Guards! Guards!
Jan. 9th, 2016 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartHaving 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.
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.
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Date: 2016-01-10 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-10 08:59 am (UTC)