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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’d had the luck to forget the plot of this book while still remembering the essence of the characters. Therefore it was like reading a new book in a series I adore. This one is still, I maintain, the best introduction to the Discworld universe.
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Oooook. Pero me gusta más la fantasía algo más seria :3
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
Find the full review on my blog: https://torsark.wordpress.com/2021/03/13/guards-guards/
Guards! Guards!, chronologically the eighth novel in the Discworld series, and the first novel in the City Watch character arc, introduces a fresh set of characters, fresh set of politics and philosophies distinctly missing from The Colour of Magic, and affixes the point of action firmly within Ankh-Morpork, our favourite, corrupt, bumbling city of banal evil and plain humanness. And also dragons.
Gone are the simple, humorous avarice and naivety of our former protagonists Rincewind and Twoflower. Instead, we now follow members of the City Watch, a beaten-down, watered-down, mocked government post that means nothing now. For you see, at the heart of the story is also the Patrician, who in any other novel of lower calibre, would bear every mark of being the ultimate antagonist our lovable rag-tag bunch of heroes would have to defeat to make it out alive on the last page of the novel. He wears dark clothes and conducts his business with pinpoint precision. All the makes of a memorable villain, surely.
“He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage.”
Here, instead, he is a sensible, albeit ruthless, man of business with a terrifyingly keen grip on human nature. He has recognized that the way to curb crime in the city is to not curb it, but rather to bureaucratize it. Make not thievery outlawed. Make ‘excessive’ thievery outlawed. And who would enforce this said threshold of thievery? Why, the Guild of Thieves, of course.
And in a city where the criminals themselves are responsible for adhering to crime ceilings, what need is a government office that was once erected with the intention of ‘stopping’ crime? So, Captain Sam Vimes, Sergeant Colon and Colonel Nobby exist at the beginning of the story in the same way members of an unwanted government office would: drunk, miserable in a half-cheerful, commonplace way, reeling from a loss of a colleague no one except them seem to mourn, etc. etc.
Captain Vimes in particular, our central protagonist, is a dark, cynical, pessimistic man ‘brung low by a woman’. He’s lying at the literal gutter at the beginning of the story, at the first hour of the night; lonely, bitter and heavily drunk.
“The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. That's what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils. Teeth. That's what it, she, did. She wasa ... thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch. And then you hated her and, and just when you thought you'd got her, it, out of your whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal, bal, bal, thing. Ance. Yeah. Thassit. Never knew where where you stood. Lay. Only one thing you were sure of, you couldn't let her go. Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gutters...”
Enter scene: the latest recruit into the Watch, Lance-Constable Carrot, a six feet tall Dwarf (he’s adopted shh) whose grasp on Ankh-Morpork’s many laws and regulations and his willingness to enforce them is commendable, though it runs the Watch into some . . . trouble. Though not too much trouble, because my man’s armed with a codpiece, a rusty sword, and did I mention that he’s six feet tall?
“People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
Thankfully, his grip on metaphors is less firm.
But trouble is brewing in Ankh-Morpork, of course . . .
“The Supreme Grand Master raised his arms. ‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘let us begin . . .’ It was so easy. All you had to do was channel that great septic reservoir of jealousy and cringing resentment that the Brothers had in such abundance, harness their dreadful mundane unpleasantness which had a force greater in its way than roaring evil, and then open your own mind . . . .”
Spurred partially by Carrot’s idealism, which is both endearing and plenty fodder of hilarity, and partially by the very real threat that the city of Ankh-Morpork is facing, Captain Vimes gets a wake-up call as he comes to a place where the city is no more *just* a thing that has brought him to his knees. It becomes HIS city. Accompanied by the Librarian who’s also an Orangutan (don’t mention the M-word to him), and Lady Sybil Ramkin (a noble lady who breeds swamp dragons in her rich, ancestral house), the Watch dives into action, and tries to defend a city that’s both shallow and pragmatic, flexible to any given philosophy that sounds attractive, including committing to a monarchy within a day despite there not never existing an instance of monarchy in their own living memories.
...
If it was not clear already, Guards! Guards! is a deeply political novel. Despite the footnotes, and the dry humour, and the absurdity of the characters, the story is a keen take on the banality of human evil, and how mundane resentments and daily inequities all lead up to a threat bigger than each actor themselves could ever fathom. Both the ‘minions’ of evil, and the larger residents of Ankh-Morpork are seen to be given to this through the course of the story, and even members of the Watch are often themselves susceptible to it.
It is interesting to see that despite the story ultimately being an improved, deconstructed tale of good-defeats-evil, however, the narrative never condemns these actors of badness simpliciter. Rather, there’s a sense of inevitability, or an admission on the narrative’s part that this is how it is. The nature of humanity and all.
“Yeah, well. Look at it this way: if you say to people, what's it to be, either your house burned down around you or some girl you've probably never met being eaten, well, they might get a bit thoughtful. Human nature, see.”
And the brilliance of the story stems from the fact that none of this is treated with a dead-eyed, edgy cynicism. Sir Terry Pratchett constructs his stories, his flawed characters, his antagonists, his cities, with a deep, deep love and admiration for humanity. He gives us a corrupt, shallow, sans-principles city in Ankh-Morpork, and yet he manages to drive home his point without condoning its people being burnt to the ground. Despite the system being broken, and rotten, there’s also joy to be found in it, joy and humanity and an odd familiarity with this world that we, the readers inhabit in.
