Grub Street

Thud! by Terry Pratchett (2005) 464 p.
Discworld #34 (City Watch #8)

Ankh-Morpork is on edge. The anniversary of Koom Valley approaches: a famous battle between the dwarfs and the trolls, two species who traditionally hold each other in deep enmity. Unfortunately for Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, both dwarves and trolls now comprise substantial minority populations in the city; and the dwarven grag (priest) Hamcrusher, an extremist demagogue and rabble-rouser, has allegedly been murdered by a troll. As ethnic hatred reaches fever pitch, it looks like the Battle of Koom Valley is about be replayed on the streets of Ankh-Morpork.

Like Going Postal, this book is on the downward slope of the Discworld’s quality, but not because Pratchett’s illness was noticeably kicking in; simply because all authors have a peak at some point, and Night Watch was Pratchett’s. Thud! fortunately comes as the peak has only just been crested, so it’s still a really good book. It’s actually curious to contrast it with Night Watch because in many ways it feels as though Night Watch, with its time travel back to the bad old days of a monocultural Ankh-Morpork, was a deviation from a theme that has been present in the City Watch books since Men at Arms and which was particularly present in The Fifth Elephant: multiculturalism, immigration, and what politicians these days have started calling “social cohesion.” In particular, like The Fifth Elephant, it very heavily features the dwarves; not just the immigrants to Ankh-Morpork but the more culturally conservative brethren they’ve left back in the old country.

To investigate a murder one needs to confirm there has actually been a death, and this is the first really interesting part of Thud!, as Vimes enters a dwarven neighbourhood – and the excavations below it – to find out what’s really happened to Hamcrusher but also to assert his authority to an immigrant group who don’t respect it. There is an uneasiness here, partly from the tense power play as Vimes realises just how much of the city the dwarves have tunneled beneath and consider to be their own, separate and apart from human law – Vimes acknowledges to himself that this is a matter for the Patrician, but also threatens the dwarves that unless he is given access to the murder scene he will return with the entire Watch and take it by force, and even “raise the regiments if I have to” – but also from the distaste Vimes has for the fact that he has to explicitly assert his authority at all, that these residents of Ankh-Morpork could ever have considered themselves outside the law in the first place. He is a cosmopolitan man, he likes dwarves, they are model citizens, but that is predicated on the dwarves actually considering themselves to be citizens in turn. The manner in which some of them hold themselves apart and have transformed parts of the city has a ring of right-wing newspapers talking about “no-go zones:”

Standing around watching people was, of course, Ankh-Morpork’s leading industry. The place was a net exporter of penetrating stories. The street felt not exactly hostile, but alien. And yet it was an Ankh-Morpork street. How could he be a stranger here?

(Non-British readers may not pick up on this – I initially didn’t – but “strangers in our own country” is a line from the infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell.) Pratchett was not a racist, and nobody who has read the Discworld books could deny that he values and promotes the immigrant nation/city; but neither was he an ideologue, and based on the text here, he doesn’t think it unreasonable for someone to feel disquiet over the rapidity with which they’ve seen their demographics of their city change. Clearly Vimes feels that disquiet, but, as a stand-in for Pratchett’s viewpoint, he encourages us to follow our thoughts beyond the initial kneejerk reactions:

“Take me to see these people down below,” said Vimes.
“They will not listen to you. They will not even look at you. They have nothing to do with the World Above. They believe it is a kind of bad dream. I have not dared tell them about your ‘newspapers,’ printed every day and discarded like rubbish. The shock would kill them.”
But dwarfs invented the printing engine, Vimes thought. Obviously they were the wrong kind of dwarf. I’ve seen Cheery throw stuff in the wastepaper bin, too. It seems like nearly all dwarfs are the wrong sort, eh?

Just like humans, Pratchett’s dwarves are not a monolithic racial bloc but a diversity of peoples, beliefs and cultures; and those beliefs and cultures are not set in stone. This echoes a theme that crops up repeatedly in The Fifth Elephant: a common viewpoint among the native Morporkian (or Briton) is to fret about the changes that immigrants have effected on their country. But the country has changed the immigrants, too, and can send some measure of those changes rippling back down the links they maintain with the old country.

