lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2006-10-02 11:02 am
lightreads) wrote2006-10-02 11:02 am
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Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, and Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
This is the city of Ankh-Morpork on the Discworld, where the guards are men (until affirmative action, anyway), where the dwarves are men (though there must be women somewhere behind the beards), where you can walk the streets in safety (as long as you pay your annual fee to the thieves guild), and where solving crime can get a bit complicated (especially when you don’t just pick who-done-it ahead of time and send Detritus the troll after them about it until they confess in self-defense). Guards! Guards! is about the mysterious summoning of a dragon, Men at Arms is about affirmative action coming to the night watch (they hire a dwarf, a troll, and a woman), and Feet of Clay is a complex little knot about golems.
Okay, so, for anyone out of the loop, these are just a few out of an enormous parody series about the Discworld, which is, you know, a flat disk which rides through space on the backs of four elephants which in turn ride on the back of a turtle. Obviously. They poke a lot of mostly gentle fun at fantasy novels, while simultaneously being very good ones themselves. The trick of the humor is a sort of deadpan acceptance of the rules – of fantasy novels, of stories in general, and sometimes of our world. The books ask what it would really be like if the things we believe about how the world ought to work are actually true, and generally concludes that it would be pretty freaking ridiculous. There’s a great sequence in Guards! Guards! where a few characters are trying to kill a dragon with one shot from one lucky arrow. It’s a million-to-one chance, and so they of course know that it must work. But then they start worrying – what if it isn’t exactly a million-to-one? What if it’s only a thousand-to-one? Everyone knows that would never come through. They do think, however, that the odds of a bowman making the shot backwards while standing on one foot with a handkerchief in his mouth are just about right.
The thing about Pratchett is that he’s completely shameless. Most of the funny works because it’s delivered so straight-faced, but once in a while you just know he’s sniggering back there somewhere because you’ve just let him get away with a really freaking awful joke. From a footnote:
How can you not love that sort of cheek? Also this, just because:
Anyway. It’s riotously funny, but like really good humor, it’s because it’s set on deep foundations. The political and social commentary flies thick and fast, and even with all that, the characters simply shine. Well, except for the ones who don’t bathe.
Okay, so, for anyone out of the loop, these are just a few out of an enormous parody series about the Discworld, which is, you know, a flat disk which rides through space on the backs of four elephants which in turn ride on the back of a turtle. Obviously. They poke a lot of mostly gentle fun at fantasy novels, while simultaneously being very good ones themselves. The trick of the humor is a sort of deadpan acceptance of the rules – of fantasy novels, of stories in general, and sometimes of our world. The books ask what it would really be like if the things we believe about how the world ought to work are actually true, and generally concludes that it would be pretty freaking ridiculous. There’s a great sequence in Guards! Guards! where a few characters are trying to kill a dragon with one shot from one lucky arrow. It’s a million-to-one chance, and so they of course know that it must work. But then they start worrying – what if it isn’t exactly a million-to-one? What if it’s only a thousand-to-one? Everyone knows that would never come through. They do think, however, that the odds of a bowman making the shot backwards while standing on one foot with a handkerchief in his mouth are just about right.
The thing about Pratchett is that he’s completely shameless. Most of the funny works because it’s delivered so straight-faced, but once in a while you just know he’s sniggering back there somewhere because you’ve just let him get away with a really freaking awful joke. From a footnote:
Fingers-mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot. He got really burned on that deal.
How can you not love that sort of cheek? Also this, just because:
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though it were designed by Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is knowledge=power=energy=matter=mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel black hole that knows how to read.
Anyway. It’s riotously funny, but like really good humor, it’s because it’s set on deep foundations. The political and social commentary flies thick and fast, and even with all that, the characters simply shine. Well, except for the ones who don’t bathe.