Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
Jun. 5th, 2019 02:50 pmWhen I think about how many Terry Pratchett books are in the world, most of which I've read at a minimum twice, it's quite likely that he's sent more words in through my eyes than any other writer. (He's probably not the writer I've spent most time reading -- I don't know who that would be -- because his books zip by).
And Night Watch is possibly the book of his I've reread most, or at least have the most coherent memories of rereading, and each time I see it in a different light -- I remember the time I came to the book on reading three or so with such clear memories of everything that happened in it that I was quite disappointed, because when I remember five scenes from a book I tend to assume there'll be another ten I've forgotten about, but no, I really did have every beat in my head; and the time after that, when I came to the book with lowered expectations and enjoyed it proportionally more, while also starting to think about how good Pratchett gets at braiding his themes into his plots. (The last sentence of the book struck me that time, and it did again this read -- I'll watch out for it in other books of his, because it’s something which struck me about Wintersmith too, a closing line which wraps the plot and theme of the book into something everyday and grand at the same time).
(Some spoilers in the rest of this for general progression of the City Watch books as well as for the premise of this particular book. Both of which would be fun to encounter fresh!)
Both the Watch sequence of books and the Witches sequence run into the complication that, as they go along, the range of problems their main characters can't deal with by Being Vimes and Being Granny Weatherwax (respectively) shrinks more and more. It's interesting that the solution to this in both cases is a version of 'Have them meet their younger selves', as Granny is given her developing equal/successor Tiffany Aching to deal with, and Vimes... goes back in time and meets his younger self.
This is possibly my favourite Discworld book for plotting, for doing a great deal in a short space. The Disc is built on a shifting foundation of retcons, but this book does very well at presenting one vivid and whole – and does for the city of Ankh-Morepork what it does for the powered-up Vimes, in that the city can get out from under Vetinari's inevitably progressive management without that management actually having to fail*). The book efficiently gives us Vimes' changed present, the mechanism by which he ends up in the past and its implications, a city edging toward revolution, and Vimes' struggle to find a place to stand, his complicated emotions around being there, in terrain which brings his competence to a peak, separated from the wife who's giving birth to their first child.
(I have a soft spot for 'Exceptional character given no resources and a new playing-field' stories, but I also like the number of times Vimes would have got himself killed in this one had people better-attuned to the situation not said 'Do not for gods' sake do that'. A perverse bit of me wants to know what would have happened if he’d just accidentally died in the middle of it all, leaving people swearing and scrambling to patch the whole thing up).
…
Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are both characters whose power is held in check by equally powerful self-images, and for both characters, in one or another book, we see them tempted by their own dark equivalents to put those self-images down. Carcer is the villain in this one, a man who looks at himself, looks at other people, sees how flimsily the law stands between most of them and the dark, and licks his lips. Vimes, seeing the same thing, sets about defending the border.
We meet young Vimes; we don't meet young Carcer. Which a) makes me wonder if there's any Pratchett book which presents the development of one of the figures of pure evil he writes so compellingly, and b) has me haring off on the idea (which there's solid evidence against, not least that no one ever thinks they look similar) that Carcer might also, somehow, be literally Vimes: the Vimes of the timeline in which his dark future self is the one who gets to him first and teaches him all he knows, a scar left on history by the book's paradox. That probably isn't timily-wimily true, but it's thematically true -- the glanced-at possibility of Carcer getting hold of Vimes' education chilled me this time as it hasn't on past readings.
What else do I see this reread? Vimes monologues a lot. They're good monologues, and they seem in character for Vimes by this point in his life, although even more in character for Terry Pratchett. It's not often Vimes says something and doesn't seem to be Pratchett's own voice; and if I was characterising this reread by one thing in particular, it would be, "Huh. I can see how Terry Pratchett might be wrong about stuff." This is a book in which Vimes is dropped into a situation and improves it rapidly; I'd have been fascinated to read the book in which Vimes, by being as Vimes as possible in a new situation, caused an unmitigated disaster and then had to deal with it. But I also don't really want to read a book like that, not by Terry Pratchett. I'm not sure he'd have been capable of doing that, either with Vimes or to Vimes. He’s on the central lineup of writers I've grown up thinking of as Entertaining Forces For Moral Good, and under that label I haven’t tended to question them -- Bujold and Pratchett, possibly Diana Wynne Jones, and also Le Guin, although she's separated from the others for me by requiring twice as much mental energy to read. It was reading through the annals of Racefail earlier this year that got me thinking, "Oh, you aren't a saint, Bujold. Huh. I guess I should stop giving you presumptive authority," and since then I've been thinking about bits of her writing and going, "The text (which I love) reflects this." Maybe there’s a flow-on to other writers in that group – or maybe it’s reading more discussions on Dreamwidth than I used to – anyway, I used to read Vimes’ monologues in Night Watch and go ‘Wisdom!’ and now I read them and go, not ‘Absence of wisdom!’ but ‘Wisdom to look hard at the edges of!’
(Have you read this one,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seahearth? I’d be interested to know what you thought, since its politics in general say ‘the revolution on the street is a distraction from the deals done in the staterooms’, but where individuals come into focus, it pretty much defines heroism as ‘people under no obligation to fight for a cause nevertheless choosing to do so.’)
Right. This post has taken over what was going to be a short relaxing pause, and grown wildly. I'm going to write about every book I read in June, as suggested byrachelmanija, but the plan is not that all the posts be this long!
*comes out from the shelter of the post into the harsh light of my assignment deadline; crumbles into ash*
*I've never read Raising Steam, having not liked Making Money and also having felt as though Pratchett's Alzheimer's took an increasing toll on his writing after Unseen Academicals. But now I'm quite curious as to what happens in the last-written Ankh-Morepork book.