There were more and more of deep-downers in the city these days, although you very seldom saw them outside the dwarf areas. Even there, you didn’t see deep-downers themselves, you just saw their dusty black sedan chairs being muscled through the crowds by four other dwarfs. There were no windows; there was nothing outside that a deep-downer could possibly want to see.

The city dwarfs regarded them with awe, respect, and, it had to be said, a certain amount of embarrassment, like some honoured but slightly loopy relative. Because somewhere in the head of every city dwarf there was a little voice that said, You should live in a mine, you should be in the mountains, you shouldn’t walk under open skies, you should be a real dwarf. In other words, you shouldn’t really be working in your uncle’s pigment-and-dye factory in Dolly Sisters. However, since you were, you could at least try to think like a proper dwarf. And part of that meant being guided by the deep-downers, the dwarfs’ dwarfs, who lived in caves miles below the surface and never saw the sun. Somewhere down there in the dark was true dwarfishness. They had the knowing of it, and they could guide you…

But – as one Morporkian grag introduced later in the book will argue – who is to say that the modern, forward-thinking Ankh-Morpork dwarves are any less true to dwarvishness than the dwarves of the old country? Who gets to define what being a dwarf is?

The fear of the Battle of Koom Valley replaying on the streets is an interesting one – reading this in 2026 (certainly as a Melburnian) it’s almost impossible not to think of Israel/Palestine, but while there might’ve been a lot of protests and counter-protests, they aren’t exactly pitched and violent battles. Probably it owes more to the Orange parades of Northern Ireland, Thud! having been written only about seven or eight years after the Troubles ended, but then that lacks the immigrant factor. Possibly we should just permit Pratchett to write a fantasy novel based on a general metaphor for blind prejudice and hatred – and, to be fair, based on thirty years of his own world-building – without everything having to map perfectly onto real-world analogues. Mind you, there was at least one line about Koom Valley having occurred “a thousand years ago and a thousand miles away” which irked me, and struck me as a very middle-class English thing to say; hatred between ethnic groups intense enough to engender violence in their new countries is usually linked to ongoing conflict and injustice in the old country, not just inter-generational grudges. Pratchett steers clear of suggesting there might be any material basis to the historic conflict between dwarves and trolls – from memory, in the very early Discworld books, it’s implied that a race which loves to swing pickaxes was always bound to be at odds with a race made of rock – but he does permit Nobby some amusing and correct observations here, even if they do run contrary to the conveniently motive-free enmity between the trolls and the dwarves in the rest of the book:

“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol—well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that, but—”
“Saving civilization from a horde of—”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?”

One thing which very much maps onto a 2005-era headline issue is the grag Hamcrusher, who echoes the contemporary British anxiety about foreign-born extremist imams radicalising native-born British Muslim youth. (Thud! would have been at the publishers by the time of the 7/7 attacks, which were perpetrated by young Muslim men born and raised in England.) Pratchett makes no bones about this: Hamcrusher and his ilk are bigoted religious zealots who have no place in cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork. Yet he still pities them, which is a form of sympathy, or at least mercy:

“They are very frightened now,” Helmclever said. “They don’t understand the city. They don’t understand why trolls are allowed here. They don’t understand people who don’t… understand them. They fear you. They fear everything now.”

An observation aside from the politics of it all: this is the first City Watch book in which Vimes is a father, and the first City Watch book I’ve re-read since becoming a father myself. There are obviously aspects which now strike more of a chord for me:

At first it had been fine. The baby was, well, a baby, all lolling head and burping and unfocused eyes, entirely the preserve of his mother. And then, one evening, his son had turned and looked directly at Vimes, with eyes that for his father outshone the lamps of the world, and fear had poured into Sam Vimes’s life in a terrible wave. All this good fortune, all this fierce joy… it was wrong. Surely the universe could not allow this amount of happiness in one man, not without presenting a bill. Somewhere a big wave was cresting, and when it broke over his head it would wash everything away. Some days, he was sure he could hear its distant roar…

