It's been a minute since I've gotten to talk about the Discworld re-read project - holidays, the world on fire, all those things conspire to keep me from posting to the blog. But I've finally made it to the next few books! The first is one of my favorite books to start getting into the Discworld series in general, Guards! Guards! (1989). It's the first book of the City Watch sub-series, and shows a whole different side of Ankh-Morpork that we have only seen glimpses of so far. It's also one that deserves a blog post all by itself.
The dedication says who the book is for - the people who, in the course of a book or movie, are the ones that line up to be attacked by the hero, or run after the bad guy as he goes speeding through the streets. The faceless Watch or police who certainly didn't ask for things to be as exciting as they suddenly became, but here they are.
The men of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch certainly didn't sign up for excitement. We see them right after the funeral of one of their own, a watchman who had the bad luck of running after a miscreant and catching him. The fact that they see his death as avoidable, if only he hadn't run so fast, is a good indicator of what kind of Watch is running the place. They aren't, in fact, running anything.
Ankh-Morpork as a city is a fascinating bundle of guilds and people with interesting ideas of a right and wrong glued together by a healthy fear/minimal respect for the Patrician. The Watch, by the time we see them, are basically a vestigial organ of the city - at one point, they had been useful, but the evolution of the city means that they aren't really needed the way they had been. They certainly don't have the respect of the citizens, until something bigger than what the guilds can handle shows up in the form of an ancient dragon.
I really enjoy how Pratchett takes the old ideas of fantasy - the hero who shows up to save the city in danger at just the right moment, the dragon being used as the example of a city under threat - and turns it on its head. What if someone forced the issue? What if someone made the conditions just right to bring the hero to rescue them about? Would it work?
Well, sort of. The dragon shows up, the man they've chosen to be the "king" comes and "destroys" the dragon, and everything's ready for a new era of Ankh-Morpork...except the dragon comes back, and that is not something the secret society that summoned it was ready for. To be fair, who expects the dragon to return after it's been banished?
In addition to being the introduction to the City Watch, this book is where we meet Sam Vimes. He's not in a great place when we first find him drunk in a gutter, but it's a great place to start - he has one of the greatest character arcs of any I've ever read, which means he needs to start from somewhere near the bottom in order to grow to the heights he will achieve.
There are some bits of this book that hit differently in the current climate. Specifically, there's a passage near the end where the Patrician is talking to Vimes about good and bad people:
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." ...
"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness...Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no." ...
[Vimes] shrugged. "They're just people," he said. "They're just doing what people do, sir."
Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. "Of course, of course," he said. "You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad."
Pratchett really has a way of putting the knife in and hitting where it hurts. I've heard that Vimes is essentially the character closest to Pratchett himself, which explains a lot about the anger we see.
It's another book that is evergreen in a lot of ways, and there are definitely lessons to be learned 30+ years after it was originally published.
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