Night Watch
by Terry Pratchett
An untamed imagination, a fluent but meticulous style, a wide background of reading, a taste for old-time satire: Was Wolcott Gibbs the last person to claim all these qualities or was it Vladimir Nabokov? Neither: Terry Pratchett's got them and he's still working. Night Watch is the twenty-seventh novel in his Discworld series.
Which may require a word of explanation, but you know what? Go to Google, enter the search term discworld, and take your pick of a thousand words. Or you can visit the author's own web site. For the ultimate in explanation, read my notes on The Science of Discworld.
Samuel Vimes has come a long way in Pratchett's work. He first appeared as a drunken, bigoted City Watch commander on the night shift, later dried out and broadened his views on nonhuman and nonliving people, saved lives beyond counting, and married into the richest family in the city-state of Ankh-Morpork. He'd love to be pounding a beat in thin-soled boots, so the cobblestones can speak to him, and sheltering in a corner for a smoke, but he's been promoted off the street and made to wear a helmet with a feather. In Night Watch, as faithful readers knew he would, he hares off over the rooftiles after a villain (interestingly named Carcer) and gets into a pickle.
A freak lightning strike casts cop and criminal back thirty years to the beginning of Vimes' career, and so begins the darkest of the Discworld books. For two decades Pratchett has spoofed fantasy writers, from Tolkien and Doc Smith to Fritz Leiber and Anne McCaffrey, and most of the series has maintained a tone somewhere in the comic-to-goofy range. The new novel steps out at a sharp angle to that line. It moves as fast as any of the others and uses (indeed introduces) a lot of the dependable buffoons we've met before, but now we see them at a decision point: Thirty years on, will they become the Fred Colon and Reg Shoe we know, or will they be unremembered failures or worse? Everything rests on Vimes, who knows how it came down before but can't see how to make it come down that way this time.
For one thing, he arrives in the past to discover that Carcer has killed the man he remembers as his mentor. How can a fresh-faced young constable learn to be a good policeman if he and his teacher never meet? For another, taxmen and secret police have applied so much pressure to the citizens that a rebellion is close to popping, but Vimes sees events turning in a new and unmanageable way. He knows, too, which coppers died on the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, and now must make sure none of them gets rescued.
The six or seven "Watch novels" in the Discworld cycle generally do cast events more darkly than the rest of the series. Jingo even takes Vimes to war. But nothing in the other books prepared me for the bleakness here. This is Terry Pratchett in an "83rd Precinct" vein: You may have a good heart and do everything right, and innocent people are still going to get killed, and you may catch the bad guys or you may not, and you're not a bad person if you don't, it's just the breaks. What's more, Vimes has a rich and nearly continuous dialog with himself in all his appearances, and what keeps bobbing to the surface in Night Watch? A soldier song that he's seen old men weep on hearing.
So if you've enjoyed the comic Discworld books and found the laughs in Guards! Guards! or Men at Arms, am I saying you won't like Night Watch? By no means. It's well structured and shows Pratchett working another sf/fantasy convention as he's done so well before. I found the pathos controlled and the gloom amply balanced by glimpses at the "origins" of familiar characters. Most of all, what I find attractive in this book is what I've seen in the others: The author has invented this zany universe (the world is held up by four elephants that stand on the back of Great A'Tuin, a huge turtle) in which he can play with laws of physics, economics and religion, and it all holds together from book to book. Notions he needs in the later volumes turn out to have been seeded into earlier ones. Discworld coheres as few other artificial worlds do.
I wouldn't recommend Night Watch if it's the first Pratchett for you. Too many connections. Although . . . if you read it and then went to Guards! Guards! . . . hmm, excuse me.
Oh, I almost left out the rant. The newspapers didn't say much about this, but sometime in the 1950s the last proofreader and the last copy editor in America died in a suicide pact. I believe they have been replaced by a 20-year-old stoner using a Microsoft spellchecker. Of all the sorry piece-of-crap jobs of hurrying out a new book I've seen, this may be the worst. Full of typos, but it isn't just typos: Verbs have been specially selected not to agree with subjects, for example. If I thought Harper-Collins capable of shame, I'd shame them good. Bunch of jacklegs. Tripe merchants. Pratchett deserves better, and so do I, and so do you.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Night Watch