Discworld novels are often divided into a number of sub-categories – the Watch, Witches, Death, and so on. Of these by far the weakest group are those featuring Rincewind, the world’s worst wizzard, and within that group, I am sorry to say, The Last Continent is the least interesting and entertaining.

The novel can’t really be said to have a plot. It has two, and they are not very well integrated. In one, following shortly after the events of Interesting Times, Rincewind is magicked away to Xxxx, a thinly disguised Discworld version of Australia. He wanders around the outback for the rest of the novel encountering just about every representative feature of Australia you could mention – if it is a cliche about Oz, it’s there. There’s a certain relentlessness about Pratchett’s approach to this, almost as if he had to include every last possible thing he had ever read or heard about the continent. Weak lager, check, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, check, Waltzing Matilda, Ned Kelly, peach melba and the Sydney Opera House, to name just a very few of the dozens of archetypes packed in. Rincewind is so heavily protected by plot-armour at this stage that the chances of anything interesting happening to him are non-existent – instead everything happens around him, and he passes serenely through unaffected.

The parallel plot features the wizards of Unseen University. Their search for someone who can help cure the Librarian, suffering from a form of morphic instability in which he keeps transforming into random objects, leads them to try and track down Rincewind, once the Librarian’s assistant. In the rooms of the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography they find a window in space leading to a tropical island. They pile through but of course get trapped when Mrs Whitlow, the University’s head of Housekeeping and the nearest thing the UU has to a sex-symbol, closes the window leading back to the university.

This is no typical tropical island. Cigarette plants, chocolate coconuts and spoon bushes pass unquestioned, but the arrival of a dinosaur that evolves into a chicken and a boat made from a plant lead even the usually phlegmatic wizards to wonder what is going on. The resident god of evolution turns up. and it gradually becomes apparent that not only have the wizards travelled a long way in space, they have also travelled far back in time, to when the world was being designed and assembled. Their suggestions – for example for sexual reproduction, are enthusiastically adopted by the god and lead to the Discworld as it becomes.

This is a thin foundation for a novel. The Australian cliches pile up irritatingly, and you end up waiting for the next one to turn up (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, check, duck-billed platypus, check, the Dreaming, check). I felt Pratchett kept throwing new Xxxx items at the book to try and distract the reader from the underlying absence of anything approaching a plot. The fun with creation myths never really takes off – it’s mildly diverting, nothing more. Pratchett published two novels a year most years for almost twenty years, so a dud was always a possibility, but they are still a disappointment when they crop up, as they inevitably must. It’s not that I actively disliked The Last Continent, just that I didn’t love it. Some, perhaps much of that is down to Rincewind – he’s just not that entertaining a character, and he doesn’t have any relationship (except, I suppose, with the Luggage) to help carry the burden.

The Last Continent does however contain one of Pratchett’s greatest, if most cynical, quotes:

“We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“It saves time.”