I have never felt this. Perhaps Pratchett did and perhaps not; every now and then we are reminded that Vimes is a fictional character rather than an authorial mouthpiece, and this strikes me as a good piece of character work, a consequence of Vimes’ job: here is a man who has spent his entire career dealing with the worst things people can do to each other and is horribly aware of how cruel the world can be. (It’s also, of course, foreshadowing for one of the great Serious Drama setpieces in the City Watch books, which are always the best Discworld books for them). A lot of people seem to love the “not my cow” climactic sequence in the underground chasms; I personally find it a bit overwrought, but the moment at the very end of the book? That’s tearjerker stuff. I’ve also seen other reviews furrow their brows at the idea Vimes would ever abuse his power to shut down the city during rush hour for personal reasons; it is indeed highly out of character, but although the Where’s My Cow gag is given away in the blurb, the reader isn’t supposed to know at the time that all of this is being done for personal reasons, so it’s really just Pratchett not being able to resist a joke.

Thud! is a good book. It avoids complexity and elides some of the obvious counter-arguments to its own assertions, but as I’ve previously noted, so does Night Watch. I’m not really complaining that Pratchett didn’t write a thousand-page treatise on immigration and inter-generational ethnic conflict rather than a fun, plotty novel satirising it; I’m just noting that he’s less left-wing and more centrist than I thought he was when I read him as a teenager. (Of course, I’m also less left-wing and more centrist than I was as a teenager.) There is a reason the Discworld series has always been popular with teenagers and why it often feels like the better class of YA fiction: it simplifies. The real world is unimaginably complex, and Pratchett’s fun and readable novels simplify that complexity into broadly laudable moral messages. Again, that’s fine, it’s not a criticism. But it is something unavoidably noticeable when I read these books in my late thirties compared to my early teens. It’s also unavoidably noticeable that the world was a much better place when people were getting its complexity distilled down into an easily readable story by somebody as decent and thoughtful as Terry Pratchett, rather than by whatever algorithm-driven blackpilling garbage they’re scrolling through on TikTok. C’est la vie.

Next up is Wintersmith – another Tiffany Aching, and therefore a Discworld book I’ve never actually read.

Rereading Discworld Index

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett (2004) 474 p.
Discworld #33 (Industrial Revolution #1)

I didn’t like this one much when I first read it as a sixteen-year-old – didn’t hate it or anything, but didn’t love it – largely, if I recall correctly, because it introduced an entirely new main character. Of course The Truth did so as well, but I didn’t particularly love that one either. I think it was because I liked Vimes and his City Watch so much that it felt odd to read a book set in Ankh-Morpork that wasn’t about them.

It was interesting to learn years later that this was precisely Pratchett’s aim; I can no longer find the exact interview, but other sources note that he found it difficult to set non-Vimes books in Ankh-Morpork, because they would inevitably intersect with the City Watch and then become City Watch books by default. You can see this occur to an extent in The Truth, though that was perhaps unavoidable for a book about the Discworld’s first newspaper, not least because as I noted in my review, the job of journalist and the job of police detective are really quite similar. With Going Postal, Pratchett set out to write a character who would deliberately avoid interactions with the Watch entirely: the forger, thief, counterfeiter and conman Moist von Lipwig. Saved from the gallows by a last minute reprieve from Lord Vetinari, Moist is given the unenviable (and non-optional) task of restoring to order the city’s defunct Post Office, which is housed in a grand but crumbling old building reputed to be haunted and currently staffed by two weirdoes. Moist is some time into the job before learning it mysteriously claimed the lives of the last three postmasters.

Re-reading this as an adult, I found the deliberate excision of the Watch from an Ankh-Morpork novel (they do briefly show up, but don’t overstay their welcome) rather refreshing: a reminder that there are in fact many facets of life that don’t involve crime and policing, no matter how much fiction in general loves the genre. It’s a little bit like seeing Granny Weatherwax through Tiffany Aching’s eyes: we’re inclined to like them, but not everybody is, and Moist certainly isn’t.

