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Rereading Discworld: Night Watch

February 25, 2025 in book review, rereading discworld | 1 comment

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (2002) 422 p.

Many readers consider this to be Pratchett’s magnum opus – certainly I doubt any rankings of the Discworld series would place it outside the top five. It’s the culmination of the story of Sam Vimes, whose arc across the series is a rag-to-riches redemption narrative about a useless old drunk in a useless joke of a city watch who becomes a sober and serious man, a thoughtful detective, and a steady-handed administrator of a modern police force in a thriving city. All through the City Watch arc, as both Vimes and the Watch itself are propelled upwards, a small part in the back of his mind misses the old days: misses chasing thugs through the alleyways, misses sheltering from the rain in a doorway at three o’clock in the morning, misses the feel of the city streets beneath the worn-out cardboard soles of his cheap boots. One must, of course, be careful what one wishes for, because in the opening scenes of Night Watch Vimes is chasing the cop killer Carcer across the rooftops of Unseen University when a magical thunderstorm flings both Vimes and his quarry thirty years into the past, into the bad old days of the corrupt, underfunded and underpaid Night Watch, patrolling the streets of an impoverished Ankh-Morpork languishing under the tyrannical Lord Winder. Now Vimes has to track down Carcer, survive the violent revolution he knows is coming, teach his teenage self how to be a good cop, and find his way home. It’s a cracker of a set-up for a story and a perfect emotional culmination to the journey Vimes has been on across six books, as both a man and a policeman.

It’s also, I think, one of the least funny Discworld books, and I don’t say that as a criticism. The magical storm which propels Vimes into the past necessitates a few early scenes with the wizards of Unseen University, and there’s a fantastic slapstick moment involving Ridcully, a bathtub and his long-handled scrubbing brush. But once we get into the meat of the book, it’s probably the most Serious novel in the entire canon: a book about policing, politics, community, revolution and violence which has little mental space for humour. By the time Vimes is visiting the graveyard at the novel’s climax, the notion of cracking a joke would be like doing so at a funeral.

The working title of this novel was “The Nature of the Beast,” a phrase referenced a few times throughout, alluding to the violent nature at the heart of Vimes (and all men) which he keeps contained – useful when unleashed, but ultimately something that must be muzzled, lest one end up like Carcer and his ilk. (Just as Vimes rejoins the Night Watch of his youth, the sociopathic Carcer find himself thriving as a recruit to Lord Winder’s secret police.) But Night Watch is a far better title, in my view: obviously tying in with the plot as Vimes literally returns to his old days (and to the Watch story arc’s initial two books) in the nocturnal half of a divided City Watch, with most of the book taking place in the hours after sunset and before sunrise. But it’s also a metaphorical title that leans back towards “The Nature of the Beast:” Vimes and his colleagues are the Night Watch, the watchers in the night and the watchers against the night, akin to George R.R. Martin’s Night’s Watch, akin to Colonel Jessup’s man on that wall, akin to Batman speeding off into the night while Gary Oldman says whatever he’s going on about at the conclusion of The Dark Knight. This does not actually ennoble them, and Pratchett (via Vimes) is very firm about the fact they they’ve mostly signed up for reasons as base as the steady paycheque or a uniform that’ll impress girls. When the military is called onto the streets there’s another aside about the common soldier, who’s generally just enlisted for “a bed and three square meals a day.” And when the grand revolution against Ankh-Morpork’s dictatorial government comes in the novel’s third act, and the Les Mis barriers go up in the streets, Vimes’ chief concern is not to lead the revolution but to keep the violence away from his precinct and preserve ordinary life as much as possible for the citizens under his watchful eye:

I wanted to keep a few streets safe. I just wanted to keep a handful of decent, silly people away from the dumb mobs and the mindless rebels and the idiot soldiery. I really, really hoped we could get away with it.

The “Night” in that sense is a metaphor. Vimes’ Watch is a watch against the darkness of man, the darkness of evil, and it’s all the more heroic for the fact that this darkness is not necessarily something grand or epochal, but the darkness that disrupts and upsets and oppresses the common people who are trying to get about their day-to-day business of raising their children and putting food on the table. It doesn’t matter whether the darkness is as small as a petty vandal or as enormous as a totalitarian government: the moral role of the Watch, however you conceive of that phrase, whether it’s an organised police force or Reg Shoe’s citizens’ committee, is to defend the common citizen against the darkness.

There is an argument – one which I’m sure many people on the 21st century internet will quite happily make – that this is a cop-out, a weak centrist opinion that it’s better to avoid rocking the boat and suffering some property damage than it is to risk things and stand up for freedom and overthrow a despotic government. Vimes is unquestionably a cynic about the revolution, telling one young revolutionary that they’re so named because “they always come round again – people die, and nothing changes,” and when the citizens’ committee in his area is drawing up their demands for truth, justice etc, Vimes says he wants a hard-boiled egg, because he believes he stands a chance of actually getting that. This is partly because Vimes has already lived through the revolution once before, seen that it failed, and also seen Ankh-Morpork become a freer and better place under Vetinari’s hand with no bloodshed necessary. (In one sense here, as with The Truth, Pratchett has written himself into a corner by spending two decades writing about Vetinari as a benevolent dictator.) But it’s also because Vimes is, more broadly, a suspicious cynic who knows the world is a place of infinite shades of grey and that there’s always more to things than meets the eye. Pratchett was never a police officer but he was a journalist, and clearly spent enough time around police officers to clock the mindset. It’s summed up well by Vimes in his perception of a police officer’s most common (if not fundamental) duty:

Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You’d go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they’d both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn’t your job. Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren’t some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace. Of course, if your few strict words didn’t work and Mr Smith subsequently clambered over the disputed hedge and stabbed Mr Jones to death with a pair of gardening shears, then you had a different job, sorting out the notorious Hedge Argument Murder. But at least it was one you were trained to do. People expected all kinds of things from coppers, but there was one thing that sooner or later they all wanted: make this not be happening.

