Guards! Guards!

[white_hart]

Having re-read all of Pratchett's Witches books last year I decided it was time to tackle the City Watch books and picked Guards! Guards! when I needed something to read the other day. This is one of the ones I first read in the summer of 1995, when, home from university for the final time, unemployed and fed up with serious reading after spending three years studying English literature, I read my way steadily through my brother's Discworld collection, starting with The Colour of Magic and making it through to Men At Arms before I finally managed to move away again*. To be quite honest, it wasn't one of my favourites then; I loved the Witches and Death and even, heaven help me, Rincewind**, but the City Watch left me a bit cold.

Partly, I think it's that I didn't really get them. Being young and stupid and fairly familiar with the tropes of fantasy, and unfamiliar with police procedurals, I immediately identified Carrot as the hero and couldn't quite work out why Pterry kept focusing on the dull, middle-aged, alcoholic Vimes instead***. I think someone finally explained to me that Vimes was the hero after we'd seen Paul Darrow playing him in a theatre production of Guards! Guards!.

Re-reading it now, Carrot is obviously just part of the ensemble cast of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, along with Colon and Nobby; the heart of the book is Vimes' redemption and rediscovery of his sense of purpose, a good man in an ugly world, a man with an unshakeable sense of right and wrong and a determination to punish wrongdoers, however powerful or influential they may be, whatever the personal cost might be.

What I was surprised at was how dark the book was in places. I know that the later Watch books are often very dark, but I'd thought that came later. I would have said that the first few were simply lighthearted fun and things took a darker turn round about, say, Jingo. But it turns out that I was as wrong about that as I was about who the hero was. The depiction of Ankh-Morpork under the control of the dragon, and the things that people will allow to be done to other people to preserve their own skins, is easily as dark as anything in Night Watch or Thud!. No wonder I didn't like it much when I was young and green and didn't really believe evil existed outside books. At that age, I think I had an innocent optimism that had quite a lot in common with Carrot; now I'm older and more cynical, more aware of what the world is really like, I've grown into Vimes, and I'm looking forward to following his journey again, this time with more understanding.

*I love my family, but at the age of 21 being forced to abandon the throbbing metropolis of Coventry for a Hampshire commuter town where I didn't know anyone any more was no fun at all.

**What can I say? I was young and stupid and had grown up on the kind of fantasy they were taking off, though I don't think I could bring myself to re-read them, now.

***I really don't know how I can have just managed to persuade a reputable university to award me a 2.1 in English literature.

Comments

[caulkhead]

I decided it was time to reread all the Vimes ones earlier this year. I think I always knew he was the hero of Men At Arms, but I hadn't noticed either how much he was the hero of Guards! Guards! (In my defence, I did first read it at 15 and, like you, familiar with fantasy tropes but not police procedural ones).

Someone said once they could see how the Vimesy of Night Watch had developed into Commander Vimes, but not the Vimes we first meet. I can - and that's almost the darkest part of the whole series, for me. Except that he grows out of it again, given the hint of a chance to grab.

[white_hart]

Yes, I was thinking about Vimesy this time. I think the years between Night Watch and Guards! Guards! must have been very bad ones for him, and yet he still manages to pull out of it very quickly.

[antisoppist]

Ah thank you, that makes sense. Guards! Guards! was the first one I really liked. I hadn't thought before that this was probably because I was familiar with police procedurals (and schoolgirl heroines with a determined sense of honour) but unfamiliar with the tropes of fantasy.*

I haven't read any since around about Carpe Jugulum though and probably should at some point.

*I did try but making sense of how the world I was in worked was hard enough without trying to work out what all the rules were in other people's imaginary worlds in my spare time.

[white_hart]

I do think that recognition of genre is important with Pratchett.

For me, I think that reading fantasy and sf and learning how to read and work out an unfamiliar world was how I also learnt to read and work out the world around me, but then one of the defining events of my childhood was moving to the US at the age of 6 and 11 months so "understanding strange new worlds" was an important life skill.

