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Clean Straw For Nothing by George Johnston (1968) 303 p.
My Brother Jack is one of the great Australian novels, a semi-autobiographical account of writer George Johnston’s childhood and early adulthood, clearly drawn from the contours of his own life but still unmistakeably a novel. It’s a disappointment that the sequel, Clean Straw For Nothing, is far more bluntly inspired by his real life – usually to its self-indulgent detriment.
In the years following World War II Johnston and his second wife Charmain Clift moved from Australia to London and then to the Greek island of Hydra, living there for years among a flourishing bohemian community of expats – and so, of course, does My Brother Jack’s David Meredith, though it’s now very difficult to think of him as David Meredith and not as George Johnston. (This isn’t helped by the fact that the book jumps back and forth between London in the ‘50s, Greece in the early ‘60s and Sydney in the late ‘60s, and back and forth between first person and third person.) Jack himself is never once mentioned – he may well be dead for all Johnston cares – and the gulf between My Brother Jack and Clean Straw For Nothing is so vast that when a despondent Meredith/Johnston wanders down the banks of the Thames to gaze out at the Discovery, and recalls seeing her in Port Philip Bay back when he was a cub reporter in the Melbourne of the 1930s, it’s a shock to remember this is even the same person. There are sometimes streaks of the same theme that made My Brother Jack so interesting – namely, the sense of being Australian, of not belonging, of the cultural cringe and the reactionary patriotic shame at feeling the cultural cringe – but these are largely subsumed by the torrid psychodrama of Meredith/Johnston’s relationship with his adulterous wife.
It is of course possible I read something that was not intended in My Brother Jack. I thought Meredith’s cultural cringe was countered, in Johnston’s eyes, by Jack’s unashamed and unabashed straightforward, working class, patriotic she’ll-be-right contentedness at his place in the world; that it made Meredith aware of and ashamed by his own pretentiousness. Perhaps I was wrong, and this was not the intended reading, but at any rate with the character of Jack entirely removed there is no longer any implicit rebuke to Meredith/Johnston’s contempt for the country of his birth. Note, however, that in all the years he spends on Hydra, there is one (1) named Greek character, with whom Meredith/Johnston shares perhaps a couple of pages of dialogue at the tail end of the book. Meredith/Johnston’s search in Europe for something more meaningful than Australia’s self-interested material prosperity never seems to extend beyond his circle of heavy-drinking bohemian expats, but – unlike My Brother Jack – there is little if any sense the author is aware of this hypocrisy.
Clean Straw For Nothing is not a bad book, per se – Johnston retains his excellent prose style and it’s a pleasure to read on a technical level. But while My Brother Jack was a perfectly-crafted novel with an overarching theme, Clean Straw For Nothing is an awkward and disjointed exercise which wanders all over Johnston’s thoughts and has only the lightest coat of paint to cover up the fact that it’s a plain memoir – one which, to boot, covers a far less interesting period of his life than its predecessor.
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!
Grub Street