The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 8: Guards! Guards!

For a lot of readers this is where the series suddenly becomes brilliant. It’s also a great jumping-on point for new readers because the world is quite well-established here and we aren’t presented with anything that requires a big load of exposition as to what has gone before. It’s also the longest novel in the series so far, with a lot of near-future volumes finding that this is a comfortable length to be as well, while some books much later in the series do achieve some almost epic proportions once Pratchett settled into what would become an incredibly productive pattern of writing for him.

But that’s a tale for another day…

What we have in Guards! Guards! is the story of the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork (ooh, look! There it is again, the eighth book in a row where we go to this magical city). Pratchett dedicates this novel to…

… the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they wanted to.

This book is dedicated to those fine men.

So this novel is written in the spirit of fleshing out the characters of those anonymous guards who inhabit any large city of a secondary world, whose purpose is to attempt to keep the streets safe.

It begins, though, with dragons, and a secret society dedicated to purging the once-great city of Ankh-Morpork of what ails it… in the eyes of the secret society, that is.

The Elucidated Brethren Of The Ebon Night, to give them their full name, are a collection of petty-minded individuals more concerned with what other have that they don’t than they are about genuinely civic matters. Guided skilfully by their Supreme Grand Master, they have managed to harness the powers of a dragon to enforce their desires on the city.

What they haven’t reckoned on, however, are the combined powers of the Night Watch: Captain Samuel Vimes, a shadow of the idealistic officer he used to be; Fred Colon, career sergeant and (very) stout upholder of the law; Corporal Nobby Nobbs, cowardly, criminal and corrupt but with a surprising private life; and their newest recruit, Lance-Constable Carrot, the tallest Dwarf on the Disc. and possessor of a curious-looking birthmark

It genuinely is Pratchett’s funniest, best written novel in the series thus far. It has a real plot, with clues and red herrings, an intriguing whodunnit as well as more than a touch of political thriller and morality play, just like all the best detective/procedural novels do.

We also get a little deeper into what makes Ankh-Morpork tick, with one of the supporting characters being Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of the city. We’ve met Vetinari several times before but this is the first book in which we discover the full extent of his reach and powers. He will become one of the more interesting characters in the series, having managed to tame the wildest, most powerful city on the Disc simply by reminding the most prominent and powerful citizens that he knows all about them and where their skeletons are buried and then letting them do what they want provided that they don’t get in the way of the smooth running of the city.

In this book he is usurped by the Elucidated Brethren but quite unobtrusively returns himself to the seat of power when the Watch have concluded their investigations.

The Watch books are one of the more popular subseries within the Discworld series. A couple of novels ago we got the introduction of the witches, led by Granny Weatherwax who were sufficiently popular that they would return in their own set of books shortly. The Watch were also a highly successful creation that very quickly begat their own sequels. But this is where they began. It’s clear that Pratchett himself was unsure of what to do in parts of this book, as is evidenced by the fact that the main character changes from Carrot in the opening quarter or so of the book to become Vimes for the remainder of it shortly afterwards. It’s a decision that he (and us) would never regret because Vimes is one of the great policemen in fiction: honest to a fault, doughty and diligent in the service of the Law and fiercely devoted to the people he cares about most. Carrot becomes an interesting character in his own right, but Vimes is where Pratchett is able to voice a lot of his anger about the human condition.

Guards! Guards! also continues the Discworld trend of taking an idea and squeezing it until it bursts in the service of comedy. There is hardly a detective cliché without a custard pie to its metaphorical face and each one makes perfect sense in the context of the story.

When it came out in paperback in 1991, I was 21. I’d read a few police procedurals (I was more familiar with them on screen at the time) so I was able to appreciate a lot more of the gags than if it had been published a couple of years prior to that. I wasn’t a huge fan of the genre, having nailed my colours to the mast of SF and Fantasy years before but I loved the mystery aspects of the story: watching a genuinely intriguing plot being worked out on the streets of what was becoming my favourite setting was further proof that you could tell any story on the Discworld. I’d really only consciously noted that Pratchett was telling a wide variety of stories using the Disc as a backdrop by the time I got to this novel, which made it different to a lot of other fantasy series that I was enjoying at the time which were content to tell the same story loads of different ways (it didn’t make them less entertaining, mind, just different – to my mind, the skill of an author is in their ability to keep people reading, not in the variety of their texts).

But what I only also noticed upon returning to the series after later volumes had been published was just how much of the wider Discworld characters and settings had been set up here. As I said, we get our first real use of the Patrician as a major character; the first appearance of C. M. O. T. Dibbler, purveyor of “sausages inna bun” amongst other things; and Lady Sybil Ramkin and the swamp dragons first show up here as well.

But it’s Ankh-Morpork that is the real standout here. It’s been a location in every novel so far but this is the first one that is set almost entirely within the walls of that city. We first encountered it all the way back in The Colour Of Magic where a large chunk of it was promptly burnt down, but it has been rebuilt since then, obviously, with a lot of the features from that novel having been demolished or removed from sight for some reason. The city displayed here is almost Dickensian in scope, with the fleshpots, smoky taverns and slavepits a distant memory. Part of that may have been down to the Patrician and his campaign of making Ankh-Morpork governable, but I think a large chunk of it was down to Pratchett not really caring too much about the geography of the Discworld too much at this point. Or it might be that quite a lot of time has passed since the first book and the city has put its past behind it. Rincewind (who doesn’t feature in this book but will occasionally appear throughout the remainder of the series) is our only real link with the past books, and we don’t know just how long he was trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions after the events of Sourcery (which is a spoiler for the next book in the series, I’m sorry), but that all gets kiboshed by the events of Interesting Times when…

… but no: I’m heading too far into Deep Nerd Space if I’m worrying about continuity like that. I’m also ignoring the history of Dragons on the Disc. We learned in The Colour Of Magic that the dragons ridden by the people of the Wyrmberg could only be summoned by those with an especially powerful imagination. Guards! guards! ignores that aspect of Discworld continuity and tells us that the dragons of the sort envisioned in that book are living in a cramped dimension far away – and very close at the same time – while the only dragons native to the disc are the highly explosive Swamp Dragons, which are tiny mockeries of the majestic beast summoned by the Elucidated Brethren.

My question is, which ones are the real dragons?

well… it would appear that all of them are, it seems. Parallel evolution is probably the reason, or it might just be something “quantum.”

Honestly, it doesn’t matter. The later books brush over the details and make it all fit vaguely together in some sort of continuity, and each book is such a joy that you really don’t care.

Guards! Guards!, though, is where Pratchett’s effort to stitch everything together really begins.

Coming Up Next: Rincewind returns from the Dungeon Dimensions and is forced to grant three wishes to Eric.