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baileyvanclieaf 's review for:
Guards! Guards!
by Terry Pratchett
I’ll start this review out by saying this wasn’t my first Terry Pratchett (or Discworld) book, so I went into this knowing exactly what I was going to get and I was not disappointed.
Guards, Guards! follows the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork as they try their best (theoretically) to save the city from the threat of a dragon (probably - very few people have actually seen the dragon and none of them lived to tell the tale. There’s just been an alarming number of scorch marks on walls and piles of ashes sitting around lately).
For me, the highlight of the Discworld series has always been the worldbuilding. It’s wild and wacky and it absolutely requires some suspension of disbelief and hand waves in certain concepts, but it is all deeply unserious and in the spirit of comedy so I think it works well. In the Mort sub-series there is an emphasis on more high level worldbuilding, so it was nice here to see a zoom in on Ankh-Morpork and get more detail on the characters and groups that I’ve only seen mentioned in passing elsewhere. Of particular interest to me is the Patrician - the ruler of the city - who is very much the lesser of two evils. He rules through a combination of audacity and confusion tactics, and frankly…it’s kind of working. Also making an appearance is the Librarian - my favourite reoccurring character and a man who was magically transformed into an ape and some point in the indeterminate past and has just been rolling with it ever since. I feel he fits in nicely with the very patchwork feel of Ankh-Morpork, and he is also the reason for several absolutely hilarious lines including my personal favourite: “as an ape, he had absolutely no doubts whatsoever about his eyes and believed them all the time” (a cute twist on the unreliable narrator: the very reliable narrator).
The plot itself is relatively simple which leaves Pratchett a lot of room to play around with the details. He does a wonderful job in this book of turning traditional tropes on their heads and keeping the reader guessing. As a lifelong fantasy reader, I enjoy seeing a rehashing of a classic and I certainly wasn’t disappointed here.
There is also an exploration in Guards, Guards! of the idea of privilege (to varying degrees and with various amounts of seriousness - depending on what serves the plot best) that I found enjoyable.
Pratchett has a very unique writing style which I think fits well with the story he’s trying to tell here. Like his world building it comes across as being fun and lighthearted most of the time with the occasional thighslappingly funny quip or cutting remark thrown in here and there. I can say with certainty that there were at least 31 times in the book that I stopped and had a good laugh - as this is the number of annotations that I paused to make while reading (something I don’t normally spend a lot of time doing, but which I felt compelled to do for Guards, Guards! because I found it so darn fun).
My minor complaints about this book (which I am willing to forgive considering how much I enjoyed the story), was that character development frequently suffers to make a funny bit, and that Pratchett uses an unconventional chapter-less style of storytelling. The latter I am more inclined to forgive as there are frequent paragraph breaks that are natural stopping points, and because I do agree with many authors who write in this style that it does create a more natural flow. It does make it slightly more difficult to decide where to stop at the end of a reading session, but really the big problem with that is that I usually end up reading longer than I should.
Overall, the Discworld series continues to exceed my expectations and I fully plan to read them all at some point.
Guards, Guards! follows the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork as they try their best (theoretically) to save the city from the threat of a dragon (probably - very few people have actually seen the dragon and none of them lived to tell the tale. There’s just been an alarming number of scorch marks on walls and piles of ashes sitting around lately).
For me, the highlight of the Discworld series has always been the worldbuilding. It’s wild and wacky and it absolutely requires some suspension of disbelief and hand waves in certain concepts, but it is all deeply unserious and in the spirit of comedy so I think it works well. In the Mort sub-series there is an emphasis on more high level worldbuilding, so it was nice here to see a zoom in on Ankh-Morpork and get more detail on the characters and groups that I’ve only seen mentioned in passing elsewhere. Of particular interest to me is the Patrician - the ruler of the city - who is very much the lesser of two evils. He rules through a combination of audacity and confusion tactics, and frankly…it’s kind of working. Also making an appearance is the Librarian - my favourite reoccurring character and a man who was magically transformed into an ape and some point in the indeterminate past and has just been rolling with it ever since. I feel he fits in nicely with the very patchwork feel of Ankh-Morpork, and he is also the reason for several absolutely hilarious lines including my personal favourite: “as an ape, he had absolutely no doubts whatsoever about his eyes and believed them all the time” (a cute twist on the unreliable narrator: the very reliable narrator).
The plot itself is relatively simple which leaves Pratchett a lot of room to play around with the details. He does a wonderful job in this book of turning traditional tropes on their heads and keeping the reader guessing. As a lifelong fantasy reader, I enjoy seeing a rehashing of a classic and I certainly wasn’t disappointed here.
There is also an exploration in Guards, Guards! of the idea of privilege (to varying degrees and with various amounts of seriousness - depending on what serves the plot best) that I found enjoyable.
Pratchett has a very unique writing style which I think fits well with the story he’s trying to tell here. Like his world building it comes across as being fun and lighthearted most of the time with the occasional thighslappingly funny quip or cutting remark thrown in here and there. I can say with certainty that there were at least 31 times in the book that I stopped and had a good laugh - as this is the number of annotations that I paused to make while reading (something I don’t normally spend a lot of time doing, but which I felt compelled to do for Guards, Guards! because I found it so darn fun).
My minor complaints about this book (which I am willing to forgive considering how much I enjoyed the story), was that character development frequently suffers to make a funny bit, and that Pratchett uses an unconventional chapter-less style of storytelling. The latter I am more inclined to forgive as there are frequent paragraph breaks that are natural stopping points, and because I do agree with many authors who write in this style that it does create a more natural flow. It does make it slightly more difficult to decide where to stop at the end of a reading session, but really the big problem with that is that I usually end up reading longer than I should.
Overall, the Discworld series continues to exceed my expectations and I fully plan to read them all at some point.