The counter-balance to the story of the Post Office, and the reason Vetinari wants it restored, is the clacks; the semaphore telegraph which was only introduced five main sequence books ago (and indeed, according to Going Postal, it’s only been around for five years) but which has revolutionised Discworld society. It’s always a pleasure when Pratchett flexes his writing muscle beyond his satirical talent, and Going Postal is replete with an entire worker’s culture built around the clacks, of an insider industry no different from any of the older trades: the lingo, the legends, the whispered stories and urban myths that have built up among the linesmen who spend all their time up rickety windy towers out on the plains or up in the mountain. So too has it transformed Ankh-Morpork, which Pratchett created in the 1980s as a medieval Conan the Barbarian fantasy city, but which now presents a vision that feels almost cyberpunk:

Around the city, the clacks towers were lighting up. Only the University, the Palace, the Guilds and the seriously rich or very nervous ran their towers at night, but the big terminal tower on the Tump blazed like a Hogswatch tree. Patterns of yellow squares ran up and down the main tower. Silent at this distance, winking their signals above the rising mists, outlining their constellations against the evening sky, the towers were more magical than magic, more bewitching than witchcraft…

There were three dark figures at the other end of the roof, watching Moist. Their shadows danced as the pattern of lights changed, twice every second.

The villain of Going Postal is the company that controls the clacks, the Grand Trunk – or rather, the villain is its chief executive officer and his board of directors, men who have usurped control of the clacks from the passionate engineers who originally built it, and are steadily increasing the cost of its services while degrading its quality.

“All they want to do is make money. They don’t care about the Trunk. They’ll run it into the ground and make more money by selling it. When Dad was in charge people were proud of what they did. And because they were engineers they made sure that the towers worked properly, all of the time.”

This is of course a tale as old as time, not just with new inventions but with any sort of business at all. But reading this 2004 book in 2026, it’s impossible not to think of the enshittification of the internet; to compare what it was like just a few years before social media came along, or even for the first five or ten years of social media. It doesn’t map perfectly, of course – for a start, Pratchett wasn’t intentionally making this comparison – because many of the Silicon Valley whizz kids have become the money men and are happily ruining their own products while telling us they’re building a better world for us. Going Postal is from a more innocent time, when Pratchett felt comfortable drawing a stark line (in my view, an overly simplistic line) between the men who work with their hands and the financiers who only care about revenue:

“That seems a bit drastic, Mr Pony?” said Greenyham.
“I hope it is, sir. I think someone’s found a way of sending messages that can damage a tower.”
“That’s impossi-”
Mr Pony’s hand slapped the table. “How come you know so much, sir? Did you sit up half the night trying to get to the bottom of it? Have you taken a differential drum apart with a tin opener? Did you spot how the swage armature can be made to jump off the elliptical bearing if you hit the letter K and then send it to a tower with an address higher than yours, but only if you hit the letter Q first and the drum spring is fully wound? Did you spot that the key levers wedge together and the spring forces the arm up and you’re looking at a gearbox full of teeth? Well, I did!”

Another thing I have noted, as an adult, is that Pratchett is fond of polemics like this. (I’d observe that managing money is in itself a highly specialised trade, which is how the Proper Bin Men who invented the clacks have been swindled out of owning it.) Nevertheless, these type of scenes wouldn’t be appealing in the first place if they didn’t have a nugget of truth; I was reminded in this case of the journalism sector, of once mighty media empires hollowed out, and particularly of Megan Greenwell’s piece The Adults in the Room about the death of Deadpsin.

Moist’s Post Office, on the other hand, delivers far slower but for a much fairer cost, and does so from a sense of civic duty; the two remaining staff, the elderly Groat and the youthful Stanley, have a dedication to the institution of the Post Office that borders on religious zeal, and one which quickly proves contagious to the previously cynical and self-serving Moist. It’s a public service rather than a private company, a juxtaposition which is never made explicit and therefore doesn’t feel ham-handed, because I suspect Pratchett himself was, in this matter, a centrist who was not particularly dogmatic about public versus private industry (an issue which has a different history and presses different political buttons in Britain than it does in other English-speaking countries). Notably, the clacks is never presented antagonistically simply because it’s a private industry, but rather because it’s a private industry run by bad men; several times it’s explicitly argued by sympathetic characters that everything would be peachy if the original engineers who were in it for the love of the game were still running the company. That, I think, is fuzzy logic that appeals to Pratchett’s libertarian streak, but examples of it occurring in real life don’t readily spring to mind.

