[Werthead]

Discworld #19: Feet of Clay

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There has been a murder in Ankh-Morpork, which at first glance is not unusual. But the nature of the murder intrigues Commander Sam Vimes and Captain Carrot of the City Watch. Their investigation of the case, aided by new forensics expert Cheery Longbottom, exposes an ambition that could plunge the whole city into chaos. Once again, Sam Vimes and his officers are the thin blue line between order and chaos in a city where it's hard to see where the one ends and the other begins at the best of times.

Feet of Clay is the nineteenth Discworld novel and the third to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, following the excellent Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms. Once again, the City Watch must rally to solve crimes and stop a threat to the safety of the city, through a combination of Commander Vimes's cynicism, Carrot's good-natured optimism, Colon's stoic experience, Detritus's massively impractical siege weaponry, Angua's nasal intuition and, er, whatever it is Corporal Nobbs does. The Watch is here reinforced by new arrival Cheery Longbottom, a dwarf forensics expert with something approaching a secret.

You might expect the novel to be predictable - the City Watch sub-series is, at least in potential, Pratchett's most procedural sequence of books - but as usual Pratchett takes some delight in wrong-footing expectations. This is still a funny book, as Colon's close encounter with a psychotic lunatic of diminutive size and then a very angry bull can attest, but there's more of a serious side to it as well. Existential debates on the rights of sentient beings when no one can agree if they're sentient form a key part of the story as well, as Pratchett introduces the Discworld's golems, here used almost as robot slave labour until it turns out that they can think and feel, after a fashion, which raises thorny ethical questions.

The book is also marvellously, intricately constructed. Some other Discworld books feel like Pratchett has aimed an Idea Cannon at a wall, blasted out whatever came to mind and then assembled the resulting narrative morass into something resembling a coherent plot. That worked extremely well for some novels and not as well in others, but Feet of Clay definitely feels more pre-planned and structured. There are more distinct character arcs, not just for Vimes but for Carrot and Angua's relationship, new recruit Cheery whose quiet confidence over gender expression rapidly sparks a cultural revolution among the city's dwarfs, and even for series stalwarts and standbys Nobby and Colon. The former gets drawn into what feels like a Game of Thrones subplot, whilst Colon - distressingly several weeks from retirement - has a solo mini-adventure that he was not expecting.

There's even foreshadowing at work here, as Vimes visits his childhood neighbourhood and we get the feeling of unspoken secrets about his background. These will, eventually, give rise to one of Pratchett's great masterpieces in Night Watch, but that's still quite a few books off.

Feet of Clay (*****) is one of the best Discworld novels, if not quite at the absolute-best tier of Small Gods and Night Watch. It's well-constructed, naturally funny whilst supporting more serious ideas, and as marvellously characterised as Pratchett at his best. It deepens the worldbuilding of Ankh-Morpork, the Greatest Fantasy City of All Time™, and sets the stage for intriguing developments to come. The novel is Pratchett at his best: erudite, thoughtful and smart, creating a work where fantasy, satire and detective elements meet perfectly.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 19 September 2021 - 04:53 PM

[Werthead]

Discworld #20: Hogfather

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The Discworld is preparing to celebrate the great festival of Hogswatch, when young children receive presents from the Hogfather. However, someone has marked the Hogfather's card and given the task to the Assassins' Guild of Ankh-Morpork to carry out. Bewildered at the idea of executing a mythical being, they give the task to their most creative and ruthless inhumer, Mr. Teatime. As the plan unfolds and the Hogfather goes missing, Death steps in to fill the void, commanding his granddaughter Susan to, under no circumstances, search for the missing Hogfather.

Hogfather is the twentieth Discworld novel and the Big Christmas Special of the series. Pratchett had occasionally mentioned the festival of Hogswatch in previous novel and with his Discworld novels usually being published at the end of the years and being an annual Christmas gift in some households, it was a reasonable move to actually write a novel about Christmas, or at least the Disc's typically idiosyncratic version thereof. Christmas therefore joins the various other topics - like films, rock music, crime, fundamentalist religion and Shakespeare - that Pratchett has covered over the series to date.

The novel also acts as the fourth novel to focus on the character of Death, and the second on his granddaughter of Susan Sto Helit (following Soul Music). Death's character has been explored pretty thoroughly in three previous books, so Pratchett splits the story here between Death and Susan, with more focus on Susan as she explores the mystery of why the Hogfather has disappeared and why someone would want to kill him. It's a sold spine for the book, and it's fun following the path of clues which eventually leads to the solution. Susan remains one of Pratchett's more underrated and capable protagonists, as he puts it, a "Goth Mary Poppins," so it is surprising she makes so few appearances (aside from this novel, she only appears in Soul Music and Thief of Time).

One of the biggest surprises about Hogfather is how dark it gets. Pratchett's reputation for comedy and laughter belies the fact that he can get quite venomous and biting when he wants to, and it's probably not a coincidence that his darkest novels - Small Gods, Night Watch and Nation - are among his very best. Hogfather doesn't go that far, but it does feature an unpleasant gang of criminals with rather unpleasant habits and tics. In Mr. Teatime it also features possibly Pratchett's most psychologically damaged and unhinged antagonists, someone who is not a nice guy and who isn't going to be won over by witty speech by the lead character. This gives the novel a surprising amount of bite for what is supposed to be the Discworld Christmas Special.

