Guards! Guards!

So, I was thinking about what to use this for and decided to use this as a repository for reviews of stuff I read, so I don't have to clutter my LJ and can link easily to them from my reading/gaming/etc. communities. So, where to start? With a new book I got for Christmas and read over the long weekend:

Title: Guards! Guards!
Author: Terry Pratchett
Set: Discworld
My take: Snappy writing, a fun look at some typical tropes and with engaging ideas, but hindered by a flat plot and characters who were more caricature than substance

Spoiler-free synopsis: In Ankh-Morpork, crime is regulated, life is unpredictable and the night watch is free of anything like responsibility or requirement. Enter Carrot, a very tall dwarf (he was adopted) who brings a sense of staid duty and a mistaken impression about what would be required of him when he joined up with the night watch to learn about humans.

As he's settling in (and unsettling residents) a completely unrelated group is in the middle of using a stolen book to summon a creature that the city hasn't seen for hundreds of year - and which, once it arrives, will change everything.



"Guards! Guards!" was published in 1989, at a time when there wasn't as much deconstruction of the fantasy genre as there is now. As a result, the style holds up well, but some of the jokes feel overworked and tired to me. However, I do have to give a nod to it - this series did it first and did it really, really well.

Some of the writing is really amusing, though sometimes I wasn't sure how amused to be - for instance, when something is described as having eyes the size of very large eyes.... well, that's either really clever or just sort of useless, and I wasn't quite able to work out how I felt about it.

Overall, it was worth the read, as there are some great lines and a few really incredible ideas, and the book itself is fairly quick to read (a short 350-pager, as 350-page books go) but I would advise going in looking to enjoy it for style rather than substance.

Spoilery review: I had huge hopes for this after the first chunk of pages (why am I describing it like that? I'll get to that in a minute) where we are introduced to most of the central characters - the drunk Captain Vimes, the dragons, the librarian in the library, the dark brotherhood of indeterminate goal and so on. They were just enough of a twist on the classic tropes to be interesting, and I was really looking forward to how it was going to come together.

As it turned out, the answer was "slowly."

First, this is a very hard book to walk away from and come back to because it has no chapters. that meant the format suggested no natural breaking points, and as a result it felt like a chore to come back to the book, scan the pages and try to figure out where I left off. A small thing, to be sure, but when your layout is making you readers work... I just don't know that it's a very good plan. On the other side, it was perhaps appropriate.

The story has a number of different groups coming together, but a lot of the time they don't seem to be doing much of anything. The night watch, in fact, makes a point out of doing nothing, and one of the big changes through the story is them going from people whose philosophy is "don't get involved" to halfway competent guards working together to try to lay low a huge dragon destroying the city. That would have been really interesting, except that I never personally got invested in any of the three regular guards.

Vimes was a little easier to follow because he did a lot of things seperate from the watch and had a lot of the book following him. Carrot was easy to follow because he was just philisophically so different from the others. but the rest of the night watch sort of melted into a group. I knew there were three of them, and one was rotund but somewhat athletic, and one liked kicking people in the nuts and one was an archer and one dressed outrageously and one danced, but I couldn't begin to say with any certainty which of those applied to which guard. they were jsut sort of a nebulous amalgum, sort of like the Gilligan's Island theme's "and the rest."

So, they were discounted, and despite being a fairly central character, Carrot actually got fairly little action. He was highly concerned with the letter of the law, making him a great foil for the law-twisted city and a great weapon for Vimes but very little of a character in his own right.

This left Vimes as our main character, but again characterization hit. He's meant to be the stereotypical guard captain I think - a decent enough guy sort of beaten down by life. the problem here, and the reason downtrodden guard captains executing their duty don't tend to be fantasy novel heroes because they're not really that engaging. The main way to make someone like him interesting is to make him a well-rounded and real character. But the problem is, this book was plying its trade with extremes, and to me, this attempt to have a regular guy in the middle of all these extremes made Vimes seem flat, sort of a hero by attrition.

I know this all makes it sound like I disliked the story. I really didn't. I read it over the course of two days - it was easy to read when I got into it. Pratchett has a way with words, a real quality of phrases that you read, then when you're another sentence down you realize that what you just read was TOTALLY not what you expected and you go back and reread it just for the sheer novelty of the wording.And it really did hit on a number of the big tropes associated with fantasy writing and put a twist on them. Often that twist went in a direction I was completely not expecting.

I very much liked their take on dragons, both on the big noble dragons and the little swamp dragons. Dragons were actually a huge part of the plot, as you could summarize the actual action as follows: Group summons dragon to use as a prop to put a new king on the thront. The dragon, unhappy at being used in that way, comes back of its own volition and takes the throne for itself, and it's up to the city night watch to try to turn it out. The dragons also bring in the love interest, a rather strong-willed lady called Lady Ramkin. she was completely my favorite part of the book, but was also a central deus ex xxxx which made her a bit disappointing from a reading/writing standpoint.

I think the biggest problem was this book was relying a lot on its ideas and its phrases, and while the phrases still hold up, a lot of the ideas have been worked over in a number of other places now. Having read the web comics "Adventurers", "RPG World" and "Order of the Stick" a number of the tropes they brought up were things I'd already heard before. As an example, they have a lengthy discussion about the one-in-a-million shot being a sure thing. An overused trope, to be sure, but I'd recently seen it sent up, and much more subtly, here.

Overall, it was worth the read and I'm looking forward to reading the second of the two books I was given, "Men at Arms" but I think part of that is I now know what I'm in for. As an experience, as a study in style, and especially taking into account when it was written, it's really remarkable and it holds up really well. It's just that at the same time, the story wasn't that engaging to someone like me, who reads for characters first and all else second.