Vimes and his loyal few at the Treacle Mine Road watch-house do not overthrow the tyrannical Lord Winder: that is accomplished, in both the original timeline he remembers and the alternate version he lives through in Night Watch, by the rich and powerful of Ankh-Morpork who turn a blind eye to Winder’s assassination and install another despot they find more pliable. (There, again, is the cynic’s view of the world.)

Was this actually Pratchett’s view? That fighting against tyranny is hopeless and you should just try to keep your head down? I don’t quite think so. It is again a little bit of a sense of writing yourself into a corner. Reg Shoe, for example, is (and always has been) Pratchett’s stand-in for late 20th century English revolutionary: the student communist raging against the System, the high-minded and self-important figure wilfully blind to the fact that he actually lives in a pretty decent society. It’s a figure common to British comedy – the most well-known version is the People’s Revolutionary Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but my mind always goes to Rick in The Young Ones – but the thing is the joke actually only works in contemporary Britain. Reg Shoe, on the other hand, lives in a society where the secret police can and do drag people off the street to be tortured.

That’s part of it; hewing to old jokes and established Discworld dynamics. But the other part of it is that this book is about Vimes. I don’t think Pratchett was making (or trying to make) an objective political or ethical argument in Night Watch. The revolution is the backdrop, and is important only inasmuch as it affects Vimes, who is, at the end of the day, a policeman; as Russ Allbery notes, that means he’s a small-c conservative defender of the status quo. He’s not about to ask anybody to sign up to the overthrow the government, but he will (and does) relieve his captain of command when an order is given to open fire on civilians, and he is ultimately forced to question his role as a dispenser of the government’s (i.e., the people’s) monopoly on legitimate violence.

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. They were thinking about the normal times, and men who go round to sort out a neighbour with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like this, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

Night Watch is ultimately not a book to answer that question, because Vimes himself does not have the answer. But he knows what his duty is as a copper, whether he’s the commander of the modern-day Watch or a sergeant on Treacle Mine Road thirty years ago: to protect the people, to keep the peace, and to stand watch in the night. Night Watch is a culmination of every part of Sam Vimes’ story that’s come before it, and in my view it’s the finest novel Pratchett ever wrote.

Next up is The Wee Free Men, the first of the Tiffany Aching young adult books – which also, interestingly, makes it the first Discworld book I’ve never read!

Re-reading Discworld Index

Top 6 Books of 2024

January 2, 2025 in uncategorized | Leave a comment

As always: the best books I read last year, not those that were released last year.

Depending on your device, this post may look hideously mangled, text running directly next to or even over the images – my apologies, but this is beyond my control and is occurring because WordPress is a dying platform that is no longer fit for purpose, and is more interested in pushing “AI” “assistance” than providing basic HTML editing functionality. If I blogged more than a handful of times a year I’d shift elsewhere, but given the broader enshittification of the internet it seems likely everywhere else is just as bad, so never mind! Read a book instead. Here are six good ones.

6. Arc Light

“If you mean the moral justification for it, I would point to the eight million Americans who have died or are dying from the grossly negligent safeguards you maintained over weapons aimed at my country. If you want the statement of a policy goal, I will say to disarm you of the nuclear arsenal of which you have proven untrustworthy custodians. But if you want a geopolitical analysis, Pavel, if you want an answer that the historians many years from now will write, it is because our two countries were bound to each other with a strange attraction, fascination mixed with mistrust. We were bound so closely for so long, war was never far away, and when it happened, we were strong, and you were weak. We win, you lose – that’s the way of it.”

In some ways extremely dumb and in some ways very well-written, this meticulously researched novel by Eric. L. Harry (whom you can tell without checking must have been a long-time national security wonk in Washington) is a classic early ‘90s Clancy-esque thriller about a nuclear war breaking out between the United States and a freshly post-Soviet Russia. It’s a fascinating time capsule of the 1990s, the film Crimson Tide being another great example, a time when it alarmingly seemed like forty decades of strategic doctrine around mutually-assured destruction between rational state actors might be about to fall apart in the face of Russia collapsing into a bunch of balkanised warlords. Good to know that all those nuclear warheads are still sitting there and Russia turned out to be a perfectly sane and reasonable actor on the world stage, then!

5. The Magus

I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down.
But then the mysteries began.