The book does falter a bit in its pacing. Once again, the presence of the Unseen University faculty slows things down to a drag. There are some nice gags here - Death communicating with the primitive AI, Hex, and the Senior Wrangler going on a date - but once again the Bursar's mental illness being played up for laughs and the other faculty going through their routines is something that was played out in Reaper Man, at the very least, and should have been retired by now.

Beyond that problem, Hogfather (****) is a very solid novel with some of Pratchett's most accomplished and unpleasant villains, which normally would be a good thing but I'm not sure it works within the context of a Christmas story. Great characters and a nicely knotty plot overcome pacing problems and some repetitive story beats to make for a rare Christmas fantasy novel that is worth reading. The book is available in the UK and USA now.

The book also has the distinct honour of being the first Discworld novel adapted for the screen in live-action (animated versions of Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music were produced a decade earlier). Sky produced a two-part TV adaptation of Hogfather in 2006, starring Ian Richardson as Death, Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) as Susan Sto Helit and Marc Warren in a very memorable role as Mr. Teatime.

[Werthead]

Discworld #21: Jingo

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An island has appeared in the Circle Sea, roughly halfway between Ankh-Morpork and the great empire of Klatch. This of course makes it Strategically Important, with both Ankh-Morpork and Klatch eager to use force to back their claim. One problem: Ankh-Morpork has no army (standing or otherwise), no money to hire mercenaries and no equipment to use (because they've sold it all to Klatch). For Sam Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and now a reluctant noble with the right to lead a company of men (and misc.), this is just the first problem he has to overcome. But not to worry, it'll all be over by Hogswatch.

Terry Pratchett brought many subjects under the microscope of his forensic satire during his long career. Small Gods, possibly his single finest novel, angrily but intelligently dissected the evils of religious fundamentalism and how it perverts faith into a force of destruction. Seeing Pratchett bring that same kind of analysis to war - the "last refuge of the incompetent" as Isaac Asimov said - is an interesting prospect.

Unfortunately, Pratchett isn't quite able to marshal the same level of eloquent, witty rage in this novel, the twenty-first in the Discworld series. This is mainly down to the book's structure. For the first two-thirds, it proceeds as a City Watch procedural in much the same vein as its three excellent predecessors, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms and Feet of Clay. Whilst the war drums are beating, a crime takes place in Ankh-Morpork and Vimes and his officers hit the streets, following a trail to solve the crime but also hopefully stave off the war. However, in the latter third of the novel it turns into a road trip to the front, which is where the narrative starts wobbling.

There are some nice ideas in this latter part of the novel - the Patrician, Nobbs and Colon making for the most unlikely buddy team-up ever - but it does feel disjointed, like a Rincewind novel has crashed and merged into a City Watch novel towards the end. This isn't helped by some potentially amusing one-page gags (Nobbs going undercover in a harem as a woman) getting drawn out past their natural lifespan to the point of tedium. It also doesn't help that, for once, other people are ahead of Vimes and he ends up being very reactive to events through the book, only regaining his equilibrium when the book is pretty much over.

I suspect part of the problem is that once he'd hit on the "Discworld goes to war," theme, Pratchett didn't really have anywhere to take the idea. War is bad, sure, but that's pretty much obvious, and of course the situation is often more nuanced than that: defending yourself from an aggressor is a necessity. Pratchett is specifically calling out pointless wars over strategic spits of land that don't remotely justify the blood spilled, and once that point is (eloquently) made, he doesn't have a huge amount more to say, resulting in the book becoming a succession of knockabout, madcap scenes. Some are funny and work well, some not so much.

Jingo (***½) is two-thirds of a great Discworld novel about the City Watch, but that story runs out of steam and transforms into being a knockabout travelogue adventure. The main theme of war being bad is very effectively explored, but Pratchett's deeper, more thoughtful examination of his central idea is here missing. The book is fine, but disjointed.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 28 April 2022 - 04:24 PM

[amphibian]

I think you're absolutely right about what Jingo is.

[Werthead]

Discworld #22: The Last Continent

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The Unseen University Librarian has fallen ill, a magical malady that can only be fixed by someone who knows his real name. Unfortunately the last person to know that, Rincewind, vanished some years ago. The Unseen University faculty set out to find him. Meanwhile, Rincewind is up to his neck in danger on the remote continent of EcksEcksEcksEcks (XXXX, aka Terror Incognita) and is trying to find his way home.

The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld novel (carrying us into the second half of the series) and sees Pratchett checking back in with Rincewind, the original Discworld protagonist. As the series has gone on, Rincewind's appearances have become more and more sporadic, mainly because the gag with Rincewind, that he's a coward who always runs from danger, has long since run out of gas. Rincewind's tendency to turn up in remote corners of the Disc does make him a useful character for exploring other cultures, however.

Having last used Rincewind in Interesting Times to explore a China analogue, Pratchett uses him here to investigate a fantasy version of Australia. This is quite unusual, with Australia rarely showing up in a fantasy setting. Unlike China, which Pratchett had little experience of and so shied away from in-depth cultural ideas, he had far more hands-on experience of visiting and spending time in Australia and is more comfortable satirising its culture and stereotypes whilst also touching base with more serious ideas like the impact of colonialism on the indigenous population (although only briefly).