Anyway, teasing out Pratchett’s political beliefs is only a minor part of why I like revisiting this series as an adult. Going Postal is a good, fun, classic late-stage Discworld book, for a bunch of reasons I haven’t even touched on here: the golems, including the tremendous Mr Pump, Moist’s “parole officer;” a fantastic set-piece in which Moist explores the dangerous upper reaches of the Post Office and slowly pieces together how his literal predecessors met their grisly fates; Mr Gryle, a shadowy sub-villain resulting from Pratchett remembering (as in the Tiffany Aching books) that he’s writing a fantasy series and is allowed to use literal monsters as well as figurative ones; and the way that, while it deliberately avoids too much exposure to the City Watch, the book still perfectly slots into the familiar surrounds of Ankh-Morpork and in particular features some great moments from Vetinari and Ridcully. (Interestingly, for a book which features many patented Ankh-Morpork crowd scenes, C.M.O.T. Dibbler is absent.) I appreciated Going Postal much, much more than I did as a teenager.

Next up is Thud! Which is (what else?) a City Watch book.

Re-reading Discworld Index

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett (2004) 298 p.

The second Tiffany Aching book, in which Tiffany is collected by Miss Tick and taken away to be introduced to her new mistress, Miss Level, for whom she’ll serve an informal apprenticeship. Unbeknownst to either Miss Tick or Miss Level, as they leave behind the Chalk and head into the witch country of the Ramptop Mountains, Tiffany has already been dabbling in self-taught magic herself – and has attracted something dangerous in her wake.

One of the pleasures of reading the Tiffany Aching books is that I never did the first time round, so it’s like getting to read a classic Discworld novel for the first time. I find them difficult to review in that sense, because I can’t talk about how they do or don’t match my own memories, and instead find myself just enjoying them for their own sake. I can’t even be particularly critical of them because, at least in the case of these first two, they’re solidly good Discworld books that I would have enjoyed as much as the others if I’d happened to pick them up from my high school library back in 2005.

Pratchett’s books are… well, they are fun, but that’s not quite the word I’m looking for. They’re compelling. They’re readable. They take you along on a great story. Stephen King is perhaps the closest comparable contemporary writer in the match between how widely popular his books were and how much they encapsulated a good adventure story; how much I enjoy sitting there reading these stories by the light of my bedside lamp before I go to sleep. They have frisson, as seen here at the end of the chapter in which Tiffany and Miss Level arrive at her distant cottage in the heights of the mountains, landing at Miss Level’s makeshift candle-lit runway for her flying broomstick:

“Sorry about screaming and being sick,” Tiffany mumbled, tripping over one of the jars and knocking the candle out. She tried to make out anything in the dark, but her head was spinning. “Did you light these candles, Miss Level?”
“Yes. Let’s get inside, it’s getting chilly—” Miss Level began.
“Oh, by magic,” said Tiffany, still dizzy.
“Well, it can be done by magic, yes,” said Miss Level. “But I prefer matches, which are of course a lot less effort and quite magical in themselves, when you come to think about it.” She untied the suitcase from the stick and said: “Here we are, then! I do hope you’ll like it here!”
There was that cheerfulness again. Even when she felt sick and dizzy, and quite interested in knowing where the privy was as soon as possible, Tiffany still had ears that worked and a mind that, however much she tried, wouldn’t stop thinking. And it thought: That cheerfulness has got cracks around the edges. Something isn’t right here…

I also admired this passage, as Tiffany settles into the cottage: capturing the feeling of a child sent to an unfamiliar place, an elderly relative’s perhaps, old enough to understand why it’s necessary for them to go but young enough to feel suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed with the unfamiliarity of it all:

Her bedroom was a… nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room…jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany’s room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls’ house, and some old calico curtains, and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in.

The room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany’s suitcase filled one drawer easily.

…

At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr. Block, the farm’s carpenter, had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept…keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)

There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep’s wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points.

She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn’t make the place look more homey. They just looked lonely.

Tiffany is a smart child, but she’s still a child.

