★★★★★ The Discworld yields a full-fledged novel

Guards! Guards!

Terry Pratchett

The Discworld yields a full-fledged novel

Guards! Guards! is the eighth book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It is, however, the first one that feels like an honest-to-God novel. For instance, the audiobook is 13 hours and 29 min long, a respectable length for a novel. Previous Discworld books are about eight hours long. It appears that Pratchett needed to work up to Guards, since the previous two books are a bit longer: Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids at 9:53 each. And the effort seems to have left him exhausted, since book 9, Eric weighs in at a mere 3:58. I'm joking, of course. I don't know what order the Discworld books were written in. But it is a fact that Guards is the longest of the first twelve, by a considerable margin.

What's more, Guards feels more like a novel than the previous Discworld books. Your typical Discworld book is more like a loose affiliation of funny thoughts than a novel. They are very funny thoughts, and it is usually possible to discern something like a plot winding through the jokes and tying them loosely together. The characters seem as often as not to be loose agglomerations of humorous traits, rather than realistic persons.

Guards isn't like that. Although the plot is complicated enough, there is a through line. Many of the characters are believable and interesting people, most especially Samuel Vimes, the Captain of the Watch of Ankh-Morpork and Patrician Lord Vetinari, who is the chief executive of the city. We have met the Patrician before, but in previous books he existed mainly to be the butt of jokes aimed at his rapacity and flexible ethics. Even more surprising, Guards has something that resembles a moral message. I'm quite certain that Pratchett would deny ever including such a thing in one of his books, but I'm *certain* I caught a glimpse of one.

The previous two books shared a common plot, to this extent: they were about the succession struggle in a kingdom, Lancre in Wyrd Sisters and Djelibeybi in Pyramids. Pratchett intended Guards to be about the succession (or perhaps accession) of a King of Ankh-Morpork. But Vimes surprised Pratchett by wresting the story away and installing himself as its hero. I know this because the audiobook of Guards contains an Afterword by Ben Aaronovitch of Rivers of London fame, in which he claims to have read it somewhere that he is too lazy to look up the citation for.

Guards is not JUST a novel -- it's also a Discworld book, with all the jokes and footnotes and yoomorous characters (Death and the Librarian, as well as some new ones) that you would expect. Best Discworld book so far, in my opinion.

Guards! Guards! on Amazon

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DormouseDecember 17, 2024 at 9:01 AM
As someone who was Very Into the Discworld series as a teenager, I am loving this journey through the series. Both the plots and the morals/anger at injustice get more pronounced as time goes on, so I don't think Pratchett would be _too_ surprised...
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