lightreads | Entries tagged with au: terry pratchett

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Discworld. Innkeeper's daughter cuts off her hair and joins the army to save her brother and her inheritance and, eventually, her entire crazy country.

Oh, yes, I loved this one. I mean, Discworld does cross-dressing, of course it's awesome. It's also scary in places, and sewn with a few nasty little bites of what people can do to each other – can do to young girls, mostly. Not the deepest book he ever wrote, partly because Polly is kind of his standard-issue girl protagonist: she's whip-smart, determined, and clear-eyed. But he defaults to that type because that type works, so there's that.

And in the background there's Vimes, stomping around being cranky because when two drunks fight, you just bang their heads together until they quit, so what's he supposed to do here, bang two countries together? Well, naturally.

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The Wee Free Men (Discworld: Tiffany Aching, #1)

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Young sheep farmer's daughter begins training to be the witch of the chalk hills that she loves. She has the help of a lot of six-inch fairies with drinking problems and pointy swords, which is good because there's no school for learning witchery, unless you think of the whole world as the school.

Oh, marvelous. I read the three published books straight through everywhere I went, and I know I disturbed people by standing there beaming in the elevator. There may also have been bouncing.

These books! Hilarious, of course, as well they should be. But also rich and scary and sad. People die in these books, and children are faced with truths they shouldn't be, but it's all still fundamentally hopeful. But the thing I like the most is the magic. There is magic, you see, but that's not really what witching is about. Witching is about women, women being so smart and relying on each other and being midwives and caregivers and judges and priests and anything else that's needed. These are books about growing into power that are about the growing, not the power, which is so rare. So many fantasy books use magic as a shorthand for power – these books are about how they overlap, yes, but how they really aren't the same thing at all.

*happy sigh*

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The Color Of Magic by Terry Pratchett

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Ah, so whoever it was that advised me to start with the Watch books, instead of going by publication chronology, was completely right. Probably the most entertaining thing about these books is watching Pratchett working really hard to tune his funny. And there are flickers of that perfect pitch he has later, but mostly it's just sort of random-incidents-strung-together, and there's only occasional bits of there there.

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The Truth: A Discworld Novel (Paperback)

The Truth: A Discworld Novel by Terry Pratchett

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Exactly the sort of Discworld book I like. I like most Discworld, you understand, but particularly the books about Ankh-Morpork development. It's the press here, and it's totally awesome. I think part of what Pratchett does so well is reuse stock fantasy hero tropes, but keep them fresh. Here it's the disillusioned outcast aristocrat with secret but profoundly held ideals. This book does what Discworld is best for – funny but heartfelt.

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Thud!

Most recent Watch novel. My very favorite Discworld arc, so I've doled them out carefully to myself over the past few years. This one lives up and then some. Sam Vimes and his ~~men~~ coppers face civil unrest as racial tensions flare between the dwarves and the trolls. Meanwhile a mysterious museum theft may have surprising consequences, there's been a murder, and Vimes must get home by six to read "Where's My Cow?" to his son.

It's a Watch novel – either you know why it's awesome and you're already smiling, or you don't and you should stop listening to me and go off and find out. Except listen long enough to know these books are hilarious, and also the sort of sneaky wonderful that makes you sit up in the middle of the page and snortgiggle up the tear you just cried without actually realizing it. Particular highlights for me in this one were the changes in Sam upon the birth of his son and the consequent exploration of Sam's untapped potential for violence in the name of right. Also, I laughed a lot. Also also, Vetinari.

Who knows what's to come, but if this is the last Watch novel we get, the world will be just a little bit less bright.

Two later Discworld novels, starring ~~reformed~~ crook Moist von Lipwig, pardoned by the Patrician in order to revitalize the city's moribund postal system and, later, the royal mint.

Oh man, so much love. Not the book-shaped awesomeness of a Watch novel, but they have a really similar feel to them. Moist is clever as clever can be, but kind of broken in the way he can't live without Adrenaline. Pratchett does such a good job with him – I mean we know this guy, right, the trickster with a heart hidden away back there somewhere. But Moist is complicated and kind of messed up in really quiet ways that only he ever calls himself on. These books feel, I don't know, a little grown-up Discworld, in the really good way where Moist has this awesomely real romance.

Which isn't to say they aren't hilarious books, because they are. Plus Vetinari! Everywhere!

Death is not a person; he’s an anthropomorphic personification. And he’s pretty emo, if you ask me. In Mort Death takes an apprentice, and then a holiday. In Reaper Man Death has an existential crisis and takes a holiday. And in Soul Music Death’s granddaughter has an existential crisis while Death takes a holiday.

See, I needed to read Discworld while I was studying for finals, and while these books suffer grievously for the lack of Sam Vimes, I did come around eventually to be a Death convert. He likes kittens, you know.