Ostensibly this is a novel about an intelligent but lower-class Ripley-esque twenty-something being lured to an idyllic Greek island to teach English to the local schoolchildren, while the real purpose of his time in the Aegean is the mysterious villa further down the coast, and the enigmatic old man who resides there. The Magus is the very definition of a psychological thriller, with the protagonist witnessing events which seem certain to have only a supernatural explanation – or perhaps it’s all a charade – or perhaps both these things are true, the first servicing the second, and there’s a deeper scheme at play? The novel definitively answers all these questions, possibly to its detriment; but in many ways it’s one of those novels that’s more about the vibes. John Fowles is a tremendously descriptive writer who perfectly captures the sense of an ancient, unspoiled island in the dry Greek summer: a land which to English eyes seems like a place out of time and space, an island where, perhaps, the impossible really is made possible.

4. Be Mine

“Where are you, Frank? I’m coming. I have something you’re going to like. Something very different and new.”

This is a bleak novel. It’s a difficult novel. Richard Ford introduced us to Frank Bascombe in 1986 as a thirty-something ex-husband and father grieving the premature death of his son, but as a man who could possibly still put the pieces of his life back together, which – more or less – he did. 2023’s Be Mine is a novel that reminds us that the security of our lives can still be pulled out from underneath us at any time: aged seventy-six, Frank’s second wife has left him, his relationship with his daughter on the other side of the country is frosty, his first wife and the mother of his children has died, and his surviving son has been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Be Mine, which I would fairly guess is going to be the last of the Bascombe books, is necessarily a novel about death, but it’s also – as always – a novel about life. Frank tackles his circumstances with his expected sense of introspection, folk wisdom, stoicism and aplomb. He is Frank Bascombe: suburban man, real estate agent, failed writer, decent neighbour, unfaithful husband, good father, observer of the human condition. He is an American. He is a human. He is a fictional character I’m glad to have known.

3. Rebecca

“There was never an accident.”

Sometimes you read a novel from a bygone era and the voice is uncannily modern. Rebecca is one of those novels, a story told from the perspective of a young woman enchanted by an older widower; a murder mystery in one sense, a psychological thriller in another, and a very English story about a grand old country house and the secrets it keeps. Daphne Du Maurier’s prose is so surprisingly contemporary that it feels like Rebecca could’ve been on a 21st century Booker shortlist, when in fact it was published in 1938. A deeply engaging novel that draws you in and carries you along all the way to its torrid end.

2. Young Lions

Across the Channel, Noah knew, no man could raise his voice thus, and across the Channel were the men who were finally going to go down in defeat. The world was not going to fall into their hands, but into the hands of the people who sat nodding, a little sleepily, perhaps, a little dully, before their ancient preacher. So long, Noah thought, as such voices could be raised in the world, stern, illogical and loving, so long might his own child live in confidence and hope…

World War II interests me more than it previously did, part of which is because I’m getting older and about to enter my Dad Era, I suppose, but also because as you get older and the world changes around you, you come to realise that history is still being written, and that if it the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice it is often only because it was bent that way by force. We unfortunately once again find ourselves living in interesting times, and freedom and justice and liberal democracy may not, as it turns out, have won a final victory. So as an older man you come back to look on an event which a million films and books and TV series and cartoons have rendered as more of a vibe or an aesthetic, and it feels almost absurd to think: this was a real thing which actually happened. I don’t just mean the brutal individual experiences of tens of millions of men, women and children, but the gargantuan state-level struggle for the future of humanity. Fascism versus freedom, liberty versus oppression, genocidal totalitarianism versus anything but that.

I first encountered Irwin Shaw reading his excellent short story Act of Faith in a New Yorker collection, a story in which a Jewish-American soldier in Europe uneasily considers the anti-Semitism of his own country. Young Lions follows three characters – a young Jewish GI, an older Anglo-Saxon GI, and a young Wehrmacht soldier – across the war, and while the Jewish character’s outsider status is certainly a factor, the novel is much more broadly about every aspect of life for these young men called to war. It reminded me strongly of The Caine Mutiny: an excellent World War II novel written by somebody who had been there, and seen it, and was acutely aware that even a titanic struggle for justice involves at its core human beings, and all the seemingly petty and ordinary aspects of their lives which they bring along with them.

1. My Brother Jack

“My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

I thought this would be an obligatory eat-your-vegetables Australian classic, in all likelihood over-egged and over-emphasised by the class of boomers and Gen X-ers that still hold a vice-like grip on Australian cultural discourse. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and my expectation is ironic in retrospect, given that My Brother Jack is in large part about Australian cultural cringe and the strange and unattractive effect it has on the out-of-sorts young nerds who fall victim to it and imagine greener intellectual grass abroad. In addition to being a truly excellent novel about sense of self, family ties, national identity and much more, My Brother Jack is a brilliantly realised period piece of Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s: a city at turns glamourous and seedy, a city of dockside slums and Art Deco newspaper offices, a city of bohemian artists and unimaginative salesmen, a city the protagonist longs to escape but finds himself drawn back to. The final sentence, quoted above, is for my money the most heartbreaking in Australian literature. A remarkable literary accomplishment and one of the finest Australian novels ever written.

Book Review: The Sleeping Dragon

August 5, 2024 in book review | 1 comment

The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg (1982) 232 p.

I read most of this series as a teenager and really enjoyed it. At some point years ago the Australian dollar was very strong and I was hoovering up second-hand books off Abebooks from Britain and the US like crazy, and snapped up this whole series but then never got around to re-reading it.

