Reading: Night Watch
Oct. 15th, 2016 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartNight Watch is arguably the Best. Discworld. Book. Ever., and definitely one from the phase when Pratchett had completed the transition from the parody of the earliest books in the series to the more pointed satire of the later ones, after a mid-period where the two coexisted a little uneasily. This is the point at which I came back into step with the books, having not really managed to get what Pterry was trying to do in the half-dozen or so before it on first reading (actually, I think I had to give Night Watch a second reading, but I obviously managed to see that there was enough there to merit a second reading, whereas I spent an embarrassingly long time thinking Jingo was dreadful).
Unlike its precursors, Night Watch really is a Sam Vimes book, rather than a City Watch book. Carrot and Detritus both appear briefly, Cheery Littlebottom gets a couple of lines, Angua doesn't appear at all, because for most of the time Vimes is adrift from his own time; after falling through the dome of the Unseen University Library while pursuing a murderer, he finds himself sent back thirty years and becoming part of a very different City Watch. This isn't the run-down rump of the Watch we saw in Guards! Guards!, but it's a Watch where bribery and paying less attention to evidence than to who it would be easiest to pin a crime on are rife, and where none of Ankh-Morpork's ethnic minorities are represented, while Ankh-Morpork as a whole is also a lot less diverse than in Vimes's present. It's really a lot like Life on Mars, although as that was made four years after Night Watch came out if that's more than coincidence the book must have influenced the TV show, and not the more usual other way round.
Night Watch isn't a book with a lot of laughs. It's a serious book, about corruption and justice and law and freedom and hope, and it's a book that always made me cry even when Pterry was still alive and I wasn't just crying at how much poorer the world is without his clarity of vision (there's a passage about refugees close to the start that got me that way). And it's amazing.
Unlike its precursors, Night Watch really is a Sam Vimes book, rather than a City Watch book. Carrot and Detritus both appear briefly, Cheery Littlebottom gets a couple of lines, Angua doesn't appear at all, because for most of the time Vimes is adrift from his own time; after falling through the dome of the Unseen University Library while pursuing a murderer, he finds himself sent back thirty years and becoming part of a very different City Watch. This isn't the run-down rump of the Watch we saw in Guards! Guards!, but it's a Watch where bribery and paying less attention to evidence than to who it would be easiest to pin a crime on are rife, and where none of Ankh-Morpork's ethnic minorities are represented, while Ankh-Morpork as a whole is also a lot less diverse than in Vimes's present. It's really a lot like Life on Mars, although as that was made four years after Night Watch came out if that's more than coincidence the book must have influenced the TV show, and not the more usual other way round.
Night Watch isn't a book with a lot of laughs. It's a serious book, about corruption and justice and law and freedom and hope, and it's a book that always made me cry even when Pterry was still alive and I wasn't just crying at how much poorer the world is without his clarity of vision (there's a passage about refugees close to the start that got me that way). And it's amazing.
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Date: 2016-10-15 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 02:19 pm (UTC)Night Watch is definitely one of the best, if not the best - I think it's my favourite.