Novel review: Terry Pratchett - Night Watch (2002)

I recently got back into the Discworld saga, more precisely the City Watch cycle I had thorougly enjoyed during my first foray. This time with the second most acclaimed entry of said series, the relatively recent Night Watch (#29 in the series).

And I loved it almost as much as the original Guards! Guards! even if it has a very different tone, more serious and less whimsical in that "Monty Python satirizing LotR" fashion I had been accustomed to. It basically rewrote Vimes to lean hard into his obvious Dirty Harry model and the associated grittiness. The result is something I'd half-expect Glen Cook to deliver in his Garrett P.I. series, to be honest!

Since Cook wrote my favourite fiction yet, this explains why I was smitten with Night Watch… but I still understand and somewhat agree with said complaints about tone and how everything Vimes plans and does works too much like clockwork.

But despite all the bad (not much) you can find, there's a lot of unusual good. Mainly that this sudden fit of seriousness allowed for a deeper, much more human hero: Vimes is expertly written, his sincere despair at the situation, his raging dilemma between trying not to disturb the past (in order to get his future back) and his nature exhorting him to act as Vimes would is classical in its poignancy. Add Carcer as the perfect nemesis in such a dysfunctional Ankh-Morpork and you're reaching gold!

And what would a Discworld novel without tasteful pop references be? I think I at least recognized the aforementioned Dirty Harry (especially the discarded badge at the end), Terminator (time travelers don't get to keep their clothes) and Braveheart (Reg's freedom rant), but there are probably countless others. See the annotated file for better rambling, really.