This is all fine, but it does feel like he really had too few ideas to explore fully in The Last Continent. The novel is split almost exactly in half between Rincewind trying to escape and the Unseen University trying to find him and getting marooned on a tropical island in the process. The book flips back and forth between the two storylines, which are so completely disconnected that they feel like two 200-page novels that have been merged into one 400-page one. This structure is unsuccessful, mainly because the Unseen University wizards really work best as supporting characters in someone else's story (as in, say, Moving Pictures). Making them the focus of half the novel really only reveals how shallow they are as characters, and we don't really learn much more about them that's interesting here. Ridcully is blustering but much smarter than he lets on, Ponder Stibbons is smart but easily exasperated by his less intellectual fellows and the Bursar keeps having funny turns and needs to eat dried frog pills. This is all stuff that was well-explored ten books back in Reaper Man. There's some interesting stuff on evolution and time travel in this storyline, but it's buried under a lot of repetitive, played-out running gags.

There are some interesting twists in Rincewind's story, with nods to the idea of how dreams and reality can get mixed up, but it can all be bit vague, not helped by a lack of interesting supporting characters. Rincewind was always helped in his early appearances by an entertaining back-up crew, whether that was Twoflower or Cohen the Barbarian, but here Rincewind is mostly flying solo and most of the characters he meets are below Pratchett's usual quality, being whacky or just mad for the sake of it. Even the Luggage is reduced to barely a cameo, which is disappointing (especially given its low profile in Interesting Times).

The Last Continent (***) is an odd book, with a structure that doesn't quite work and a lot of ideas that don't really come together. But, below-par Pratchett remains capable of spinning out some interesting ideas and some good gags. There's an interesting line on how people suddenly decide that war is a great idea during a time of peace and plenty, and there's some thoughtful musings on evolution and predestination paradoxes. But in terms of plot and character development, this is one of the weaker entries in the Discworld series. It is available now in the UK and USA.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 05 May 2022 - 11:30 AM

[Werthead]

Discworld #23: Carpe Jugulum

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King Verence of Lancre has welcomed travellers from across the Disc to the naming of his daughter and heir. Amongst the visitors are Mightily Oats, of the Church of Om, and dignitaries from Uberwald who like their drinks glasses to be warm and filled with blood. This sounds like a case for the Lancre witches, but young Agnes is suffering from divided attention and Granny Weatherwax has gone to ground, prompting a search by Nanny Ogg. The undead have come to Lancre, and don't seem keen to leave...

Carpe Jugulum, the twenty-third Discworld novel, returns to the Kingdom of Lancre and the adventures of the witches' coven led by Granny Weatherwax, one of the most popular sub-series within the larger series. It's a book that has a straightforward narrative, boiling down to vampires vs. witches, but also uses its straightforward story and structure to tell, in the best tradition of Pratchett, a more complex story about good, evil, morality and responsibility.

In the novel we meet "reformed" vampires. Through years of mental training against superstition and stereotypes, they've overcome many of the weaknesses of their kind. They've also trained themselves to "sip" from victims, keeping them alive for repeated use rather than killing lots of people. The vampires claim that this is progress, and they have overcome evil in pursuit of the common good, with the best results for both vampires and humans. However, it quickly becomes clear that this has just provided them with another form of control and oppression. The overt, cliche-ridden face of evil has instead been replaced by a bureaucratic, over-explained form of it, which feels even worse. The vampires beg the question, is slavery better than murder, and if so, does that still make slavery a good thing?

This leads to one of Pratchett's best encapsulations of the nature of evil and sin: people treating other people not as complex individuals worthy of respect, but as things, reducing them to statistics and not caring about their own volition; talking at people rather than with them. It's one of the Pratchett's most powerful arguments and it resonates through the novel as he explores it from different angles.

Pratchett is at his best when he is angry about something, as he was with fundamentalist religion in arguably his best novel, Small Gods (here echoed in the character of Oats, who is also a member of the Church of Om which was central in that book). His anger here is somewhat cooler, but he makes his point extremely well.

This overcomes a potential weakness of the book in terms of its basic plot and structure. "Vampires show up, take over Lancre, and get into a struggle with the witches and their allies," is extremely close to "Elves show up, take over Lancre, and get into a struggle with the witches and their allies," which we've already seen in Lords and Ladies. Although the specific plot points are different, the overall feeling of the novel is familiar. But still, if you can't tap yourself for ideas and inspiration, who else can you? And it helps that Pratchett uses a familiar structure to make an important thematic point about morality.

There's also some nice continuity moments in the book, like the first appearance of the Nac Mac Feegle in force (a solitary example appeared previously in Feet of Clay) who go on to play a major role in later books. The book is also quite amusing, with Pratchett satirising many elements of the horror genre, and the vampire genre specifically, without relying on the most obvious (and long-exhausted) gags. If there is another weakness, it's that the book dabbles with the idea of characters with split personalities, but doesn't engage with the idea as fully as perhaps it could.

Carpe Jugulum (****½) has a familiar and somewhat predictable structure, but Pratchett uses that to his advantage to relay a powerful message about the nature of good and evil, develop his characters (especially Granny Weatherwax) and trigger some good laughs along the way.

