Powerful Novels: Night Watch

So, ages and ages ago, I read The Colour of Magic, or part of it, I don’t remember. I thought it was clever-ish and mildly funny and I didn’t touch anything else by Terry Pratchett for a long, long time.

Then I picked up a paper copy of Night Watch at a book sale (or something, I don’t remember exactly where the copy came from, but I wasn’t going out of my way to buy anything by Pratchett). Well, let me tell you, Night Watch is not clever-ish and mildly funny. That is not remotely a sensible take on this book, which comes, as I’m sure you all know, fairly late in the Vimes series.

Let me see, it’s

Guards! Guards! — which is not that great in my opinion, but is worth reading in order to get into the Vimes series. Oh, I see this one was written back in 1989 — twenty-two years earlier than the last of the Vimes series. This is the one in which Vimes pulls himself together and becomes can-do character we all love later.

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

I think that’s it for the actual Sam Vimes series, though of course Vimes appears as a minor character in quite a few others.

Also, of course, Pratchett was writing a lot of other books in there as well, and at some point as his skill and wit sharpened and grew more pointed, he quit writing fantasy novels and started writing social satire disguised as fantasy novels, and then the disguise got thinner as the satire got more brilliant, and Night Watch is somewhere near the top. It’s still my personal favorite, though I will grant, I haven’t actually read all of Pratchett’s books. But Sam Vimes is my favorite character. Yes, I like Death a lot too, and Reaper Man is another favorite of mine and would have done just as well for this post. Who will care for the corn if not for the reaper?

Also, Going Postal and Making Money are both brilliant, and I’m re-reading them now, in fact, because writing this post made me want to reread a lot of Pratchett’s books. Although I like the protagonist in those books, I must say, Vetinari is the one I REALLY love. You see, I believe in freedom, Mr. Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will, of course, protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based. ….The thing about angels, Mr. Lipwig, is you only ever get one.

But back, with some difficulty, to Night Watch.

There’s lots to like about it, including a glimpse of Vetinari both as a young assassin just starting out and as the Patrician at the height of his power. I do love Vetinari. I honesty don’t know how often I’ve read some fantasy novel or other and thought, “You know, if Vetinari were in charge, this so-called intractable problem would be solved by tomorrow. Morning. Early.”

In my earlier post about powerful fiction, I said that power comes from the confidence of the author, the author’s belief that they are saying something true and something that is worth saying.  In another recent post, I pointed to lines in the Tuyo novels that have picked up a handful (sometimes a generous handful) of highlights and noted that most of these lines comprise some kind of advice. This, I will just note, means that readers think this advice is good advice – that it’s true. Which it is.

Terry Pratchett definitely has lines like this all over the place. My copy of Night Watch is paper, so I can’t check popular highlights, but here’s a line I would personally highlight:

“So what people do matters! What they do is important! The multiverse isn’t infinite and people’s choices are far more vital than they think!”

Throwing this into the story, with exclamation points, in the midst of other dialogue, doesn’t mean Pratchett is just tossing these lines into the story as a way of getting the plot lined up. He put that in because he thought it was true, and it is true, and it’s also important, and that’s why that conversation is important to the reader as well as to Vimes.

Here’s another, a comment in Vimes’ point of view, when he’s thinking about Swing — you may recall, Swing is the head of, basically, the secret police:

Vimes wasn’t against intellect. … Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn’t look around, and watch, and learn, and then say, “This is how people are, how do we deal with it?” No, he sat and thought “This is how people ought to be, how do we change them?”

And then Pratchett savagely takes apart this rather too common desire of the intellectual to change society by changing human nature, by explicitly identifying this desire and then handing it to an extra-creepy sociopathic torturer. It’s not a coincidence that Swing has that weird puppet-like way of moving and that even weirder way of putting pauses in strange places when speaking. Swing is maybe the single most overtly weird character in the whole series, which is saying a lot, but he’s right up there. He’s so weird he doesn’t seem quite human, and is that pure coincidence? No, it’s a way of amplifying just how completely antithetical Swing is to normal people and normal civilized behavior and normal ethics. And there he is, in charge of the secret police, which, wow, certainly shows Pratchett’s opinion of the people who appointed Swing and support him.

The story goes on and Vimes makes various crucial decisions and so do other people and we finally wind up back home, and, if you recall, Vimes visits those graves, with lilac blooming and sprigs of lilac here and there, and do you recall that Vetinari turns up? And for once does not completely understand exactly how to handle this encounter with Vimes. Here we get the most powerful passage in the novel:

“No,” said Vimes, coming to a halt under a lamp by the crypt entrance. “How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn’t have to do, and they died doing it, and you can’t give them anything! Do you understand? They fought for those who’d been abandoned, they fought for one another, and they were betrayed. Men like them always are. What good would a statue be? It’d just inspire new fools to believe they’re going to be heroes. Just let them be. Forever.”

Now, of course, I love real heroes and real heroism in fiction (and in real life), and I’m all in favor of encouraging young people to admire heroes because who else should they admire? There is that comment in the earlier post about whether truth in fiction always has to do with heroism, and no, probably not — EC pointed specifically to themes of choices and consequences, forgiveness, and redemption as other ways to bring power into a novel, not in the absence of heroism, necessarily, but without depending on the heroic arc to carry all the power. Nevertheless, heroism is certainly a common element in powerful fiction, because heroism is aspirational. That’s why I’m all in favor of underlining heroism in real life and in fiction both. But here we are, with Vimes passionately denouncing the idea of a statue.

Vimes himself is definitely, for sure, a hero. More than that, he does in fact do the job he has to do, in that time and in that place. I mean, that’s one big reason I love this novel and the biggest reason Vimes is my favorite of Pratchett’s protagonists. What we get in his passionate speech to Vetinari — a speech that Vetinari permits; he’s treating Vimes with kid gloves here — is, maybe, a denunciation of the betrayal of heroism. It’s definitely a paragraph that ought to make the reader pause and think about the whole concept of heroism. I think almost any reader would pause here. That’s not a scene anybody would rush through. It’s a scene that compels attention. That — making the reader pause, compelling attention, provoking thought — is all characteristic of powerful scenes and powerful writing.