Rosenberg wrote it specifically as a thought experiment in how much it would suck to actually live in a “fantasy” world, so it’s ironic how fun and breezy it is to read. A group of all-American 1980s college students find themselves transported into the bodies of their characters in a vaguely Roman-era RPG world when it turns out their gamesmaster is an exiled wizard who launches them over for his own ends. One of them is speared in the gut and dies screaming within the first 24 hours, as a taste of how presciently grimdark this series is going to be.

There’s a ~Problematic~ attitude towards women that went over my head as a teenager but which is hard not to see now; not a misogyny, but more of a well-meaning yet oblivious sexism in which the feelings (let alone horrific ordeals) of the female characters are largely vehicles for the men’s character development. It’s not a dealbreaker but it is very, very “1980s SFF author.”

On the whole it’s good, readable fun. It’s also a bit of an odd one out – being the first book in the series it’s about the characters’ quest to return home, whereas the remainder of the series is about their acceptance that they’ll remain in the fantasy world and how they subsequently set about drastically changing it by kickstarting an industrial revolution. Which is much more interesting.

Book Review: My Brother Jack

April 12, 2024 in book review | Leave a comment

My Brother Jack by George Johnstone (1964) 348 p.

There was a time when, as an aspiring writer, I felt obliged to read through all the “classics,” an enormous amount of which still clog up my Goodreads to-be-read list and a smaller but still voluminous amount of which have physically occupied my various homes over the years. Of course forcing yourself through The Canon is a young man’s game, one for which I’ve long since lost any motivation, but for the books I bothered to actually acquire I do still read them eventually. A second-hand copy of My Brother Jack that I probably bought in some dusty St Vincent de Paul’s has been floating around on my shelves for seven or eight years, but I only got around to it this week.

It was therefore an excellent surprise to find that My Brother Jack is not the slog I expected – some kind of antiquated family drama from a time when Australia still felt spiritually Edwardian, something that would drag me back to assigned high school English class reading – but is instead a downright literary achievement that is also a genuine pleasure to read, often reminding me of Peter Carey at his picaresque best. In what I suspect is a strongly autobiographical story, Johnstone’s novel follows young David Meredith through his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the Melbourne of the 1920s, Great Depression and Second World War, largely revolving around his sense of detachment and mis-belonging; especially in contrast to his older brother Jack, an effortlessly popular ordinary Australian bloke. David by contrast is a nerd, a writer, an effete; an aspirational bohemian, a boy who dreams of more than the stifling mediocrity of Australian suburbia. (I have to admit I found it very funny to consider anywhere five or six train stations from the Melbourne CBD as suburbia; but then perhaps I was lucky to grow up in the post-WWII car-oriented suburbs of Perth, as opposed to an Australian kid growing up in Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta. Mind you, David himself notes that the suburbs were “worse than slums… they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty.” Perhaps the real problem I had with Perth’s suburbs was that unlike Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta, they lacked the exoticism of true country remoteness.)

It feels curious to read literature set in this part of Australian history which is also set in a city. Our novels and films and television series are heavily weighted – unlike our actual population distribution – towards the bush and the Outback, in dutiful accordance with the national mythology. In any case, part of the pleasure of My Brother Jack – one which of course won’t chime as much with people who aren’t Melburnians – is seeing your own city, its familiar landmarks and streetscapes, as they were a full century ago:

It was an uneasy, muggy evening with a storm brewing, and the Remington seemed to weigh a ton, and the width of the carriage, which kept sliding and ringing the bell, made it very awkward to carry, and by the time I had staggered as far as Swanston Street the shops and offices were closing and it was the rush hour, with everybody pushing and jostling for the trams. The sultriness had made people irritable and nobody had much patience with me and my cumbersome burden, and it was quite some time before I was able to struggle aboard a Darling Road tram, and even then I had to stand with the typewriter still in my arms. We were crossing Prince’s Bridge when the conductor elbowed his way through the strap-hangers. The weather and the crowds had given him a fine temper, too, and he began to make a tremendous fuss when he saw me and wanted to kick me off at the next stop.

I found it very lonely walking the streets of my own city in a soft pale drizzle of rain… I had nothing to go back to at Beverley Grove – so I just went on despondently walking around until the dark became night and the street-lamps were blurred and blobby through the fine slide of rain, and the spires of St. Paul’s shone against the street-glow like the points of licked lead-pencils, and the coloured tram tickets at the street corners had been trampled and muddied into patchy little Braque-coloured collages, and I had the oddest sensation of being nowhere…

I don’t think this is the same as seeing, for example, New York City or London through a historical lens. Australia has an endless appetite for stories from the 19th century colonial frontier (less so the 19th century cities) or the boomer and Gen X nostalgia of the recent decades from about the 1950s or ‘60s onwards, but less so for the half-century in between those two periods. (We have plenty of war stories, but those necessarily take place abroad.) You rarely see it, and even more rarely do you see it done well – partly why I like Peter Carey’s Illywhacker so much. But Johnstone, through a combination of his personal memories and genuine raw talent, recreates the living and breathing Melbourne of a century past. He has a rare skill of bringing scenes and locations to life, whether told first-hand or second-hand: the titular brother’s desperate and impoverished journey from Sydney to Melbourne through the “grim wet forests of Cape Howe and Gippsland” after a failed attempt at fortune-hunting during the Depression; the bohemian apartment of a raffish art student on Spring Street; the neat and tidy suburbs of the respectable middle class, newly-built and with nary a tree in sight; the glorious Art Deco tower, topped by a copper cupola and statue of Prometheus, that houses a thriving print newspaper of the 1930s. (This last is based on the real-life office of the Argus, which still stands on the corner of Elizabeth and LaTrobe a stone’s throw from my own office, and which I must have walked past a thousand times without thinking twice.)

