Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the most ludicrous and one of the most brilliant stories I have ever read. I honestly do not remember the last occasion I laughed out loud this often while reading a book. Be warned. This has a lot of quotes from Guards! Guards! So, continue reading at the risk of getting irrevocably hooked to the world of Terry Pratchett.
The story is set in the great mythical city of Ankh-Morpork! They are a lovely folk, the people of Ankh-Morpork, and they love pizzas!
‘The people of Ankh-Morpork had a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to entertainment, and while they were looking forward to seeing a dragon slain, they'd be happy to settle instead for seeing someone being baked alive in his own armour.’
‘That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.’
‘We always beat ourselves before we even start. Give any Ankh-Morpork man a big stick and he’ll end up clubbing himself to death.’
‘That’s the Ankh-Morpork way. If you can’t beat it or corrupt it, you pretend it was your idea in the first place.’
‘Great days for the law, they were. In 1321, a small cloud was prosecuted for covering the climax of Frenzied Earl Hargath’s investitute ceremony.’
They also have pizzas. Did I tell you that?
A short synopsis of the story.
A plan is being hatched by a secret organization (who conduct the most hilarious conspiracy meetings ever!) to overthrow the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and replace him with a King. In order to do that, they need to summon a dragon using magic (after all, magic is only waving your arms and chanting, when all’s said and done). They summon a dragon because everyone knows that the true King will always be the man who saves the City by slaying a dragon. (Sidebar: Dany should pay a visit to Ankh-Morpork with Drogon sometime. It would be a nice change from Mereen.)
At the same time Carrot Ironfoundersson, who is too tall to be dwarf (being human and all), is sent by his adopted dwarf parents to Ankh-Morpork to join the Night Watch, who are led by the cynical Captain Vimes.
‘Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.’
‘If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.’
He’s a charming fellow and as Sergeant Colon would say, ‘he (Vimes) wouldn’t have known what to do either, but he’s got a much better vocabulary to be baffled in.’
SergeantSargent Colon is another memorable character. He owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and he worked all night. They communicated only by means of notes. They had three grown-up children, all born, possibly as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.
My personal favourite in the Night Watch is the new recruit Carrot, a strapping 6’4’’ human brought up by dwarves. He has a crush on a dwarf called Minty. (Interesting titbit about dwarves: In the Discworld, all dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.) He has memorized the book ‘Laws and Ordinances of the Cities Ankh and Morpork’ and is fond of arresting dangerous people/creatures and reading them their rights.
‘He (Carrot) walked with a stoop. What will do that is being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarves who thought that five feet was a good height for a ceiling.’
‘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."'
The city is ruled by the Lord Vetinari, the Patrician who has several interesting principles that he strictly adheres to.
‘When the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.’
‘I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.’
‘The plain fact was that the thieves were far better at controlling crime than Watch had ever been. After all, the Watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the Guild (of Thieves) had to do was to work less.’
‘Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.’
Coming back to the ‘story’, after the dragon is unleashed, it crowns itself the king, the Patrician is imprisoned in his own dungeons, virgins are selected for sacrifice, and everything that glitters is brought to the dragon for, you know, making a nice comfy bed for it to sleep on. Given the plight of Ankh-Morpork, our draco nobilis doesn’t get as good a bed as Smaug (The Hobbit).
The Night Watch are the only ones who dare oppose the dragon. The City Watch side with the dragon, but don’t present much of a problem. More guards were hurrying up, but with that special kind of run that guards had. It was the run that said, there’s a dozen of us, let someone else get there first.
However, the Night Watch is aided in the hunt for the dragon by the Librarian and the Lady Sybil Ramkin. Er, I forgot to mention this. The librarian happens to be a monkeyan ape whose entire vocabulary includes ‘Oook’ (Yes) and ‘Eeek’ (No). He is better than me in charades though. I can never bring myself to act anything beyond Oook and Eeek.
Their other benefactor, Lady Ramkin is a rich lady who breeds the smaller, cuter and less dangerous swamp dragons. (I am guessing they are as big as Drogon was in Season 2, you know, when we all wanted to have him as a pet. I wouldn’t mind them being similar to Charmander as well.) Vimes and Sybil get along quite ‘well’. So, he gets to take a swamp dragon (with a malfunctioning digestive system, of course) as a pet.
The remainder of the book hilariously narrates how the Night Watch tries to dethrone the dragon from its golden horde. Traditionally, in all the movies, the heroes/heroines always get to have a last-ditch ‘million-to-one’ shot that invariably works, right? Of course, the heroines/heroes have to whisper random things like ‘I know you can do it’ and ‘I believe you’ over the phone. But, a last ditch effort always works as long it is a one in a million chance. So, our members of the Night Watch do their best to worsen the odds from ‘thousand-to-one’ to ‘million-to-one’ in the funniest ways imaginable.
The entire book is littered with countless witty dialogues and drips with satire. It makes a lot of jabs at governments. It borrows heavily from traditional mythology and fantasy writings and turns everything upside down. Nothing is ever the same here in the Discworld. After all, this is a disc-like world that is borne through space on the back of four giant elephants that stand on the back of a huge turtle.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld was heavily recommended to me and it did not disappoint one single bit. It was sheer delight reading this inventively mad, wild and wonderful book. As Anne McCaffrey quite succinctly put it, Guards! Guards! is logically illogical as only Terry Pratchett can write!
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