Reading: Jingo
May. 8th, 2016 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartWhen I first read Jingo, in 1998, I was bitterly disappointed by it. I - and quite a few other Pratchett fans I knew - thought it was probably the worst thing Pterry had ever written. I think this may have been a little while before the phrase "jumping the shark" became common parlance, at least in Coventry, but that was exactly what we thought had happened. I simply couldn't understand why people like A.S. Byatt praised it so highly, when it was clearly the Worst. Discworld. Book. Ever.
Re-reading it now, I can completely understand why I thought that. If you approach Jingo expecting straightforward comic fantasy with many humorous references to real life then there really is no way you aren't going to be disappointed, because straightforward is the last thing Jingo is. It's complicated and subtle. It's a thoughtful novel about war which is at least partly satirising the 1991 Gulf War and partly satirising every war ever. With many humorous reference to real life, just for incidental amusement. And it is stunningly good. This is Pratchett on top form, spinning interlocking storylines together, mixing serious and silly utterly seamlessly. It turns out that he didn't have a slump in the late 90s after all; he was just producing work that was so much more than the light comedy I was expecting that I simply couldn't adjust my frame of reference to it.
Re-reading it now, I can completely understand why I thought that. If you approach Jingo expecting straightforward comic fantasy with many humorous references to real life then there really is no way you aren't going to be disappointed, because straightforward is the last thing Jingo is. It's complicated and subtle. It's a thoughtful novel about war which is at least partly satirising the 1991 Gulf War and partly satirising every war ever. With many humorous reference to real life, just for incidental amusement. And it is stunningly good. This is Pratchett on top form, spinning interlocking storylines together, mixing serious and silly utterly seamlessly. It turns out that he didn't have a slump in the late 90s after all; he was just producing work that was so much more than the light comedy I was expecting that I simply couldn't adjust my frame of reference to it.