[Werthead]

Discworld #24: The Fifth Elephant

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To the distress of Sam Vimes, he has been appointed the new Ankh-Morpork Ambassador to Uberwald, a position he feels as well-suited to as a herring to the role of architectural consultant for a non-fish-related building. At the Patrician's insistence, due to Uberwald's vital role in the international fat trade, Vimes heads off to witness the coronation of the new Low King of the dwarfs*. Of course, there is a crime and, of course, Vimes can't leave well enough alone. Meanwhile, the werewolves of Uberwald have their own crisis going on, drawing in Angua of the City Watch and her boyfriend Carrot. This leaves the Ankh-Morpork Watch under the command of Sergeant Colon...which may not be the idea situation.

The Fifth Elephant is the twenty-fourth Discworld novel and the fifth to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Arguably, this is the most popular of Pratchett's sub-series due to its large cast of colourful, well-characterised characters with emotional and character arcs that unfold across multiple books, with the cynical Commander Vimes as one of Pratchett's most popular protagonists. The Fifth Elephant is also one of the more epic books in the series, adopting a multi-stranded, multi-POV approach more reminiscent of epic fantasy than most other Discworld novels.

The book divides itself into three main plot strands: Vimes as the Ambassador to Uberwald, getting entangled in political intrigue that would make George R.R. Martin at least somewhat nod in approval; Carrot, Angua and Gaspode the Wonder Dog getting into hijinks with the werewolves and non-were wolves of Uberwald; and Sergeant Colon being promoted beyond his ability and leading the City Watch into abject disaster at home. Pratchett's done multi-stranded plotting before, but rarely as accomplished as he does here, rotating between these three primary storylines and several significant subplots: Nobby forming the Disc's police union; a complicated vampire/werewolf/dwarf rivalry; Cheery Longbottom's ongoing crusade to allow dwarf women to be women; the onward march of the Igors; and the mysterious activities of Vimes' newly-appointed attache. There's a lot going on in The Fifth Elephant, maybe more than in any Discworld novel before it, and it's to Pratchett's credit that he juggles these ideas with skill and in a very disciplined 450 pages.

It's also the book that brings in one of the biggest worldbuilding changes to the series: the clacks. Discworld started off as a medieval-aping series, with Ankh-Morpork an effective carbon copy of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar. Since then, the setting has shifted down the timeline (although, fortunately, guns have not caught on). The introduction of the clacks - a continent-spanning semaphore system - starts to shift the setting more into the early 19th Century, with the Discworld steadily gaining a more steampunk, industrial feel to it which sets it apart from other fantasy settings. Pratchett handles this shift with subtle ease (to the point where you can forget the setting has advanced about 500 years in far less than a human lifetime), and it's fun to see it starting to happen here.

There's also a tremendous amount of successful worldbuilding here. We got a taste of one small corner of Uberwald in the previous novel, Carpe Jugulum, but the enormous country is covered and explored in more detail here. In particular Pratchett delves into the society and culture of his dwarfs more than in any previous book, and more than in most fantasy setting, where they're just kind of hanging around without a lot of development.

On the negative side of things, there's perhaps a few too many ideas being fired off here, with several promising plot strands and side-characters underserved due to the concise page count. This might be the Discworld novel most deserving of being longer so Pratchett could explore more ideas in more detail. I'm also not particularly convinced by the idea that even Sergeant Colon could nose-dive the City Watch into the ground within just a couple of days of being left in charge. Whilst never the brightest spark in the plug, Colon has never been the vindictive idiot he's made out to be here. It's particularly bizarre that his fall from grace happens so fast after his successful work alongside the Patrician in Jingo.

That aside, The Fifth Elephant (****½) is a triumph, with Pratchett delivering a large-scale, epic storyline spanning multiple characters and subplots and doing it extremely well, with some of the best worldbuilding in the series to date. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

*Pratchett has no truck with the cooler-looking, but ungrammatical, spelling "dwarves" in his setting.

[Werthead]

Discworld #25: The Truth

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William de Worde runs a seasonal newsletter for the well-to-do of Ankh-Morpork and other cities, but due to unusual circumstances he suddenly finds himself running the Discworld's first newspaper. As he tries to get to "the Truth," he finds himself the subject of seething rage from those who are unhappy with the stories he prints, those who want him to print their stories (and nobody else's) and those are desperate for him to print stories about their humorously-shaped vegetables. But there's also a Big Story going on, and William finds his interest in the truth of that story might be hazardous to his health.

The Truth marks a couple of notable moments for the Discworld series, being both the twenty-fifth book in the series and the first published after the new millennium. This may be be more subjective, but it also feels like there's a shift in the series at this point, with the series becoming a tad more serious in its pursuit of subject matter. It still has gags and jokes, but they now feel much more focused in support of the story, whilst in some earlier novels the two did not always work in tandem.

The Truth can be described as "Discworld does journalism" in the same way that Soul Music was "Discworld does rock music" and Moving Pictures was "Discworld does the movies" (the Disc inventing movies before newspapers kind of sums up what kind of place it is). However, this is an area which Pratchett has first-hand experience, as he worked in both newspapers and as a press officer for many years. He famously noted how he saw his first dead body about three hours into his very first day working for a newspaper, "work experience" meaning something back in those days. As a result Pratchett brings considerable knowledge to bear on how printing presses work, how journalists talk to people and the widely-ranging responses people have to journalists, from showing off, lying or exhibiting extreme hostility.