[ironed_orchid]

This is so interesting. I bounced quite hard off The Colour of Magic when I was young, and it was only when I read Guards! Guards! when I was 30ish that I really fell for Pratchett and proceeded to read all his stuff over the next couple of years.

[white_hart]

I think that The Colour of Magic is quite difficult for people who aren't familiar with the kind of sword-and-sorcery fantasy it's lampooning; when people ask me where they should start reading the books I normally recommend Mort, Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards!.

[ironed_orchid]

Oh, I was very familiar. I just wasn't interested in someone who only did parody.

[white_hart]

Ah yes, that too. The books definitely got more interesting as they moved away from straightforward parody.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I think I had an innocent optimism at 21, too, but it's so long ago that I can't really remember.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

I don't think I had much innocent optimism at 21, partly as a result of reading "Animal Farm" at the age of 7 at my mother's suggestion (long story) and "1984" a few years later. So I always did appreciate the darkness of the stories.

[white_hart]

I have still never read Animal Farm, though I did read 1984 for my degree and had also read Brave New World at 14, but neither managed to shake my belief that people were fundamentally good. It took another 20 years of news to do that.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I really most revisit some Discworld, I love Vimes :) I keep eyeing up those lovely new hardback editions they have in Waterstones and then thinking what an expensive habit that would become...

[white_hart]

We have almost all of them in either hardback or paperback, depending how rich we were feeling when they came out, though there are a few later ones I bought on kindle instead and will look out for secondhand copies of to complete the collection (though tbh those are all the post-Embuggerance ones and I'm not entirely sure I'll want to re-read them).

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

We only own about half a dozen, they used to be something so many of my friends bought on publication that I always just borrowed them. I'm hopelessly out of date now though, the last one I read was The Fifth Elephant I think, although I watched and enjoyed the TV adaptation of Going Postal.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

We only own about half a dozen, they used to be something so many of my friends bought on publication that I always just borrowed them. I'm hopelessly out of date now though, the last one I read was The Fifth Elephant I think, although I watched and enjoyed the TV adaptation of Going Postal.

[deililly.livejournal.com]

I love Vimes but wonder if I would have felt the same about him if I had read the books when a little younger. Interesting thought.

[white_hart]

I love him too, now. It's odd, because it's not as though I ever thought that, say, Magrat was the heroine of the Witches books.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I think it says a great deal for the judgment of the university, which is really a very good one indeed.

[white_hart]

I'm not convinced that it can have had a solid backing of evidence, though I suppose I might have been a bit more on the ball when I was reading things for my course and not specifically to get away from serious reading.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I guess it's hard to bench oneself against twenty-one-year-olds a couple of decades later?

[white_hart]

I don't think I know any 21-year-olds! I don't have much contact with the students, and if I do it tends to be graduate students, who are a slightly different proposition.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm not being clear at all! I mean you against a population of your peers at the time! My thesis is that we would set a higher standard for ourselves now than would have been appropriate then.

[white_hart]

Ah, I have no idea. I suspect I was still more emotionally immature than many, but maybe not extraordinarily so.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I must have read the Watch books before I was 17, because Jingo was the first one I got in hardback because I couldn't wait for the paperback, yet I fell head over heels for Vimes from the start. I like Carrot, and I like Angua a lot, and I like the whole crowd as a crowd, but it was always Sam for me.

Odd, because I don't think I was very cynical - but then I'm not sure cynical is the right word for Vimes either - he might have been a lot less miserable in those days if he didn't believe there was a way things should be to contrast with the way they actually are...

[white_hart]

I really, really disliked Jingo when I first read it; I'll be interested to see whether that's changed when I get back to it this time (I suspect it will have done).

Yes, Vimes' cynicism definitely comes from disappointment; not just that there are people who will break the law but that, at the start of Guards! Guards! the law isn't respected at all.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I'll need to go back and read it again - I haven't, since I saw Darrow in the stage production all those years ago.

And I also thought that Carrot was the hero, way back then. Time has changed that view, but then I also think that Louis is the hero of Casablanca, these days.

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

The Guards novels are my favourite. I should reread Pratchett when I get time.

I bet Darrow made an *excellent* Vimes.