Johnstone also achieves, in a manner that reminded me of Patrick O’Brian, a way of illustrating the exterior broader world beyond the one his protagonist inhabits. When David is a rookie journalist assigned to the shipping beat he describes, in the uneasy climate of the 1930s, the first German vessel sailing into our own Port Philip Bay with the Swastika displayed, an ominous portent despite the fact that their passengers are largely “Australians or European businessmen or German-Jews fleeing from Hitlerism, and even under the new Swastika flag flying right there at the masthead they talked quite openly about the evils of Nazism…”

Yet the queer thing is that not one of the German ships was ever the same after that day. They were the very ships that I had watched in and out of the docks for years, the long graceful four-masters of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd, the Main and the Aller and the Neckar and the Mosel, and they were even the same jovial and efficient captains I had known for so long, but once they all started coming in under the Swastika a kind of sinister stain seemed to brush off on them, and one never went aboard them again without being oppressed by a feeling of uneasiness, of eyes watching, or mouths opening to ask a question, of jackboots rapping on the steel plates at the far dim ends of alleyways.

What propels My Brother Jack past a brilliantly-realised period piece and into the realm of a great novel is the way it moves from what initially appears to be the bog-standard holier-than-thou diatribe of a gifted kid straining to break free of his perceived suburban desert, and eventually makes it clear that this boy – now a very well-travelled and cosmopolitan man – is a bad person, and that in the back of his mind he knows it. The very final line of My Brother Jack must be one of the most devastating in Australian literature, delivered as it is by Jack himself, not in anger or in bitterness, but in completely and totally mistaken earnestness: “My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

A truly excellent book. It’s always a pleasure to read a classic that turns out to deserve its reputation.

Book Review: The Terraformers

March 18, 2024 in book review | 2 comments

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (2023) 335 p.

I should have steered clear when the review quotes on the back were from Martha Wells and John Scalzi. I’m surprised there wasn’t one from Becky Chambers, since her narrative style of insufferable happy-clappy Super Best Friends is what Newitz’s book most reminded me of, but these authors are all much of a muchness: a novel in which all the concepts and dialogue feel like they’re being explained to you by somebody who self-identifies as part of “nerd culture” at a board game cafe or a video-game-themed bar or (in Newitz’s case) a furry convention.

I don’t want to sound like a crusty old conservative, so I’ll be clear: the issue is not people introducing each other with their pronouns, or that everybody is vegan, or that at one point a character almost reaches orgasm just because her partner asks for verbal consent (yes, really). The problem is that a novel purporting to be about the terraforming of a planet and the messy business of creating a new society 60,000 years in the future is so uninspiringly copy-pasted from the progressive American discourse of the 2020s, in everything from gender identity to public transit to urban design to gentrification.

More disappointing is how shallow it all is; there’s a Saturday morning cartoon vibe of evil corporate villains vs morally upstanding best buddies who are always calling each other “friend” and (a la Chambers) talking about their feelings. The result is that there are basically no stakes, except when Newitz decides to deus ex machina an orbital laser beam into proceedings, which nonetheless remain boring. None of this works as a science fiction novel. I don’t care if your politics are different from mine, but if you’re going to nail your colours to the mast like this, at least be more politically interesting about it.

Book Review: Dog Soldiers

January 7, 2024 in uncategorized | 1 comment

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1974) 342 p.

1. You will note that 90% of the reviews about this book use the word “counterculture,” by which they mean it’s set in the 1960s and is about drugs and California and the Vietnam war. That’s a joke; I know what it really means and I know it had its relevance, but it’s more or less the first time I’ve re-encountered it since having to spend a whole semester on it in 2006 for a bachelor of arts at a university where the curriculum was designed by boomers who naturally thought the decade of their early adulthood was the most important in world history. Looking back across the past 17 years this now seems morbidly ironic.

2. During the fall of Kabul, countless photojournalists and TV crews picked out good spots to keep an eye on the US embassy, and even, I recall, explicitly anticipated whether we would see helicopter evacuations from the roof. They were fixated by the iconic images of Saigon’s evacuation a full 45 years earlier and wanted to replicate them. Of course the actual iconic imagery of that week occurred at the airport, where Afghan civilians clung to the wings of departing cargo planes and horrifically fell from the sky; but journalists and writers and talking heads had (justifiably, mind you) compared the Afghanistan War to the Vietnam War for decades, and thus expected its closing days to play out similarly even on a visual level. This fundamentally boomer mindset deeply irritated me.