And Night Watch is possibly the book of his I've reread most, or at least have the most coherent memories of rereading, and each time I see it in a different light -- I remember the time I came to the book on reading three or so with such clear memories of everything that happened in it that I was quite disappointed, because when I remember five scenes from a book I tend to assume there'll be another ten I've forgotten about, but no, I really did have every beat in my head; and the time after that, when I came to the book with lowered expectations and enjoyed it proportionally more, while also starting to think about how good Pratchett gets at braiding his themes into his plots. (The last sentence of the book struck me that time, and it did again this read -- I'll watch out for it in other books of his, because it’s something which struck me about Wintersmith too, a closing line which wraps the plot and theme of the book into something everyday and grand at the same time).
(Some spoilers in the rest of this for general progression of the City Watch books as well as for the premise of this particular book. Both of which would be fun to encounter fresh!)
Both the Watch sequence of books and the Witches sequence run into the complication that, as they go along, the range of problems their main characters can't deal with by Being Vimes and Being Granny Weatherwax (respectively) shrinks more and more. It's interesting that the solution to this in both cases is a version of 'Have them meet their younger selves', as Granny is given her developing equal/successor Tiffany Aching to deal with, and Vimes... goes back in time and meets his younger self.
This is possibly my favourite Discworld book for plotting, for doing a great deal in a short space. The Disc is built on a shifting foundation of retcons, but this book does very well at presenting one vivid and whole – and does for the city of Ankh-Morepork what it does for the powered-up Vimes, in that the city can get out from under Vetinari's inevitably progressive management without that management actually having to fail*). The book efficiently gives us Vimes' changed present, the mechanism by which he ends up in the past and its implications, a city edging toward revolution, and Vimes' struggle to find a place to stand, his complicated emotions around being there, in terrain which brings his competence to a peak, separated from the wife who's giving birth to their first child.
(I have a soft spot for 'Exceptional character given no resources and a new playing-field' stories, but I also like the number of times Vimes would have got himself killed in this one had people better-attuned to the situation not said 'Do not for gods' sake do that'. A perverse bit of me wants to know what would have happened if he’d just accidentally died in the middle of it all, leaving people swearing and scrambling to patch the whole thing up).
…
Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are both characters whose power is held in check by equally powerful self-images, and for both characters, in one or another book, we see them tempted by their own dark equivalents to put those self-images down. Carcer is the villain in this one, a man who looks at himself, looks at other people, sees how flimsily the law stands between most of them and the dark, and licks his lips. Vimes, seeing the same thing, sets about defending the border.
We meet young Vimes; we don't meet young Carcer. Which a) makes me wonder if there's any Pratchett book which presents the development of one of the figures of pure evil he writes so compellingly, and b) has me haring off on the idea (which there's solid evidence against, not least that no one ever thinks they look similar) that Carcer might also, somehow, be literally Vimes: the Vimes of the timeline in which his dark future self is the one who gets to him first and teaches him all he knows, a scar left on history by the book's paradox. That probably isn't timily-wimily true, but it's thematically true -- the glanced-at possibility of Carcer getting hold of Vimes' education chilled me this time as it hasn't on past readings.
What else do I see this reread? Vimes monologues a lot. They're good monologues, and they seem in character for Vimes by this point in his life, although even more in character for Terry Pratchett. It's not often Vimes says something and doesn't seem to be Pratchett's own voice; and if I was characterising this reread by one thing in particular, it would be, "Huh. I can see how Terry Pratchett might be wrong about stuff." This is a book in which Vimes is dropped into a situation and improves it rapidly; I'd have been fascinated to read the book in which Vimes, by being as Vimes as possible in a new situation, caused an unmitigated disaster and then had to deal with it. But I also don't really want to read a book like that, not by Terry Pratchett. I'm not sure he'd have been capable of doing that, either with Vimes or to Vimes. He’s on the central lineup of writers I've grown up thinking of as Entertaining Forces For Moral Good, and under that label I haven’t tended to question them -- Bujold and Pratchett, possibly Diana Wynne Jones, and also Le Guin, although she's separated from the others for me by requiring twice as much mental energy to read. It was reading through the annals of Racefail earlier this year that got me thinking, "Oh, you aren't a saint, Bujold. Huh. I guess I should stop giving you presumptive authority," and since then I've been thinking about bits of her writing and going, "The text (which I love) reflects this." Maybe there’s a flow-on to other writers in that group – or maybe it’s reading more discussions on Dreamwidth than I used to – anyway, I used to read Vimes’ monologues in Night Watch and go ‘Wisdom!’ and now I read them and go, not ‘Absence of wisdom!’ but ‘Wisdom to look hard at the edges of!’
(Have you read this one,
seahearth? I’d be interested to know what you thought, since its politics in general say ‘the revolution on the street is a distraction from the deals done in the staterooms’, but where individuals come into focus, it pretty much defines heroism as ‘people under no obligation to fight for a cause nevertheless choosing to do so.’)Right. This post has taken over what was going to be a short relaxing pause, and grown wildly. I'm going to write about every book I read in June, as suggested by
rachelmanija, but the plan is not that all the posts be this long!*comes out from the shelter of the post into the harsh light of my assignment deadline; crumbles into ash*
*I've never read Raising Steam, having not liked Making Money and also having felt as though Pratchett's Alzheimer's took an increasing toll on his writing after Unseen Academicals. But now I'm quite curious as to what happens in the last-written Ankh-Morepork book.