These elements all work well, are interesting and can be quite funny, but The Truth also feels distressingly prescient. Pratchett presents the responses to the arrival of newspapers as hyper-exaggerated events for comedic purposes, such as the setting up of rival newspapers that just make stuff up and enraged people trying to track down journalists for revenge, or accusing journalists of lying when they simply don't like the story that's being told. What was grossly-exaggerated in 2000 fells distinctly less so in 2022. This is an area where the book has perhaps become both less funny but also much more prophetic and interesting. The book's motto of "a lie can spread around the world whilst the truth is still putting its boots on," feels even more resonant today then it did at the time.

Beyond that, The Truth works as a great mystery in its own right. It's interesting that the City Watch is investigating the same crime but since this is not a Watch novel, we don't have any insight to what they are doing. Instead we catch glimpses of their investigation through William's story, and Pratchett juggles having to keep William as his protagonist without suddenly making the Watch into idiots who can't solve the crime themselves. It's a fun balancing act which he pulls off with typical aplomb. The book is also an important piece of Terry Pratchett's worldbuilding growth of Ankh-Morpork, which over twenty-five books (and the following sixteen) has grown from being a Lankhmar knock-off to being the greatest, best-detailed fantasy metropolis in the history of the genre.

The novel is also notable as having arguably Pratchett's greatest tip of the hat to his good friend and collaborator, Neil Gaiman. Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin feel like a homage to Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Gaiman's TV series (and later novel) Neverwhere, and it's fun to see Pratchett but his spin on those kind of charismatic but evil villains.

The Truth (****½) might be the Discworld novel that's aged the most depressingly, with its hyper-exaggeration of fake news and reporting having become surprisingly accurate. However, it's also Pratchett working at the top of his game, delivering a strong mystery with great villains and some of his most quotable dialogue.

[Werthead]

Discworld #26: Thief of Time

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In Ankh-Morpork a young clock-maker is given the challenge of making a very special kind of clock, one which can measure time so finely that it can find the gaps between moments. Thousands of miles away, a troublesome apprentice joins forces with a monk to investigate a phenomenon which suggests big trouble is coming and, as so often, Ankh-Morpork will be at the centre of it. Death also gets the call-up alerting him to ride out for the apocalypse, which he cannot interfere with...but he knows a relative who can.

Thief of Time is very much one of those Discworld books where Pratchett came up with a killer central idea and then never really developed much follow-through. In his best books, Pratchett would develop a great idea which characters and more ideas and themes would develop organically around but, once in a very rare while, this creative alchemy would not take place and the book that he ended with was just okay. There's a neat idea, there's some funny gags, but the spirit and energy of the best Discworld books is wholly missing.

This is the issue with Thief of Time. It doesn't help that Pratchett is taking on a fairly cerebral idea here - of how time itself works and how people messing around with it can cause problems - but trying to explore it in the context of his Discworld comic fantasy series is not a comfortable fit. We've seen a lot of the gags about the Four Horsemen before (in Sourcery) and the Auditors of Reality are among Pratchett's dullest bad guys (even if he does here come up with a way of giving them more character). Novel co-protagonists Jeremy and Lobsang are somewhat undercooked, and even the usually-magnificent Susan Sto Helit (here in her swansong as a major, and underused, character) and her superb can't-be-dealing-with-the-world snark is absent for vast stretches of the book.

It's not all bad, and by this point Pratchett had developed to the point where he could turn almost anything into an amusing read. There's some nice jokes and the idea of a Fifth Horseman who left the group before they came famous is quite well-played. Nanny Ogg also gets a series of enjoyable cameos, a bit oddly, given that most of the Ankh-Morpork Regulars are missing from this novel when most of it is set in the city.

But the novel mostly feels a bit autopiloted onto the page. The pacing is quite poor - this is a 300-page book at best stretched out to closer to 500 - the more subtle character and thematic points Pratchett is making in other novels around this time aren't really there and an apparent romantic subplot that is supposed to be developing is just absent to a lack of chemistry by the characters, to the point it's genuinely weird that it comes up on the closing page.

Thief of Time (***) isn't the weakest Discworld novel and it has some excellent ideas and a few good gags. But in terms of character and story, it's well below-par for Pratchett in this middle part of the series when he was otherwise producing some extremely good books.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 11 June 2022 - 12:15 PM

[Werthead]

Discworld #27: The Last Hero

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Cohen the Barbarian is one of the greatest heroes in the history of the Disc. He has defeated many enemies, found much treasure and conquered several empires. But his well-earned retirement of riches and power is a bit on the boring side, so he's now come up with a new idea: to return fire to the gods and confront them on their home ground of Dunmanifestin, atop the ten-mile spire of Cori Celesti at the very heart of the world. Unfortunately, this will destroy the Disc and everything on it. Fortunately, the wizards of Unseen University are ready to join forces with Leonardo da Quirm and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch to save the day. Or at least try to.

The twenty-seventh Discworld book is another departure from the standard format of the series. Like the earlier Eric, The Last Hero was written and designed as an illustrated project. Unlike Eric, The Last Hero was never designed to be reissued without its illustrations, and they are more dynamically and essentially integrated into the book.