But these weren’t quite the books I was expecting. They were funny, of course, if a bit drier than the Watch books I’m used to. And it’s not like the Watch books are all hilarity all the time, but the Death books are startlingly, well, sad sometimes. People die -- I mean duh, right? -- and sometimes it’s awful and often they really don’t want to go. My favorite of the lot was Reaper Man which was both hilarious and painfully melancholy. Because as Pratchett says, “you have to dance both. Otherwise you can’t dance either.”

Good winter reading, as it turns out.

Another Watch novel, in which Sam Vimes Is accidentally transported decades into the past in pursuit of a murderous psychopath, whereupon he must play the part of the old Sergeant who first taught young Lance Corporal Sam Vimes what it means to be a copper. Meanwhile, political unrest spreads across the city, the old Patrician is on his way out, and the barricades are going up. Vimes knows what’s going to happen – he was there after all – and he’s visited the graves every year since. And now he’s got to do it again.

Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Okay, I’m fine – it will take a lot more than this book to reduce me to a gibbering, inarticulate wreck. This isn’t as funny as some Discworld novels, by which I mean that it’s not as giddily hilarious, though it is dry and sarcastic and unflaggingly witty. Pratchett usually has a selection of particular targets for that wit, and this time around It’s Les Miserables, which he sort of turns inside out and upside down and then sets it going with a gentle pat. This is a book about doing the job that’s in front of you, about being clever in the face of stupidity. Vimes starts out just trying to catch a killer, and ends up trying to assure his own future and, by the end, save as many innocent bystanders as possible from being crushed between the military machine and the shifting tides of political power. Because Vimes is a copper. His master is the law, and this book wholeheartedly believes that the law is not something we are given by higher authority, it’s something we’ve got just because we are.

And that’s what I love about the Watch novels, I think. They’ve got a keen, unerring nose for the right of the thing, and a deep disdain for those who maintain there is no right. And by ‘they,’ I mean Sam Vimes. Vimes believes in things like justice and truth with a purity and strength which should be laughable, and which is usually idiotically obnoxious in a hero. But Vimes’s justice and truth aren’t the cheap knock-offs, manufactured of pasteboard and excuses glued together with a stew of stick-up-your-ass. They’re the real thing, and they’re worth it. And that’s just so wonderfully refreshing after spending too long navigating between two equally irritating options – the books that’ve never heard of a shade of gray, and the ones who think absolutes are just way too much fucking work, so better chuck away the whole mess in a nihilistic tantrum. (Sorry. That last one, in particular, really gets on the nerves of this pragmatist with an idealist’s heart).

So these books make me happy because they believe in things with towering strength, and the things they believe in are actually worth it.

Also, I love Sam Vimes with every fiber of my being.

Back to the Discworld, rollicking satire but also heartfelt and marvelous just for its own sake. These are two more Watch novels, detailing the exploits of the Ankh-Morpork city watch as they trip and stumble their way into solving crimes. Jingo details the attempted assassination of a foreign leader during the opening moves of war over a newly discovered island, and The Fifth Elephant takes Vimes and other members of the Watch out of the city altogether to attend the coronation of the new dwarf king in Uberwald, where things are a whole different kind of nasty.

The Fifth Elephant is a slice of the usual Pratchett fare – hilarious but heartfelt, exquisitely plotted and accomplishing more character work per square inch of pagespace than many of us manage in a few thousand words. And all while sniggering behind its hand and insisting that no really, you oughtn’t take any of this seriously, all just stuff and nonsense. But what I really want to talk about is Jingo It’s a sociopolitical parody, and a quietly vicious one, of western/Arab relations, racial prejudice, and the things we believe about war. Through Vimes’s copper’s eyes (and Vetinari’s tidy, clockwork understanding of the ways of politics) the book puts its head to the side and has a long hard squint down its nose at accepted historical authorities on war like, “war, Vimes, is just a continuation of diplomacy by other means,” and “if you want peace you must prepare for war.” And then it calls them bullshit.

War isn’t just a thing that happens to us, according to the book. That’s just a comfortable story that makes it easier to live with all that dying. Because as Vimes puts it to himself, ““History was full of the bones of good men who’d followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow.” And if there’s anything we know about Sam Vimes, it’s that he’s not always the best at following orders. Particularly bad ones. And if there’s another thing we know about Vimes, it’s that he’s a copper first and foremost, and it’s his job to stop people disturbing the peace. This book is dry, a little embarrassed to find itself so deeply passionate, devastatingly eloquent in the way of the best parody which isn’t just interested in kicking holes in things, but also in showing a different way of shoring things up. That, and it’s just damn good writing:

Vimes glanced down and pulled the baton out of his pocket. It glinted in the moonlight. What damn good was something like this? All it really meant was that he was able to chase the little criminals, who did the little crimes. There was nothing he could do about the crimes that were so big you couldn’t even see them. You lived in them.

And you know the best thing? There are like thirty more books I haven’t even read yet.

Current Mood: pleased

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:

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.