the Disc's most beloved characters, someone who has been a force of nature in the series since almost its very start. Their passing will already have regular readers (perhaps teetering on the edge of teariness knowing that This Is It in terms of there being no more Discworld books after this one) feeling moved as Pratchett ponders on the impact of a single person's life on the people around them and the wider world. An avalanche of long-standing Discworld character cameos reacting to the death may have the reader reaching for the hankies already.
But Pratchett is far too clever to have a novel that's basically an excuse for melancholy. The elves, his most reliably hateful villains, take advantage of the absence to return in force and it's all hands-on-deck as the Disc must muster its forces to oppose them. There are crowd-pleasing cheers as the young-but-not-untested Tiffany Aching leads the battle against the invaders in force, with a surprising return to prominence from the long-retired witch Magrat Garlick, who's already taught the elves a thing or two previously. As with the previous book, Raising Steam, it feels like here Pratchett is borrowing a lot of ideas from the subgenre of epic fantasy, a genre he's not been afraid to gently (as a huge Tolkien fan) mock in the past, and finds them both surprisingly useful and something that he is very good at employing.
But Pratchett is still Pratchett. Wars, battles, epic fights to the death etc are all very well, but he's more interested in the human soul and the human mind, and the impact upon them of these concepts. Empathy and compassion are also present, as Tiffany tries to bring the exiled Queen of the Elves to an understanding that may lead to peace...but there are those elves who don't understand the world has changed to one of iron and steam and they have no place in it any more, and are unwilling to change with it.
The Shepherd's Crown was said to have been left unpolished and only partially edited at the time of Sir Terry's frankly unacceptable passing in early 2015, but I wonder if this was overstated. It's clear that several subplots are not as fleshed-out as you'd expect (Geoffrey and his unusually intelligent goat feel like they needed at least moderate expansion), but the main narrative thread is here, complete and relatively tight. For a novel written by someone deep in the grip of Alzheimer's, the attention to detail is at times astonishing, with minor characters showing up from 20+ books back to kick names and take bottom, or possibly (and hopefully) vice versa. Pratchett himself extends thanks to his assistant Rob Wilkins and his editorial team for providing supporting during the last few novels, but even so, Sir Terry himself had to get the words down just months before his passing and it's frankly astonishing he did it, and did it so well.
The Shepherd's Crown (****) is not the best Discworld novel, but it might be the one that best sums up everything Sir Terry Pratchett set out to accomplish in this series. A tremendous feat of worldbuilding, frequently laugh-out-loud jokes including some that take a while to parse (is it bad that I only got the joke in the name "Casanunda" with this book, thirty-two years after reading the original gag for the first time?), and a tremendous sense of human compassion. Pratchett famously did not take fools gladly, but he had a lot of time for people with all their strengths and foibles, and that shines through here perhaps more strongly than ever before.
A full assessment of the entire Discworld series will require a much longer article, but it has to be said here that The Shepherd's Crown, unpolished though it might be, is a fitting capstone and a final footnote (Pratchett loved those) on the series. Like many others, I was reluctant to read these last few books because the idea of there being no more Discworld books to read for the first time was a horrible one. But there is also a gained appreciation for the author who, facing mortality square in the eye socket, still went out delivering some of his best ideas.
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