The Last Hero could be best-described as Discworld: Avengers. Pratchett takes advantage of the enormous cast of characters he's built up over twenty-six previous novels to come up with a story and cast of characters to form a team to save the world. Unfortunately, given the competence rating of the average Pratchettian protagonist is usually in minus figures (especially given the absence of Granny Weatherwax and Susan Sto Helit, and Commander Vimes only gets a cameo), this is not quite the slam-dunk solution it should be. Leonardo da Quirm, Captain Carrot and Rincewind join forces at the not-so-subtle behest of the Patrician and the Unseen University Faculty to stop Cohen's plan, and in the process have to build the Disc's first rocket ship and be the first people to set foot on the Disc's very small moon.

Compared to the form of thematic depth and rich characterisation Pratchett had hit in the mainline novels by this time, The Last Hero is lightweight and, even by Discworld standards, a bit implausible. The buildup and backstory of most Discworld novels is largely missing, and events unfold at very high speed given the epic scope of the story. But the book also works very well in its first aim, which is being a bit of disposable, knockabout fun of the kind we haven't seen since the early days of the series, and even better in its second, which is to act as a showcase for the artwork of Paul Kidby.

The original Discworld artist, Josh Kirby, passed away around the time this book was published. Kidby, who'd been working on art projects related to the setting for a few years already, had already been set up as his successor-in-waiting and this project was already underway at the time. Kidby would go on to illustrate the covers from Night Watch (the twenty-ninth book) onward, so The Last Hero can be read as a statement of confidence and intent here. And it works very well. Kirby's madcap art had a wit and charm of its own, but fans had long complained of a lack of fidelity to the text. Kirby's Rincewind was decades older than the thirtysomething character in the novels, and his constant depiction of Twoflower with literally four eyes rather than wearing glasses was quite odd. But Kidby's artwork is much truer to Pratchett's text and also much clearer and easier to parse, whilst still retaining its own, unique stylised energy.

The artwork throughout the book is excellent, often eliciting a giggle by itself. Many of the pieces in the book have become familiar art pieces for the setting individually, and these range from epic depictions of the view of the Disc and its supporting elephants and turtle from its moon to more intimate portraits of the characters and creatures. Kidby does a particularly great job at capturing Carrot's charismatic heroism and Rincewind's world-weary fatalism.

The story is thin and a little disposable, but fun. Pratchett layers in some melancholy thoughts about aging and feeling obsolete in your work as you get older, but also some traditional comic references to history and science.

The Last Hero (****) won't rank as many people's favourite Discworld book due to the lack of depth in its story, but the exceptional artwork elevates the work beyond being a mere curiosity or Christmas stocking-filler.

[Werthead]

Discworld #28: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

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A band of travellers from Ankh-Morpork have arrived in the town of Bad Blintz. The band consists of a boy with a flute named Keith, a tomcat called Maurice and a lot of rats. A lot of very smart rats. However, as the town suffers from a curiously well-timed rat infestation and Keith and Maurice prepare to enact 'the scam', it becomes clear that something else is at work in the sewers and tunnels under the town. Something that takes an interest in the curiously smart rodents...

Discworld occupies such a huge part of Sir Terry Pratchett's output that it's sometimes easy to forget his other career, that of a bestselling children's author. Thanks to the animated TV show, Pratchett was as well-known for his Truckers trilogy of children's fantasy as he was his adult Discworld series for a while, and his other books aimed at children were also huge successes. His Johnny Maxwell trilogy was the first of his works adapted for live-action television.

It's therefore interesting that it took twenty-eight novels for Pratchett to write a Discworld book for children, and it's also quite remarkable the impact it had on his career. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was published in 2001 and won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction. Although a British award, it seems to have had a strong impact in the American market, with Maurice being the book that apparently finally broke through and established Pratchett as a solid-seller in the US after years of very patchy performances for the earlier books. Pratchett's performance in the UK also seemed to pick up, and indeed his already-incredible sales performance in the UK (1% of all books sold in Britain in the 1990s were apparently Pratchetts, which was remarkable at the time) would have likely broken even more records had he not also been overtaken around the same time by a certain other fantasy series about wizards and magic. Pratchett no doubt cried about this into his handkerchiefs made of £100 bills.

The Amazing Maurice is an an interesting novel, most notably because Pratchett makes almost exactly zero concessions to his apparently intended audience (his other books are not exactly awash in nudity and swearing). The novel is written in the same manner as his adult books and in fact is actually among the most disturbing Discworld novels, with the revelation of the antagonist in the book being one of Pratchett's more revolting moments. It may have talking rats in it, but the tone is closer to Watership Down (complete with some pretty savage fights and deaths) than to Beatrix Potter. Pratchett seems to do this deliberately, with the rats' belief in a utopian future of animal cooperation stemming from reading a children's book called Mr. Bunnsy Has An Adventure, which becomes a totem of their tribe. Pratchett paints the internal divisions of the rat gang and each character in some detail, with his traditional economical-but-effective storytelling. The book has a darker tone than most of his novels, and whilst there are still a few laughs here, it's a more intense book than many of the Discworld series.

