The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 29: Night Watch

His Grace, Commander Samuel Vimes is pursuing Carcer, a cold-hearted killer. However, it’s also the eve of the birth of his first child and the 30^th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution Of The Twenty-Fifth of May, a people’s uprising that happened during a brief period of turmoil in the city of Ankh-Morpork’s recent past.

During the course of the pursuit, Vimes and Carcer wind up on the roof of the library of Unseen University, the pre-eminent college of magic on the Disc. There is a magical explosion, and Vimes wakes up next to Carcer on a street in Ankh-Morpork, and promptly gets arrested by someone he recognises as his younger self…

Honestly, if you had told younger me that Terry Pratchett had written a mash-up of The Terminator, Back To The Future and Les Miserables, I don’t think I would have believed you.

So here we go…

This is the 29^th novel in the series and the sixth featuring Vimes as a major character. Vimes is one of the best-established characters in the series at this point. He has risen from being a Captain of the Watch in Guards! Guards! to being a Commander, a husband, a Duke, a general, a diplomat… and is soon to be a father. He has risen about as far as a character in world that doesn’t have a lot of kings about the place can rise. In Night Watch, Pratchett does the only logical thing: throws him back in time and has him start again, except this time, all he’s armed with is his knowledge of what is going to happen.

His task is to make sure that it does…

He isn’t completely alone, of course: he has the occasional advice from Lu-Tze, the sweeper, who is also one of the time-travelling/bending History Monks. Lu-Tze is in town cleaning up after the events of Thief Of Time, a novel which is running concurrently with this book (the explosion at the end of that book sets this one in motion). He doesn’t quite take Vimes under his wing but he does push him in the direction that he is supposed to go.

This direction appears to be to take on the guise of Sergeant John Keel, a recent arrival to Ankh-Morpork, and a new addition to the Watch. Vimes remembers him as being someone who mentored him as a young man… or who would have, had he survived the chaos of those days… instead, he has flashes of memories of a man who showed him what the possibilities of his life could be. Unfortunately, Keel has been murdered and Vimes is forced to take on his role, up to and including being killed during the Revolution…

As is usual, I won’t say too much else about the plot at the risk of giving away spoilers that I will probably quite happily divulge when discussing a future book.

What I am going to discuss is just how absolutely brilliant this novel is, and how it deserves the title of “Probably The Best Discworld Novel Of Them All.”

But I want to talk about what I dislike about it first.

First up, it’s a prequel. I’m not a fan of prequels because they very rarely capture the magic of the original story that you may have loved. Most prequels struggle to do this because they are trying to make sure that the story being told doesn’t contradict what has been talked about before and it does sometimes lead to an author tying themselves in knots to make sure that nothing is contradicted.

Pratchett has no shits to give on that score.

The bulk of this novel predates The Colour Of Magic, the first book in the series. In that book, we were presented with slave markets, fleshpits and general lawlessness. We get some of that here, but it feels a lot closer to the setting of the more recent novels than to the wild and halcyon days of yore when Pratchett gave no thought to continuity.

(Also, we know it predates that first book because Pratchett insists that the Patrician we meet in that book is indeed Lord Vetinari, the instrument of Vimes’s future success. He’s a lot different to what we knew him as later, but he is apparently the same guy: here, in Night Watch, he is still a student at the School of Assassins. As I mentioned a couple of entries ago, this is another example of Pratchett tidying up the past so that it makes a more consistent whole)

This doesn’t feel like a prequel to the earlier novels: it feels like Vimes being stuck in a past he thought had long been wiped out because of the advances that had been engineered by the Patrician. In other words, we could be in Rincewind’s version of Ankh-Morpork but we are seeing it through Vimes’s eyes, rather like the way we saw Vimes in The Truth, through an outsider’s version of the story.

The second reason why I shouldn’t like this is that it is a giant crossover event that melds together a heap of stories, showing that these characters have known each other for longer than we would have thought. Nobby Nobbs turns up as a Gavroche substitute; C.M.O.T. Dibbler shows up with his mobile pie stall and receives his signature line from Vimes; Reg Shoe (post-life activist and member of Vimes’s Watch in the future) meets his demise here. It’s all just a little too neat that all these subsidiary characters happen to be around and have formative moments in the composition of their characters (or decomposition in the case of Reg) during the few days that Vimes is travelling back in time.

There is no third reason why I should dislike this book.

It is an absolute masterpiece.

As a novel it is superb. As a portrait of a man cut off from all he holds dear, it is magnificent. As a part of the Discworld series, it is possibly the highwater mark.

Part of what makes it so brilliant is the fact that it wears its influences on its sleeve so blatantly. Like all good parodies, the audience must pick up on what is happening without too much trouble. So, when Vimes and Carcer arrive back in time naked and with only their wits to guide them, we are instantly reminded of The Terminator. When Lu-Tze gives advice to Vimes on how to deal with being in the past and what not to do, we are of course reminded of Doc Brown in Back To The Future. And when Vimes takes over the role of John Keel during the Revolution and instructs the rebels on how to construct a better barricade, we are instantly thrown into the middle of Les Miserables (or, more pertinently, Past Tense, a  two-part story from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s third season, in which Commander Sisko must take the place of a significant revolutionary during an important moment in Earth’s history). But probably the clearest debt is the 1979 Nicholas Meyer film, Time After Time, in which H. G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) pursues Jack The Ripper (David Warner) to modern-day Los Angeles.

At any rate, a novel with so many antecedents must have something special in order to prove that it is so damned good on its own merits. Night Watch has it by virtue of being superbly written (it was recently accorded the honour of being the first Pratchett novel to be published as a Penguin Modern Classic, if you want some more evidence).

What is special about it is that we can spot all those influences, and mark down all those inconsistencies with the earlier novels, and just not give a damn about them because we are so invested in Vimes fulfilling his mission and getting home.

Night Watch marks the point in my own reading life when I stopped worrying about where stories came from and more about how they were told. I’d always admired originality in stories but I’d gradually been thinking about how there were only so many ways to tell a story across all of literature – this was about the time that I was embarking on what I laughingly refer to as my own literary career.  

I shouldn’t sneer: I wrote fairly compulsively across about twenty years with the end result that I was receiving a far nicer grade of rejection letters than when I started writing. But part of putting your own stories onto a blank page is worrying about whether what you’re producing is original. Night Watch went a long way to ensuring that I stopped worrying about my plots and focused more on being honest with my characters and where they found themselves.

My own writing gradually dried up (here’s a gratuitous link for what I have written) but that idea of honesty to other people and to my work – like what young Sam learned from his older self – never really went away. And like younger Sam, I sometimes lost sight of that aim, but it never really went away.

Coming up next: Tiffany Aching is on her way to Fairyland. All she has is a frying pan, a steely attitude and a small army of Wee Free Men…