Guards! Guards!, chronologically the eighth novel in the Discworld series, and the first novel in the City Watch character arc, introduces a fresh set of characters, fresh set of politics and philosophies distinctly missing from The Colour of Magic, and affixes the point of action firmly within Ankh-Morpork, our favourite, corrupt, bumbling city of banal evil and plain humanness. And also dragons.
Gone are the simple, humorous avarice and naivety of our former protagonists Rincewind and Twoflower. Instead, we now follow members of the City Watch, a beaten-down, watered-down, mocked government post that means nothing now. For you see, at the heart of the story is also the Patrician, who in any other novel of lower calibre, would bear every mark of being the ultimate antagonist our lovable rag-tag bunch of heroes would have to defeat to make it out alive on the last page of the novel. He wears dark clothes and conducts his business with pinpoint precision. All the makes of a memorable villain, surely.
“He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage.”
Here, instead, he is a sensible, albeit ruthless, man of business with a terrifyingly keen grip on human nature. He has recognized that the way to curb crime in the city is to not curb it, but rather to bureaucratize it. Make not thievery outlawed. Make ‘excessive’ thievery outlawed. And who would enforce this said threshold of thievery? Why, the Guild of Thieves, of course.
And in a city where the criminals themselves are responsible for adhering to crime ceilings, what need is a government office that was once erected with the intention of ‘stopping’ crime? So, Captain Sam Vimes, Sergeant Colon and Colonel Nobby exist at the beginning of the story in the same way members of an unwanted government office would: drunk, miserable in a half-cheerful, commonplace way, reeling from a loss of a colleague no one except them seem to mourn, etc. etc.
Captain Vimes in particular, our central protagonist, is a dark, cynical, pessimistic man ‘brung low by a woman’. He’s lying at the literal gutter at the beginning of the story, at the first hour of the night; lonely, bitter and heavily drunk.
“The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. That's what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils. Teeth. That's what it, she, did. She wasa ... thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch. And then you hated her and, and just when you thought you'd got her, it, out of your whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal, bal, bal, thing. Ance. Yeah. Thassit. Never knew where where you stood. Lay. Only one thing you were sure of, you couldn't let her go. Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gutters...”
Enter scene: the latest recruit into the Watch, Lance-Constable Carrot, a six feet tall Dwarf (he’s adopted shh) whose grasp on Ankh-Morpork’s many laws and regulations and his willingness to enforce them is commendable, though it runs the Watch into some . . . trouble. Though not too much trouble, because my man’s armed with a codpiece, a rusty sword, and did I mention that he’s six feet tall?
“People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, "Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
Thankfully, his grip on metaphors is less firm.
But trouble is brewing in Ankh-Morpork, of course . . .
“The Supreme Grand Master raised his arms. ‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘let us begin . . .’ It was so easy. All you had to do was channel that great septic reservoir of jealousy and cringing resentment that the Brothers had in such abundance, harness their dreadful mundane unpleasantness which had a force greater in its way than roaring evil, and then open your own mind . . . .”
Spurred partially by Carrot’s idealism, which is both endearing and plenty fodder of hilarity, and partially by the very real threat that the city of Ankh-Morpork is facing, Captain Vimes gets a wake-up call as he comes to a place where the city is no more *just* a thing that has brought him to his knees. It becomes HIS city. Accompanied by the Librarian who’s also an Orangutan (don’t mention the M-word to him), and Lady Sybil Ramkin (a noble lady who breeds swamp dragons in her rich, ancestral house), the Watch dives into action, and tries to defend a city that’s both shallow and pragmatic, flexible to any given philosophy that sounds attractive, including committing to a monarchy within a day despite there not never existing an instance of monarchy in their own living memories.
...
If it was not clear already, Guards! Guards! is a deeply political novel. Despite the footnotes, and the dry humour, and the absurdity of the characters, the story is a keen take on the banality of human evil, and how mundane resentments and daily inequities all lead up to a threat bigger than each actor themselves could ever fathom. Both the ‘minions’ of evil, and the larger residents of Ankh-Morpork are seen to be given to this through the course of the story, and even members of the Watch are often themselves susceptible to it.
It is interesting to see that despite the story ultimately being an improved, deconstructed tale of good-defeats-evil, however, the narrative never condemns these actors of badness simpliciter. Rather, there’s a sense of inevitability, or an admission on the narrative’s part that this is how it is. The nature of humanity and all.
“Yeah, well. Look at it this way: if you say to people, what's it to be, either your house burned down around you or some girl you've probably never met being eaten, well, they might get a bit thoughtful. Human nature, see.”
And the brilliance of the story stems from the fact that none of this is treated with a dead-eyed, edgy cynicism. Sir Terry Pratchett constructs his stories, his flawed characters, his antagonists, his cities, with a deep, deep love and admiration for humanity. He gives us a corrupt, shallow, sans-principles city in Ankh-Morpork, and yet he manages to drive home his point without condoning its people being burnt to the ground. Despite the system being broken, and rotten, there’s also joy to be found in it, joy and humanity and an odd familiarity with this world that we, the readers inhabit in.