The novel also has some great riffs on folklore, on the allure of storytelling and the inhumanity of humans to both other humans and the natural world. Pratchett is at his best when he's angry about some injustice, and he fires up his anger quite nicely here, particularly on how people treat animals.

It's also quite snappy, coming in at a breezy 270 pages, avoiding the bloat some of the later Discworld books intermittently suffered from. Pratchett sets up his plot and characters, tell his story with impressive depth and characterisation and gets out all in the time that some more traditional fantasy authors are still using to clear their throats and get the protagonist out of his starting village.

There aren't many negatives aside from one, which was outside the author's power: at the time of his grossly premature passing in 2015, Pratchett had a sequel to this novel planned, in which the Amazing Maurice becomes a ship's cat. It's a grievous shame we'll never read that story. But the book is getting another chance to shine, with an animated film based on the novel scheduled for release in late 2022, starring Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, David Tennant, Gemma Arterton, Himesh Patel, David Thewlis and Peter Serafinowicz.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (****½) is Pratchett at his most impressive, telling a darker story than normal but with his trademark wit and skills at character-building. It's also a complete stand-alone, with no connections at all to the rest of the Discworld series and can be read completely independently.

[Werthead]

Discworld #29: Night Watch

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Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh-Morpork, is having a very bad day. His wife is in labour with their first child, and it is the thirtieth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May. But rather than spending his day toasting fallen friends and greeting his child into the world, Vimes is instead chasing down Carcer, a notorious murderer and sociopath with a taste for killing Watchmen. The inadvertent combination of a lightning strike with the standing magical field of Unseen University transports both Vimes and Carcer back to the week of the Glorious Revolution, and Vimes has to stop Carcer and ensure that history unfolds precisely as it did before...which is a bit difficult when their arrival brings about the death of Vimes' old friend and mentor before his time.

There is nothing, or at least very little, as glorious in the world as Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) on his best form. Released in 2002, the twenty-ninth Discworld novel holds a strong claim to be the series' very best, although it is a crowded field.

As with the other (arguable) leading candidate for that title, Small Gods, Night Watch is a book that is both funny and angry. In the earlier novel, Pratchett was furious over religious fundamentalism and how personal faith could and can be perverted into a force of oppression and evil. In Night Watch he studies paranoia and fear, how crowds and masses can be moved by propaganda and oppressed by their own rulers because they fear them. The tone is darker and bleaker than most other Discworld books by design: this isn't the cosmopolitan, successful Ankh-Morpork of the later series, but an old, rough, poor and paranoid city ruled by a lunatic despot. There's a sinister secret police force, there's torture chambers and inquisitions, and there's casual racism (as usual in the series, filtered through the lens of speciesism) that takes even old-skool, dyed-in-the-wool copper Vimes by surprise. There is still humour here, but it's grimmer and blacker than in most of his books.

One of the novel's most impressive achievements is evoking such ideas and reaching such quality in the middle of one of the series' most tightly-woven sub-series. Small Gods was a complete standalone set long before the rest of the series, but Night Watch is a key book in the "City Watch" arc, with frequent continuity references to what's been going in that storyline. However, Night Watch's fish-out-of-water setting does render that somewhat moot: you really just need to know that Vimes is a successful, reforming police commander with a pregnant wife and an ambiguously motivated boss.

The book is dealing with a lot of inspirations: the cover (Paul Kidby's first regular cover for the series following the passing of his more idiosyncratic predecessor, Josh Kirby) is a riff on Rembrandt's "Night Watch," whilst the revolution itself plays on everything from France to Russia and even Bloody Sunday (the deployment of the military to deal with a civil order issue is uncomfortably on the nose, as it means to be). Pratchett is not really interested in a 1:1 copy-past of the real events, though, and is more interested into delving into the rationales for civil disorder, for popular rebellions and mass uprisings, and if revolutions ever really change anything, other than just swapping the name on the door of the top office, and if today's heroic revolutionary leader is tomorrow's tyrannical despot.

Night Watch (*****) is still funny, but Pratchett wraps the comedy around more serious, even grimmer themes than in many of his books. The story is excellent, the characterisation - especially of Vimes, who by this novel has become maybe Pratchett's richest protagonist - among Pratchett's best and the villain is one of the most genuinely hateful in the entire series. It's also an interesting morality play on political states, the meaning of power, and how the masses can be harnessed for good and ill.

[Werthead]

Discworld #30: The Wee Free Men

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Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is serious and studious for her age, and has little truck with myths and superstition. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil supernatural force from another universe and she is offered an alliance with the Nac Mac Feegle, a species of diminutive-but-psychotic warriors, this offends Tiffany's worldview. But pragmatism wins out, and she has to reluctantly embark on an adventure.

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth Discworld novel, and when you're thirty books into any series you might be forgiven for resting on your laurels a bit, especially when the previous one, Night Watch, is often cited as the best thing you've ever written. For Sir Terry Pratchett, this was not an option. Having experimented with a Discworld book for younger audiences, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, he decided to start a whole new sub-series within the wider Discworld framework that would be aimed primarily at younger readers.

Pratchett being Pratchett, this meant relatively little changes or compromises to his usual vision. Some of the very occasional double entendre gags are gone, the book is somewhat shorter than usual, but beyond that Pratchett didn't really censor himself at all. If anything, this is a more thoughtful, contemplative Discworld book than the norm, with some enjoyable setpieces interrupted by Tiffany's internal musings on life and her ambitions.

