white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2016-04-08 07:05 pm
white_hart) wrote2016-04-08 07:05 pm
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Reading: Feet of Clay
I remember when I was reading Discworld for the first time noticing, sometime around the mid-1990s, that something about what Pratchett was trying to do seemed to have shifted. The books became less straightforward comedy, more thoughtful; less parody, more satire. At the time, I found this quite hard to accept, because what I'd originally loved about Discworld was the lampooning of real-world originals; I started reading the books as light relief after doing an English degree and, two years on, I still wasn't really ready for subtlety or books that made me think. These days, I feel rather different; the earlier books feel a bit silly, and the subtler, more satirical books are the ones that feel like vintage Pratchett.
Feet of Clay is definitely vintage Pratchett. Ankh-Morpork here feels much more three-dimensional than it did in the earlier books, and although it's still very funny the issues it tackles are serious. I was surprised by just how much Cheery Littlebottom's story anticipates the current discourse around trans rights, while the main plot explores of the distinction between things and people and how that can change, with nods to the history of slavery but also to Asimov's robots and questions of artificial intelligence and sentience, as well as to the Luddites. I really like the expansion of Angua's role, as she's one of my favourite characters in the series, while Vimes's character seems to have crystallised into the person he is, more or less, for the rest of the series. I found the Nobby subplot rather dull, but I do tend to find the Nobby and Colon bits less appealling; they're like the clowns in Shakespeare, where I mainly just think "please get on with it".
I have to admit to a certain horrified curiosity about what's going to happen when Mark Reads gets to this (he's on Interesting Times at the moment, so a couple of books away. Mind you, I'm even more horrified and curious about what's going to happen when he gets to Jingo. I think certain sections of the internet may actually explode. (I think that Predict What Mark Will Misread As Offensive would be a good party game. In Feet of Clay, I'm going to hazard transphobia for Cheery, racism for the golem/slavery analogies and possibly anti-Semitism for the use of golems full stop. Not that I'm planning on reading Mark Reads to find out if I'm right.)
Next up, eventually, will be Jingo. Which will be interesting, because I hated it when it first came out, and I rather suspect I won't this time round.
Feet of Clay is definitely vintage Pratchett. Ankh-Morpork here feels much more three-dimensional than it did in the earlier books, and although it's still very funny the issues it tackles are serious. I was surprised by just how much Cheery Littlebottom's story anticipates the current discourse around trans rights, while the main plot explores of the distinction between things and people and how that can change, with nods to the history of slavery but also to Asimov's robots and questions of artificial intelligence and sentience, as well as to the Luddites. I really like the expansion of Angua's role, as she's one of my favourite characters in the series, while Vimes's character seems to have crystallised into the person he is, more or less, for the rest of the series. I found the Nobby subplot rather dull, but I do tend to find the Nobby and Colon bits less appealling; they're like the clowns in Shakespeare, where I mainly just think "please get on with it".
I have to admit to a certain horrified curiosity about what's going to happen when Mark Reads gets to this (he's on Interesting Times at the moment, so a couple of books away. Mind you, I'm even more horrified and curious about what's going to happen when he gets to Jingo. I think certain sections of the internet may actually explode. (I think that Predict What Mark Will Misread As Offensive would be a good party game. In Feet of Clay, I'm going to hazard transphobia for Cheery, racism for the golem/slavery analogies and possibly anti-Semitism for the use of golems full stop. Not that I'm planning on reading Mark Reads to find out if I'm right.)
Next up, eventually, will be Jingo. Which will be interesting, because I hated it when it first came out, and I rather suspect I won't this time round.