You say you want a revolution? (Night Watch - Terry Pratchett)

Member Name: xalala

Product:	Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
Date:	30/04/04 (459 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great example of a City Watch book, Darker humour, Get to find out the past of lots of current characters

Disadvantages: Less humour than other books, Darker humour may not appeal to everyone

For many people, Discworld books that centre around the Ankh-Morpork City Watch are the most appealing. I think that this is for a variety of reasons, not least because they clearly deal with a subject that most people can relate to - that of police procedures. Essentially the books are exactly that - police procedure stories that just happen to be set in a fantastic and unlikely world that is governed by magic. Of the books so far that fulfil this criteria (Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms are two other examples), Night Watch is perhaps the best. Certainly it's one where the fantastic setting takes more of a back seat than usual. Well, once you get around the time travel and the history monks...

Seasoned readers of Discworld will recognise many of the characters found in Night Watch, from Sam Vimes, Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs to Vetinari, CMOT Dibbler, Rosie Palm and Reg Shoe. However the writing is darker, the humour blacker, than we are used to. Other members of the Watch are barely given a mention - Detritus, Angua and Carrot, popular new additions, are definitely on the periphery here. Although Detritus almost steals the show with his view on firearms safety issues:

"When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend."

The plot centres on Sam Vimes, and relies quite heavily on the relationship the reader already has with him. If someone were new to the Discworld series, this is not a book I'd recommend to start with. It assumes a familiarity with the characters and their backgrounds.

Or does it?

The story begins in present day Ankh-Morpork. Sam Vimes, the poor boy from the back streets, has seen h
is star rise considerably and is now His Grace the Duke of Ankh Commander Sir Samuel Vimes. But he's still a copper at heart, a man of the street, and within a few pages he's forgotton the confines of his social status, the daft uniform that goes with it, and the fact that his wife is about to give birth to their first child, and is frantically giving chase to Carcer across the city rooftops.

Carcer and Vimes crash through the roof of the High Energy Magic building at Unseen University and, rather than landingon the ground far beneath them, they land in the past. It's now 30 years ago, and Sam Vimes is up against it - he has to teach himself (the young Watch recruit) all he (the cynical old Watchman) knows. And quickly, before time runs out and something happens in the past that irrevecably changes the future - Vimes' future, that the old Vimes knows as his present. Most importantly, he has to keep himself alive - both old and young - so that he can make it back to the present time to see his firstborn.

In a way, then, it doesn't matter that we aren't really introduced to the Watch characters before Vimes gets tossed back into his own past. We meet familiar names with unfamiliar faces, and see how they became what they are (if you know what I mean!). We see the pivotal moment of Reg Shoe's existance - I'm deliberately not saying life, you'll notice - and a young CMOT Dibbler, just beginning to feel his way into the sausage inna bun marketplace.

More interestingly we see a young Vetinari, as student at the Assassin's Guild rather than feared Patrician of the city. Even then, however, he seems to easily be putting one over the his peers in their shortsighted attempts at bullying.

In the past, Vimes be
comes Keel, someone who up until this point he has considered the guiding light of his career as a watchman. The Watch of the past is unformed, a group of misfits and dropouts, who don't really know what they're doing. Vimes as Keel enters as a breath of fresh air, brushing away the existing power structure and telling it to the recruits like it is:

"And for close up fighting, as your senior sergeant I explicitly forbid you to investigate the range of coshes, blackjacks, and brass knuckles sold by Mrs. Goodbody at No. 8 Easy Street at a range of prices to suit all pockets, and should any of you approach me privately I absolutely will not demonstrate a variety of specialist blows suitable for these useful yet tricky instruments."

Keel, however, is/was a well known figure in Ankh-Morpork, and Vimes knows the fate of the man whose identity he is using. He was one of the casualties of the brief and surprisingly unbloody People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road. And now Vimes is him, and he knows what's coming - the question just remains, how much of the future can he change? Enough so that he doesn't end up in an occasionally tended grave in modern day Ankh-Morpork?

I enjoyed reading this book very much. Partly that was because it offered me, as a long-time fan of the Discworld series, a chance to see well-established characters in their youth. It echoes the TV popularity of "Before They Were Famous" type shows in that respect. Partly I enjoyed it because it was less slapstick in its humour than the early Discworld novels. They were very much a parody, and drew heavily on their source materials. There are some similarities to that here, but less striking. As ever, it's possible to read through and spot less than half of the re
ferences made to other works, from fiction to TV and other popular culture yet still enjoy the story.

The basis of the plot was interesting - Pratchett has played with the Trousers of Time before (or Quantum theory, for those not in the know), and this is, along with Thief of Time, perhaps the most well thought out example of that. More than anything else, this book is not simply funny, as other works have been. Pratchett has moved into more serious themes, and doesn't shy away from social commentary on police procedures and the dangers of secret police forces, the problems of bureaucracy and why it can be a valuable thing, the force of a mob, corrupt politicians, and many more.

Throughout the books, the Patrician is credited by making the city work. But in Night Watch, Vetinari is still only a student of the Assassin's Guild. This, then, is the Ankh-Morpork that Vimes has always talked about, the one that he remembers so well - the darker, messier city, without rules and little in the way of law and order.

The book will, of course, appeal to fans of the Discworld series. But those who like a good police story could find it appealing too, if they can get round the fact that it's set in a fantasy world that spins through space on the backs of four elephants, themselves stood on the back of a giant turtle.

I highly recommend it to you.

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Details
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Night Watch is out in paperback, and is available from Amazon for £5.59 at the time of writing.

The cover art (at least of the hardback UK version) is a version of Rembrant's painting Nightwatch. It's fairly widely known that Rembrandt painted himself into the original picture, and if you look closely at the cover version, you will be able to see that, in the same spot
in the picture, is an image of Josh Kirby, famous cover artist for many of the Discworld books, who died recently.

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