Another fine thing in A Hat Full of Sky, and a sign that Pratchett was still operating at the height of his powers, is Tiffany’s view of the other witches. We know that the rural parts of the Discworld are full of them, but our viewpoint thus far has been largely confined to the coven in the Witches arc, led by the indominatable Granny Weatherwax; A Hat Full of Sky is the first time we really closely get to see two others, Miss Tick and Miss Level, and it’s interesting to realise that many witches could charitably be described as being merely competent, in the same way that many of the rank-and-file officers of Sam Vimes’ City Watch are basically adequate but not up to scratch with the man himself – a comparison with policing which Pratchett in fact makes:

She’d come to witching later than most, being naturally qualified by reason of the two bodies, but she’d never been very happy about magic. In truth, most witches could get through their whole lives without having to do serious, undeniable magic (making shambles and curse nets and dream catchers didn’t really count, being rather more like arts and crafts, and most of the rest of it was practical medicine, common sense, and the ability to look stern in a pointy hat). But being a witch and wearing the big black hat was like being a policeman. People saw the uniform, not you. When the mad axeman was running down the street, you weren’t allowed to back away, muttering, “Could you find someone else? Actually, I mostly just do, you know, stray dogs and road safety. . . .” You were there, you had the hat, you did the job. That was a basic rule of witchery: It’s up to you.

Yet it’s also interesting to view Granny Weatherwax through the eyes of a peer (and Tiffany, while young, is undoubtedly her peer), because we’ve only ever seen this before through the eyes of Magrat (tinted with frustration and resentment) or Nanny Ogg (tinted with friendship and a general ebullience). Pratchett repeats a line a couple of times in Monstrous Regiment in which the protagonist Polly is reminded that other people are always looking back at you: that while you’re watching them and forming your opinion, they’re assessing you, too. This is not actually true of all people, as I’m sure Pratchett would agree, but it’s true of smart people. Tiffany and Granny are two very smart people, and while Tiffany is obviously the junior partner, being measured and appraised and judged by Granny, she’s also watching back:

“Perhaps you’ll call again sometimes,” she said, turning slowly and watching the cloak curve in the air. “It’s always very quiet here.”
“I should like that,” said Tiffany. “Shall I tell the bees before I come, so you can get the tea ready?”
For a moment Granny Weatherwax glared, and then the lines faded into a wry grin.
“Clever,” she said.
What’s inside you? Tiffany thought. Who are you really, in there? Did you want me to take your hat? You pretend to be the big bad wicked witch, and you’re not. You test people all the time, test, test, test, but you really want them to be clever enough to beat you. Because it must be hard, being the best. You’re not allowed to stop. You can only be beaten, and you’re too proud ever to lose. Pride! You’ve turned it into terrible strength, but it eats away at you. Are you afraid to laugh in case you hear an early cackle?

There is nothing new about this; Pratchett has always been clear about Granny’s flaws as a person, even though she’s (demonstrably and repeatedly) a hero. But it’s interesting to see her from Tiffany’s viewpoint, especially since while Granny is aware of her own flaws, Tiffany isn’t yet mature enough to be aware of hers; yet you can see here a creeping awareness of what Polly in Monstrous Regiment knew, and which Granny Weatherwax would too, which is that while everybody is always watching and judging, that is – like anything else – just an opinion, and that opinion need not unsteady you. You can just shrug and get on with things. That’s what witches have to do.

Next up is Going Postal.

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett (2003) 352 p.
Discworld #31

I previously referred to Monstrous Regiment as a “late-in-the-game throwback to the series’ earlier days,” not because it’s madcap or silly or wildly creative, but for one very simple reason: it doesn’t take place in Ankh-Morpork or feature Ankh-Morpork-based characters travelling somewhere new. (At least not the main characters – Vimes sticks his nose in here and I would’ve preferred that he hadn’t.) It therefore reminds me of Pyramids or Small Gods, and indeed I think it’s the last book in the series that doesn’t slot into a larger arc.

But it’s not a throwback in any other sense. It’s one of Pratchett’s most political novels, coming perfectly on the heels of Night Watch, following young Polly Tonks in the backwards, North-Korea-esque nation of Borogravia, a mountainous backwater most well-known for its restrictive religion and warlike nature. Polly’s brother Paul (well-written as being autistic without ever using that word) has gone off to war and is missing in action; determined to find him, Polly cuts her hair, puts on a pair of breeches and signs up to the army herself in the hopes of finding him and bringing him home. After we get the measure of the other rag-tag and all obviously underage recruits whom she signs up alongside, it’s pretty clear the Borogravian army is on its last legs; it also becomes clear to Polly very early on in the novel that pretty much all of the other young lads are, like her, actually young lasses in disguise.

