The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 15: Men At Arms

After their triumph in Guards! Guards!, Captain Samuel Vimes and his squad of watchmen are on the up and up. Lord Vetinari has charged Vimes with the task of recruiting more watchmen… but there’s a catch: Vetinari is insistent that they need to be representative of all the races resident in Ankh-Morpork.

So Vimes recruits Cuddy (a dwarf) and Detritus, a troll last seen in Moving Pictures. And, because women also live in Ankh-Morpork, he employs Angua, recently arrived in the city and the bearer of a dark secret…

But a murderer is also in Ankh-Morpork and he’s using a weapon that nobody has any experience of in the service of a conspiracy that only he knows about which will usher in a new golden age.

Oh, and Vimes is also getting married to Lady Sybil Ramkin!

Men At Arms is probably the most important book in the Watch series. Like Witches Abroad before it, it needed to prove that there was life in the idea of a continuing series of books about the same characters. Unlike Witches Abroad, which continued the eminent fantasy tradition of stealing stories from other places and placing them in a secondary world, the Watch books are telling different kinds of stories, ones that don’t normally translate to the fantasy setting.

Mysteries and magic don’t normally go together: in a universe where you can create a locked-room mystery just by teleporting out of a crime scene, it seems that solving crimes would happen only if the author put in some fairly strict rules about the world being used. And since the Discworld has existed for fourteen books prior to this, there’s a fair amount of expectation that goes with what is and isn’t possible.

So Pratchett, after having Vimes investigate a noir-ish murder mystery in his previous appearance, invents the rules for police procedurals set on the Disc. It makes sense: Vimes was largely working on his own in Guards! Guards! so he could get away with some breaches of the normal rule of law. Here, though, he has a larger force to work with, as well as a greater amount of scrutiny (largely from himself, but that’s another story), so he needs to follow some kind of policeman’s rules.

Which is a treat to read, especially if you know how procedurals work.

Let’s see…

Vimes has to go up against his immediate superior…

(check!)

There’s an event of great personal importance to him that could clash with his work on solving the case…

(check!)

He has to deal with some bureaucracy that he doesn’t quite see eye-to-eye with…

(check!)

He’s got some personal issues of his own that he is struggling with…

(check!)

There are some folks in town who don’t trust him or want him looking too closely at what they’re up to…

(check!)

He’s got to deal with some rookies in his force who aren’t all they seem…

(check!)

Pratchett has as much fun as we do launching the cliches and tropes of cop drama into the fantasy world and it’s probably the most successful attempt since Simon Green gave us the Hawk And Fisher novels.

As with most of the Discworld novels, this story works best when the comedy suddenly comes up against the drama of the situation. Pratchett isn’t afraid of milking a funny situation for all he can but he definitely doesn’t shy away from making us feel the impact of tragedy or criminal behaviour either. He’s also not afraid to critique society at large in this book, either: Men At Arms is probably most famous these days for giving us the ‘The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Injustice’:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This idea has spread way beyond readers of the Discworld novels and it has become a defining quote from Sir Terry. There’s a whole school of thought behind that quote and I’m not going to do it a disservice by poking through it further when it says what it needs to so well. It’s essentially a gem of truth hiding in a comic fantasy novel: being poor is expensive.

And there’s a lot of other ideas to take in with this one as well: the weapon discovered by our initial antagonist, Edward d’Eath, is one that has been previously unknown to the Disc but will be quite familiar to us. The way it is deployed will also be depressingly familiar to us. Pratchett shows more prescience here, as well, when he has the possessors of this weapon becoming slavishly enchanted to the will of the weapon and enthralled by how it can strike people down from a distance. This gives Men At Arms a relevance that has only increased over time.

But, thankfully, that’s not the only storyline of interest here. Lance-Constable Angua is paired with Corporal Carrot – who has attracted a lot of interest from d’Eath (and not just because he’s one of the few people who can pronounce his surname). She’s also chummed up with Gaspode, the talking dog we were introduced to in Moving Pictures, who immediately senses that Angua is more than she seems. The relationship that develops between Carrot and Angua is one that initially seems more on par with a rom-com than with a police procedural but the problems that Angua believes they will face promise to give fuel for future storylines as well…

We also spend a lot of time in the company of Acting-Constables Cuddy and Detritus who are paired together. Anybody who has watched a buddy cop movie knows what happens when you put two people diametrically opposed to each other in a situation where they have to work together, and this story is no different… mostly. The way that Cuddy and Detritus help each other out in a city where they would normally be at each other’s throats is quite heart-warming as well as… well, I don’t really want to add anymore because I don’t want to ruin anything for you if you aren’t familiar with this book, although I will most likely reveal what happens in the discussion of future volumes, so it’s a pretty hollow promise, frankly.

In order to avoid ruining a story that you may or may not have read, let’s move on to the part where I talk about the book rather than the story.

There’s a moment in the climax of this book where Corporal Carrot stands between Vimes and the villain of the piece and utters a phrase that has stayed with me ever since:

… personal isn’t the same as important.

It’s pithy and glib, and the kind of line that you’d expect from someone as selfless and self-aware as Carrot is, but it vibrates throughout the entirety of the novels dealing with the Watch… and the Witches. Because it’s not even original to Carrot, having been uttered by Granny Weatherwax in Lords And Ladies. But when both of those characters, who have each devoted their lives to the service of others, say something similar, it bears thinking about as a theme. The fact that it appears in two consecutive books makes it appear to be some kind of mission statement.

Personal isn’t the same as important.

Carrot stands to gain a lot from what d’Eath has uncovered. But it doesn’t matter to him because it would change the way that Ankh-Morpork is run, despite benefiting him personally. For one thing, he’d find out something about his ancestry, which has remained a mystery to him until now. He’s probably also aware of Vimes own ancestry (which we learn a bit more about in the next Watch book) which has a particular tie to what d’Eath suspects of his own.

However, Carrot realises that Ankh-Morpork in its current state works. It’s far from perfect, but opportunities exist for people who had previously been denied them, and it’s a great melting pot for all types of people to come and learn a little bit more about each other. I haven’t mentioned Ankh-Morpork as a character for a few books, but it’s worth pointing out here that we get a closer look at how the Patrician has changed the city here than almost anywhere else in the series thus far. We’ve previously viewed him as a tyrant with a will of iron, but in more recent books it’s been hinted at that he has a grand vision of what the city could be and become, and he is taking some fairly ruthless steps to make that happen.

Or, at least, what appear to be fairly ruthless steps…

At any rate, the idea of personal being subservient to importance also butts heads with one of the most persistent themes in procedural literature.

People taking things personally practically drives police and detective drama: the conflict between what the officer emotions and the officer’s duty is one of the most common plotlines in detective fiction. Every detective worth their salt has at times had their duty clash with their own personal ideas of “justice” and to see it enacted here only adds to the verisimilitude of the novel’s ideas.

However, Carrot almost transcends it. Vimes wants to and tries really hard to, and usually succeeds – so much so that a couple of villains in later books try to take advantage of it in order to make an escape or to put off having some sort of arse-kicking take place. Vimes is also aware of how contemptuously many inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork view the Watch so he takes immense pleasure when he – or one of his officers – manages to prove everyone wrong by showing honour and decency. In later books, we learn that Vimes is transforming the work and reputation of watchmen all across the Disc… and this is where it starts.

It’s good to know that fifteen books into the series, Sir Terry was still trying to think of ways to keep it fresh.

Coming Up Next: You mightn’t like Soul Music… but your kids will love it.