Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (4 stars, paperback, 403

Captain Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has seen better days, and so has his institution. There are only three members left when Carrot Ironfoundersson, a plucky new recruit, journeys to the city from Dwarven lands with a willingness and drive to protect and to serve. Meanwhile, the city is having a bit of a dragon problem, and the orange, most-definitely-not-a-monkey Librarian of Unseen University discovers he is missing a book. Can Vimes reconcile the fate and purpose of the City Watch and solve the mysteries?

I think I figured out what I like about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, aside from the obvious humor. These novels aren’t tightly-plotted page-turners, not really. They’re meandering, stubborn, and the pace sometimes slows to a trickle as the wide cast of characters debate and philosophize on an extended spoof of some aspect of life or literature. They’re messy, a bit all over the place. The books wrap up generally happy, with the right people coming out better off, but you can never guess exactly how. These books don’t read like novels - they read more like it would happen in real life (for an optimist, at least). Pratchett finds ways to simultaneously spoof tropes, play them straight, and shatter them into a million pieces. He writes with an excellent grasp of humanity, and these novels are more true to life than anything in the comedy fantasy genre has any right to be.

This book is no different. I appreciated Vimes’s origin story, so to speak, and of course I love the Librarian and Lord Vetinari. I will definitely be reading more books in the City Watch line.