Monstrous Regiment was released in 2003, and when I read it as a fourteen-year-old boy I undoubtedly would’ve been thinking of the 1998 Disney film Mulan – not a film I’d ever actually seen, but one which had been popular and well-known enough that I would have assumed this was the basis of the trope. But of course Mulan was based on an old Chinese folk tale, and the notion of women joining the military by disguising themselves as a man dates back to antiquity in cultures all over the world. Many fans today view Monstrous Regiment as a trans story; I’m sure there’s a countering view that this was not what Pratchett intended and that he was merely referencing these old stories.

But the funny thing is that a change in our social mores doesn’t just change how we interpret old stories: it changes how we interpret the historical record, too, and many of these stories about women dressing up as men to join the army were true stories. In the same way that we now realise that the famous homosexual romps of the British Navy or British boarding schools weren’t (or at least weren’t entirely) just a case of thoroughly heterosexual lads falling back on what was available, it’s difficult not to look back at historical cross-dressers without thinking: oh… of course. This was recently and explicitly done well in Lev Grossman’s excellent Arthurian novel The Bright Sword, which I read but didn’t review earlier this year. Grossman creates several original Knights of the Round Table, and one of them, named Dinadan, has a backstory which reveals that he began life as a woman, but – through a bargain with the fairy folk – was trained in swordsmanship and escaped his miserable lot in life to ride out into the world identifying as a man and seeking a knighthood of Camelot. There are those who might say (and I will note I would strongly disagree with them even if Grossman didn’t write this so skilfully) this is a case of the author inserting a minority character into his fantasy novel as a sop to the zeitgeist; but instead it feels like a perfectly appropriate recognition of the fact that trans people have always existed, even if only a few of them were bold enough to transition by whatever means they could find.

I don’t think Pratchett is explicitly writing a trans text here – unlike Grossman’s Dinadan, Polly never expresses any unhappiness with being female, only with the fact that being female consigns her to being a second-class citizen – but it can absolutely be interpreted as one. In my review of Feet of Clay I wrote this:

Most interesting of all is the introduction of Cheery, a new dwarf officer who – although all dwarfs outwardly present as men (a trope of the fantasy genre dating back to Tolkien) – is in fact a woman, and now that she’s in the big cosmopolitan city feels she’s entitled to act like one. When Pratchett wrote Feet of Clay in the mid ‘90s this was doubtless intended and interpreted as a metaphor for closeted gay people; in 2018, it much more obviously lends itself to the analogy of trans people. I can’t quite recall whether I picked up on the satire at all as a young teenager, but of course I would have understood that the broader point, and the reason it can be applied to both the gay and trans rights movements, is universal: the desire of people to express their disapproved-of-but-harmless true selves in defiance of their own conservative culture, and the liberating atmosphere of a big city in which they’re finally afforded the freedom to do that.

I believe that holds here. I can entirely see why this is such a popular one of Pratchett’s novels in the trans community, even as I’m not sure any of the characters could reasonably be described as being trans, per se. But it’s undeniably a novel about the ludicrousness of sexism, of the gender binary, of the fact that all people should fundamentally be free to do whatever they please as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else.

The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.

In the same way that Cheery’s subplot in Feet of Clay can be embraced as a trans storyline even if Pratchett didn’t originally write it as such, Monstrous Regiment can be embraced as a trans novel even if that wasn’t his direct intention. They’re both novels about breaking free of the gender roles society has forced upon you by an accident of birth, and if he was ahead of the curve on where society was at with regards to its trans citizens – certainly, as it transpires in 2025, where Britain was at with regards to its trans citizens – then that only goes to show what a universal message it is. One which, unfortunately, is still very much necessary.

Next up is the second Tiffany Aching book, Wintersmith.

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (2003) 352 p.
Discworld #30 (Tiffany Aching #1)

Like The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, this is a book which was described at the time as “a story of Discworld” and wasn’t included in the main numbering sequence, because Pratchett’s publisher wanted to promote it as YA. It’s the first of a series of YA Discworld novels featuring the young girl Tiffany Aching, who goes on to become a witch, and I believe as time went by the YA classification was dropped and they were published as general Discworld novels and retroactively added to the main sequence.