3. In the (perfectly enjoyable) 2022 blockbuster Avatar 2: The Way of Water, James Cameron has his villainous Marines attempt to root out our heroic partisan fighters by arriving at remote villages by future-helicopter, conducting brutal and ham-fisted interrogations, and burning down the villages on accusations of harbouring fighters. This imagery is straight out of the Vietnam War, a full 49 years after US forces left Vietnam, and with two Vietnam-esque US military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan having both started and concluded in the interim. It’s also a full 26 years after Cameron already cribbed Vietnam-era imagery and vibes for the film Aliens. Cameron, born in 1954, is of course classic mid-range boomer.

4. Dog Soldiers is a perfectly fine novel, a crime caper about fairly ordinary people motivated by greed and getting themselves mixed up in some serious money and serious shit, akin at its best to No Country For Old Men. (At its worst, you will have to sit through some stream-of-consciousness passages and listen to characters talk about what they think the meaning of America is, or whatever.) Stone is a good writer and I cannot really fault him for writing this book all the way back in 1974. I am just unsure, in 2023, after a 20-year period of enormous change in our own political, media, financial and even narcotics culture, whether this book really needs to remain in the literary landscape, and indeed whether anybody who isn’t a boomer reminiscing about their youth needs to spend much time reflecting on the counterculture of the 1960s.

5. I will reiterate that Stone is a good writer. This passage nicely articulates how I feel with the adrenaline rush of a near-miss on the freeway, or when reading police blotters about the random and terrible things that can happen to people:

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise. One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Discworld Re-Read: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

November 9, 2023 in book review, rereading discworld | 1 comment

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett (2001) 304 p.

It’s arguable that the Discworld books were always sort of YA, before YA became a marketing term: certainly they’re not difficult reads and I hoovered up the entire extant series between the ages of twelve and fourteen, as I suspect most fans did. For that reason – and because despite its short length it’s a genuinely good book – I can’t really name a meaningful difference between The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and any of the other Discworld novels, apart from the fact that it’s shorter and that it was marketed to younger readers at the time but subsequently seems to have been subsumed into the general sequence. Unlike The Last Hero, I think that post-facto rearrangement into the canon is deserved.

Animals straying too close to magic and becoming self-aware and capable of speech is at this point an established trope in the Discworld, largely because of Gaspode the Wonder Dog. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodent takes that concept and applies it to a mean old alley cat, a whole bunch of rats, and a maybe-not-as-dumb-as-he-seems kid with a musical pipe. The story begins well into the existence of an ongoing criminal racket in which Maurice, the titular tomcat, has established a scam which travels from town to town. The rats infest the joint, the kid shows up as the convenient Pied Piper, he gets paid off and dutifully shares it with his four-legged conspirators, and they all move on to the next town. The first problem for Maurice – both for himself and his business venture – is that sentient thought comes with lots of other problems, like the development of conscience and doubt and religion, and this applies both to himself and to the increasingly diverse society of rats. The second problem is that these issues are just starting to bubble over as the “Clan” arrives in the town of Bad Blintz, where in the classic Discworld fashion of “this is a funny book but there’s also a great mystery and dramatic story here,” something very mysterious is occurring. There are dry old traces of rats in Bad Blintz – nests and spoor and scent and traps – but there an no actual rats, anywhere in the town…

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a solid book, as we’ve come to expect from Pratchett at this stage in his career. It’s probably only because I knew it was originally marketed (and probably at least partially conceived) as YA that I noticed slight differences. A longer book might have included more flashbacks about how Maurice and the Clan first established themselves as swindlers, and also expanded the role of the real Pied Piper who ominously swaggers into town on horseback in the third act like the man in black in an old Western. It’s rare to see a book (even, I have to admit, a Pratchett book) which I think could have been expanded rather than cut down, and interesting that in this case it’s specifically because the publishers wanted to market it as YA.

Nonetheless, it works very well as a solid and enjoyable entry in the series. Maurice in particular is quite a good main character. Pratchett’s sympathetic protagonists in his one-off novels often run to a groove (Keith, the piper boy, is his familiar Sensible Voice of Reason character in this one) but Maurice retains enough of his inherently catty nature to be interesting. As Granny Weatherwax observed some ten or fifteen books ago, “if cats looked like toads everyone would see them for the cruel bastards they are,” and Maurice’s instinctive selfishness battling against his burgeoning empathy is fun to read. The rats themselves are also sketched across enough of a diverse spectrum to be interesting as individual characters. The elderly rat leader Hamnpork (as they gained the first magical stirrings of intelligence, the rats took their names from the labels of discarded cans in their rubbish dump; I thought this might have been cribbed from the musical Cats but apparently not!) is a particularly interesting one: an unintelligent and angry old rat who’s suspicious of change and bitter about the younger and smarter rats supplanting him as leader, but who still has a brave and admirable end to his story arc – he may be a grouchy old man, but sometimes society needs grouchy old men. I also really liked the supernatural villain of the piece (which I had no memory of from my initial read back in the day), the genuinely unsettling way that villain speaks to the characters, and the way Maurice manages to – at least briefly – figure out how it works and outwit it. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is one of the best kinds of Discworld novels, like the Witches or City Watch arc: one which is funny, sure, but is mostly enjoyable because it has a really good and interesting fantasy plot.

Discworld Re-Read: The Last Hero

August 2, 2023 in rereading discworld | Leave a comment

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett (2001) 176 p.

