The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
                     by Terry Pratchett

                 Reviewed by Marianne Jones

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is the 27th
instalment in Terry Pratchett's incredibly popular Discworld
series; however, it is the first one aimed primarily at children.
Not that you'd really be able to guess that it was written for a
younger audience - some aspects of the book are quite dark and may
even be a tad disturbing for some young 'uns.  The only real
difference between this and the 26 others is that almost all of
the characters are animals; the few human characters are either
evil or a bit thick, while the animals (rats and cats) are very
intelligent and, in Maurice's case, rather manipulative.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents have been mentioned
fleetingly in previous Discworld books.  What we learned from
those is that Maurice is a Pied Piper type character, who
basically cons money out of the towns he visits by bringing his
own trained rats which, obviously, follow him out of the town when
he plays his pipe, thus earning Maurice a pretty penny.  A fact
which was never mentioned until this book, however, is that
Maurice is actually a cat.  A talking cat.  With a team of
trained, talking rats.  Of course.  The role of the piper is
played by a 'stupid-looking kid' whom Maurice, with his wily cat
ways, persuaded to assist him in his schemes.  Quite why a cat
needs money is something of a mystery.

The rats themselves are struggling to get to grips with their new
found intelligence and loquaciousness.  The older rats began life
as, well, normal rats, but they made what may have been a small
error of judgement by scavenging rubbish from the grounds of
Unseen University, a magical establishment.  Due to the rodents'
consumption of discarded spells, they find themselves endowed with
the 'gift' of speech.  The younger members have of course grown up
with this gift, and are just getting on with it.  The older rats
are having a harder time adapting however, as all their old
traditions are being thrown aside for new 'laws', such as not
eating other rats who have died, even keekees (normal unchanged
rats).  The elderly leader, Hamnpork, finds the adjustment
especially difficult, as he begins to lose his grasp on the
leadership.  Notice the comedy name there?  All the Changelings,
as they call themselves, chose names from what they read on signs
and tins from around the University where they lived - Tomato,
Nourishing, Sardines (a tap dancing rat!), Donut Enter, to name
but a few.  The undoubted star of the show though is Dangerous
Beans.  A small, white, half-blind rat, he is nonetheless the most
intelligent of the clan, something of a philosopher, and is
responsible, with the assistance of the female rat Peaches, for
many of the new laws the Changelings have adopted.  He assigns
great importance to an unremarkable (from a human point of view)
children's book called Mr Bunnsy has an Adventure, a book in which
the animals all wear clothes and live side by side with both
humans and each other in perfect harmony.  Peaches is in charge of
carrying the book, and is also the inventor of a form of written
language for the Changelings.

Maurice himself is in something of a moral quandary.  He is a cat.
Cats are renowned for eating small furry squeaking things.  Yet he
finds himself joining forces with the rats, albeit for monetary
reward.  To make matters worse, despite his best efforts, he finds
he does actually care what happens to the 'little wobbly noses'.
He gets around his dietary requirements by not eating anyone who
can talk.  However, Maurice is hiding a dark secret, one which
racks him with guilty nightmares and which he desperately wants to
keep from the Changelings; let's just say he knows more about
where his own gabbiness came from than he's prepared to admit.

The book begins as the unlikely team of Maurice, Changelings and
the stupid- looking kid arrive in the town of Bad Blintz to pull
off the proverbial 'one last job', before they jack it all in and
go their separate ways.  Dangerous Beans has a dream of an island
in the sun where the Changelings can form a proper community of
their own.  Maurice wants to find a house where he can be fed and
pampered with minimal effort.  The stupid-looking kid just wants
to play his pipe.  So it should be the usual technique of sending
in the Chief Widdlers, Darktan the trap and poisons expert, and
Sardines with his tap-dancing shenanigans, to mither the residents
into calling for a rat-piper, then collecting their payment and
leaving town.  Unfortunately, Bad Blintz isn't the simple job they
are anticipating; there is already a plague of rats, and a couple
of mean resident rat-catchers charging an extortionate amount of
money per tail.  The people have no food because the rats are
alleged to be eating it all; however, when Darktan's team explore
the local tunnels, they discover that there are no rats in Bad
Blintz.  Thus with the help of the mayors mental daughter,
Malicia, who thinks that everything in life works like story, our
heroes set about discovering exactly what the dastardly
rat-catchers are up to.

This is the best Discworld book for a rather long time - funny,
but oddly gripping and fairly scary for a kids book.  There are
some excellent new characters - Maurice is indeed amazing, and
hopefully he'll turn up in another book at a later date.  The
dilemmas facing the Changelings are very well written, and the
comedy elements work both on a children's level (Chief Widdlers
indeed!) and on the level of the usual Discworld reader (possibly
one and the same thing, at least in my case).  To cut a long story
short, I enjoyed this instalment so much that I named one of my
hamsters Dangerous Beans.  And there is no higher praise than
that.

















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