None of this really matters, except as a piece of trivia about the publishing industry and the fact that it means these books aren’t technically part of the my Discworld Re-Read, since I’ve never read them. Why that is I’m not sure. I read and enjoyed The Amazing Maurice at the time, so I wasn’t averse to reading what the publisher considered YA. (As noted in my review of that book, I don’t really see the difference aside from a child protagonist and slightly shorter length.) It’s possibly because the Wee Free Men themselves, whom we first met in Carpe Jugulum, I found (and still find) irritating more than amusing, and therefore didn’t read the first Aching book and thus didn’t read the rest.

So, yes, the Wee Free Men unsurprisingly features these rambunctious little “pictsies,” who show up around the same time that young Tiffany Aching encounters a strange monster down by the river and a witch named Miss Tick who has a talking toad as a familiar. Incidentally here’s a little throwaway line which tickled me just right:

“Can I operate the spring now?” said the toad.
“Yes,” said Miss Tick, her eyes still on Tiffany. “You can operate the spring.”
“I like operating the spring,” said the toad, crawling around to the back of the hat.

The first half of The Wee Free Men is rather slow-paced, revolving around Tiffany trying to find her brother (kidnapped by the fairies) and enlisting the help of the pictsies to do so, with lots of cartoonish slapstick pictsie nonsense. It’s the sort of stuff that has never really appealed to me in Pratchett’s writing, though I may be in the minority on that.

The second half, however, was really enjoyable, as Tiffany, the toad and Pictsies venture through a gateway into the world of the fairies. This is where The Wee Free Men becomes a classic magical adventure story of the type Pratchett can write really, really well, which are noticeable in the Death/Witches arcs but which he strayed away from later in the series in favour of the (equally compelling but noticeably different) Watch/industrial revolution arcs, which are much more grounded and political. Tiffany’s expedition into the illusory world of the “Queen” (similar to but probably not precisely the same “Queen” of the fairies in Lords and Ladies) is a page-turning adventure mixing horror with fantasy. The Queen’s fairy world is one of dreams, harvested from all over the real world and operating on the same sort of Alice in Wonderland illogic that we find in dreams, as we see when Tiffany comes across a clearing in a field full of people watching a man crack nuts with a sledgehammer:

There were lords and ladies, people in fine clothes and even a few shepherds. But some of them had a pieced-together look. They looked, in fact, like a picture book back in her bedroom.

It was made of thick card, worn raggedy-edged by generations of Aching children. Each page showed a character, and each was cut into four strips that could be turned over independently. The point of the whole thing was that a bored child could turn over parts of the pages and change the way the characters were dressed. You could end up with a soldier’s head on a baker’s chest wearing a maid’s dress and a farmer’s big boots.

Tiffany had never been bored enough. She considered that even things that spend their whole lives hanging from the underside of branches would never be bored enough to spend more than five seconds with that book.

The people around her looked either as though they’d been taken from that book, or had dressed for a fancy-dress party in the dark. One of two of them nodded to her as she passed, but didn’t seem surprised to see her.

And like a real dream, the sense of bizarreness overlays the lurking possibility that it might become a nightmare at any moment, the ludicrous turned terrifying:

Tiffany didn’t wait to see what else was going to happen. She grabbed her brother again, and ran away, down through the grass, past the strange figures looking round at the sound of the Queen’s anger.

Now shadows moved in the shadowless grasses. Some of the people—the joke people, the ones that looked like a flaps-on-the-pages picture book—changed shape and started to move after Tiffany and her screaming brother.

There’s also, of course, the general good stuff we used to get from the Witches arc about belief and justice and fairness, and indeed Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg show up near the end of the book, giving a strong indication that Tiffany’s story will become intertwined with theirs. As I said, I’m not sure why I skipped over this arc when I was younger, but I’m quite glad I have another four unread Discworld novels to check out now.

Next up is Monstrous Regiment, which I remember also being something of a late-in-the-game throwback to the series’ earlier days.

Rereading Discworld Index