Tiffany is smart, curious and sensible, not given to recklessness but also having a strong moral centre. She may be a quintessential Discworld protagonist, being often the only sane person in the room and constantly wondering why selfishness and hatred even exist. She is cut from the same competence cloth as Granny Weatherwax and Samuel Vimes, but lacks their experience and cynicism. She is a well-drawn protagonist who has to overcome problems presented by capable enemies, rather than because she's holding an idiot ball (something many other writers could learn from).

What is impressive about The Wee Free Men is how much of it is told from within Tiffany's head: the Nac Mac Feegle are not given to in-depth dialogue (although they have a few bon mots of wisdom) and many of the other characters are evil, monsters, stupid adults or even less-communicative children. Just about the only person Tiffany can have a decent 1:1 conversation with is a sentient toad. This means we get to lock into Tiffany's thought processes and motivations in a lot of depth, which is refreshing.

Taking part in a hitherto-unexplored part of the Disc with almost no recurring characters (not even Death, making this the first Discworld novel that he skips out on), at least until the last chapter, The Wee Free Men also makes a viable on-roading point for the entire series. Technically the main villain did (briefly) appear in Lords and Ladies, but that is really not alluded to in the book so is not hugely important.

The Wee Free Men (****½) sheds a lot of the extended subplots that had started padding out the Discworld books around this time and is focused and entertaining, with a small but well-drawn cast of characters. It's funny, but intermittently, with musings on growing up and responsibility. For the first in a new, YA (or outright children)-focused series, it's surprisingly contemplative and thoughtful, and all the richer for it.

This post has been edited by Werthead: 17 December 2023 - 05:17 PM

[Werthead]

Discworld #31: Monstrous Regiment

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With war raging - or shambolically bumbling around - bar worker Polly Perks decides to go searching for her missing brother. She poses as a man to join the army and is assigned to a new regiment, only to find out almost the entire company has had the same idea. With women doing men's work also deemed an Abomination Unto Nuggan, the regiment has to keep their heads down, infiltrate an enemy keep, and work out how to rescue/escape their assorted family members, and, if possible, end the war before it causes any more damage.

Throughout his prolific career, Sir Terry Pratchett had a knack for using his witty dialogue, sharp prose and keen knowledge of history and culture to explore many different concepts. In most cases, he produced a brilliant Discworld book exploring a certain idea, like the press or the dangers of fundamentalist religion. But, when he turned his attention to the idea of war, he uncharacteristically dropped the ball. Jingo was perfectly okay, but lacked his trademark intelligence and depth.

Ten books later, he decided to give it another go, and this time nailed it. If Jingo was about the superficialities of going to war for absolutely no sane reason, Monstrous Regiment is about war as a much more complex force. Here we have burned-out homesteads, villages standing amidst salted fields and people's homes being invaded for reasons they don't really understand. Borogravia is fighting a defensive war against invaders, but it's also been a bellicose lunatic in the past, and is being flattened under the weight of the abuse heaped upon it by its own rulers. This creates a complex stew of ideas and themes, which is where Pratchett is at his best.

Polly and her fellow soldiers have little interest in the greater geopolitical complexities of the war, instead just trying to rescue individual people from the maelstrom. But, thanks to a chance encounter with newspaper reporter William de Worde (cameoing from The Truth), their mission inadvertently becomes famous across half the continent, and takes on a grander importance. It's also symbolic of the losses Borogravia has suffered, where an entire regiment is made up of women because there's increasingly few men left able to fight.

As in his best, most cutting books, Pratchett remembers to keep the funny: the regiment consists of an assortment of funny characters, the most memorable being Maladict, a suave, reformed vampire who has sworn off blood but developed an equally crippling addiction to coffee. But there's an undercurrent of seriousness here that is powerful: more than a few of the recruits have been victimised, and how they deal with trauma is a subtle but constant theme of the book. Sergeant Jackrum also emerges as one of Pratchett's most fascinating characters, a counterpoint of his more familiar Commander Vimes (who has a few brief appearances in the novel as an Ankh-Morpork liaison) who went down a decidedly more disturbing path (with more than a whiff of Life on Mars' Gene Hunt to them as well, for good and ill).

The book unfolds with a very deliberate pace: at just under 500 pages this is one of the longest Discworld novels but it earns its length by dividing the narrative into several distinct sections as the mission unfolds, as well as the larger-than-normal cast giving Pratchett a lot of characters to develop. But this also gives the book the feel of holding a stick of dynamite that's about to go off. Pratchett is known for being funny but he is absolutely at his best when he is angry, and I get the distinct impression as he wrote the book and continued researching things like the treatment of people in war, especially women and "non-conformists," he got progressively angrier. By the time the book concludes, the humour is so laced with white-hot rage that it is positively acidic. But Pratchett also never loses control. He doesn't go into some lecturing rant (a weakness some of his other books suffer from) and he never dissipates the focus on the story or characters.

Monstrous Regiment (*****) is Pratchett's take on war - actual, messy, horribly murky war - and gender and politics. It's a long book, by his standards, but he maintains the pacing and tension to deliver one of his finest and most thought-provoking novels.