As the century turned, and the Discworld was riding the height of its popularity (Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling author before Rowling took the crown), there was a cottage industry of supplementary works published: Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, The Science of Discworld, The Streets of Ankh-Morpork. Among this number were a couple of narrative features that were not, at the time, considered part of the main series, but have subsequently been brought into the fold. Hence, while my memory indicates that Discworld #27 should be Night Watch (in my opinion, probably Pratchett’s magnum opus) it is instead The Last Hero.

The Last Hero is an over-sized book shaped like a graphic novel, but isn’t quite one; there’s a lot of Kidby illustrations, but it’s still a text-based story, though of course the illustrations mean the book is more of a novella than a proper Discworld novel. This is amplified by the fact that the story is quite an odd one, a bit of a throwback (as Rincewind/Cohen the Barbarian stories often are) to the early days of the series when Pratchett was having fun experimenting with fantasy tropes. The story is basically that Cohen and his coterie of geriatric barbarian warriors are angry at the notion of time, ageing and death – and by the way, “what if Conan was an old man” is a joke that has well and truly run its course by now – and have therefore decided to take out their revenge on the gods: returning (the Discworld equivalent of) Prometheus’ fire to their home at (the Olympus-equivalent) Cori Celesti, “with interest.” The wizards of Unseen University catch wind of this plan and warn the government of Ankh-Morpork that setting off explosives on the mountain of the gods would trigger a magical effect that would obliterate the entire Discworld, and so the full forces of the state are arrayed to stop them. This ends up involving a slingshot space travel manoeuvre, in a prototype vehicle designed by Leonard of Quirm and staffed by Rincewind the Wiz(z)ard and Captain Carrot of the City Watch, to reach Cori Celesti ahead of the Cohen’s barbarian horde and prevent the catastrophe.

A Discworld book which features regular illustrations and is the size and shape of a graphic novel is unusual enough; add in such an outlandish plot (these are generally not Pratchett’s best) and it begins to feel like a forgettable lark, which is more or less how I remember it being published and marketed at the time. Has Captain Carrot, of the City Watch arc, actually gone to space and set foot on the moon? Sorry, I don’t think he has. The entire thing feels like it’s not really canon, like a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. That’s fine – it’s a perfectly amusing sideshow that I flicked through across a weekend – but that’s all it is.

Next up is another retcon kicking the Night Watch can down the road: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is apparently no longer a separate YA novel that happens to be set on the Discworld, but one of the main sequence. I read it but barely remember it, so we’ll see!

Book Review: Blue at the Mizzen & The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

April 17, 2023 in book review | Leave a comment

Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O’Brian (2000) 262 p.

And

The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey by Patrick O’Brian (2004) 192 p.

I’ve long had a habit of saving my reading of the Aubrey-Maturin series for holidays, because they’re books that deserve to be read in the life-affirming circumstances of a refreshing break from the daily grind, in warmer and more exotic locales. I finished the series this past January, travelling around the south-west of Western Australia after my sister’s wedding; completing the “true” ending of Blue at the Mizzen sitting on a balcony in the deep karri forest outside Pemberton, and completing the wistfully incomplete ending of The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey* on a remote and deserted stretch of coast at Cathedral Rock Beach. I know that sounds wanky and faffy but I’m right, right? I started reading this series on a park bench in London when I was twenty-six. I’m now thirty-four. It’s been too long and enjoyable a voyage to conclude it when I’m half-asleep on the train to the office at 7:30am on a bleak winter’s morning.

(*The title of this book is a frankly shocking affront by the publisher: it is the final unfinished voyage of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and there is not a fan of the series alive who would deny that.)

However, there’s a reason it’s taken me a few months to get around to reviewing them: after twenty books, you know what you’re in for, and if you’d like to read my effusive praise of the series there are nineteen other reviews you can read. I find myself, anti-climatically, with little to say. I noted at the end of The Hundred Days that it’s a strange way for the series to pause, with nineteen books about the Napoleonic wars and then one-and-a-half about what comes next. Obviously this was driven by O’Brian’s own passing, and if history had played out differently then perhaps we’d have a more robust five-or-six-book career-postscript of Jack’s adventures in South America, but instead Blue at the Mizzen is a bit of an odd duck, one which has largely faded in my memory since reading it in January. It has aspects reminding me of many of the Mediterranean books in the middle stretch, when Jack is obliged to play diplomat with local lords and power-brokers, in this case assisting revolutionary factions in Chile and Peru; the strongest part of the book is when another Royal Navy captain attempts to unlawfully assert authority over him. The novel nonetheless ends on a proud and thoroughly deserved moment – made all the better by the fact that Stephen is the one given the pleasure of informing Jack – which I won’t spoil here, but which any astute reader will have guessed from the title.

The Final Unfinished Voyage… is, by its nature, the more interesting book to talk about. There’s an argument about unfinished work in general (and I’m sure it’s been made about this book) which is that it’s not morally right to publish the work-in-progress of a deceased author. In this case I believe it’s justified, partly because it’s very clearly presented as an unfinished work – a curiosity rather than a long-awaited new adventure – and partly because O’Brian himself, as we learn in this peek behind the curtain, was an exceptionally polished writer even in the early stages of a work. The Final Unfinished Voyage… is not even a quarter of a regular book’s length, and it literally ends mid-paragraph, but what we do see is almost indistinguishable to the casual eye from any other given chapter in the canon, and a reminder that what truly drove the pleasure of this series was not the weave and weft of the grander plots, but rather the day-to-day life of the characters in a vanished time and place. In fewer than a hundred pages we see Stephen’s combined sadness and delight at the unexpected specimens provided by a flock of brilliant green parrots literally flying dead into the maintops; encounters with grumpy Latin American quarantine officers and local “witches;” and, according to Wikipedia, we also see Stephen best a rival in a duel. (I regret that I read this as an ebook, in which these final handwritten pages were impossible for me to decipher; this is definitely one to buy in paperback.)

O’Brian is one of the few writers where I can pluck a book off the shelf and read a chapter alone, satisfied simply to inhabit his world; and it’s for this reason that The Final Unfinished Voyage… doesn’t merely feel like an academic curiosity. In fact, it ultimately feels appropriate as an ending despite not really ending at all: because what have these novels been but one long, ongoing, perpetual meta-novel? What really separates the opening chapters of The Final Unfinished Voyage…, thematically or tonally, from the closing chapters of Blue at the Mizzen? The series has been one beautifully unfinished voyage since Jack and Stephen first weighed anchor in Madeira – all those books and all those years ago – and in my view there could be no better place for it to ultimately “end” than the very locale from which Stephen always signs his letters:

Surprise, at sea

Rereading Discworld: Thief of Time

October 31, 2022 in book review | Leave a comment

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (2001) 378 p.

The “arcs” of the Discworld got a bit blurry towards the end. This is technically a Death/Susan book, but a solid half of the narrative is given over to the Monks of Time, who’ve been briefly hinted at but never given their own novel (and will play a minor but important role in the next book, Night Watch, which sort of takes place contemporaneously to this one.) Thief of Time more comfortably feels like a Death book, though, since although the big fella himself gets very little screen time, his enemies the Auditors are front and centre in their clearest role yet as antagonists.

Thief of Time begins with two different people whose lives revolve around time: Jeremy, a brilliant but disturbed clockmaker in Ankh-Morpork, and Lobsang, a thief plucked from the Thieves’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork and whisked away to the Discworld’s equivalent of the Himalayas to be trained as an apprentice history monk. The history monks, in their obscure monastery, are manipulators of space-time: dividing it up and spreading it around, taking it from where it isn’t needed (the bottom of the ocean) to places where there’s never enough time (like bustling cities) and generally keeping an eye on the nefarious elements of the cosmos who would seek to tinker with the fourth dimension in more malevolent ways. Which is where Jeremy the clockmaker comes in: hired by a human avatar of the Auditors to create a truly perfect clock which will stop time itself. Under the guidance of Lu-Tze, the humble sweeper and personification of kung fu tropes about unassuming but deadly lethal old sages, Lobsang travels to Ankh-Morpork to prevent this from happening.

This is the kind of book that sort of works in practice but sounds a bit weird when you describe it like that. One of its biggest problems, I think, is that the concept of the history monks never quite takes off. Pratchett has managed to turn joke ideas into serious stuff before, but the long setpieces in which the history monks use their machinery to handle time is not much divorced from, say, reading about people weaving the Source in a Wheel of Time book, or using magic in any other fantasy: basically not real and therefore uninteresting. I found the book on much stronger ground in Ankh-Morpork, where Susan has found her calling as a schoolteacher (but is bothered by how her bizarre heritage and eerie powers have turned her into a social hermit); the Auditors’ human avatar is increasingly enchanted by the temptations of physical experience; and Jeremy is a great illustration of an obsessive, one-note mind who is utterly happy as long as he’s just left alone to tinker with his clocks and is probably best left to do just that, carefully watched over by the Clockmakers’ Guild after hints of unpleasantness in the past. (When told the legend of the last perfect clock which was wiped out of reality by the history monks after being built, so that it never happened at all, Jeremy says “Things either exist or they don’t. I am very clear about that. I have medicine.”) The moment when Lobsang and Lu-Tze arrive in Ankh-Morpork just as the clock tolls and subsequently have to traverse a world frozen in time is neat; there are some great cameos from Nanny Ogg, called to serve as a midwife across several decades by a stranger knocking at her door for whom no time seems to have passed at all; and a very nice conclusion to a semi-romantic subplot for Susan and Lobsang.

Ultimately, though, I never much liked Thief of Time the first time around and didn’t this time either. It’s fine, and at this point in the series I never outright dislike any of Pratchett’s work, but it’s oddly out of step with the books around it – as we are dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat in what some term the “industrial revolution” phase of the Discworld, Thief of Time is a throwback to the weird-and-wonderful fantasy tropes of the series past; a metaphysical story with universe-breaking stakes in which an excessive chunk is spent in the halls of a distant faux-Buddhist monastery.

It’s worth noting that apparently my view is very much a minority one – it was one of thirteen Discworld books which placed in The Big Read, a 2003 survey run by the BBC of 700,000 Brits to determine the country’s 200 favourite books; and it ranked first (!) in Pratchett Job’s Discworld re-read when he came to numerically ranking the series. No accounting for taste!

Next up is my own pick for the best book in the series: Night Watch, which is very specifically a Sam Vimes story rather than a City Watch story, but which I remember serving in many ways as the true denouement of his character arc.

Re-reading Discworld index