My first Terry Pratchett novel
YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE
The Book:
Night Watch
By Terry Pratchett
Harper
First published in 2002
The Talk:
Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams were English authors who wrote funny, popular satirical novels during the late 20th Century. Adams wrote mainly science fiction; Pratchett wrote mainly fantasy.
Their sense of humor is similar, a bonkers story delivered with a straight face. The laughs I had reading Pratchett’s Night Watch reminded me a lot of reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a bus in junior high.
Pratchett writes:
“Are you really like… policemen, for Time?” said Vimes.
“Well, in a way,” said Sweeper.
“So… you make sure the good stuff happens?”
“No, not the good stuff. The right stuff,” said Sweeper. “But frankly, these days, we have our work cut out for us making sure anything happens.”
But Adams and Pratchett also have their distinctive worldviews.
For Adams, comedy points to an existence that is absurd. The universe (and life and everything) is just one bizarre nonsensical event after another. And the attempt to make logical sense of it is ultimately pointless. It’s a generally cynical, nihilistic point of view:
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
For Pratchett, based only on my reading of Night Watch, there is a potential in humanity worth striving for. There are good guys with the odds stacked against them. And there are bad guys, too. The story is whimsical, cartoon-y, but also clearly meant to be enjoyed by adults. (The graphic novel Bone kept coming to mind.) It’s a fairy tale for grownups, and like most fairy tales, it’s trying to say something important about life.
Pratchett’s humanism
If I had to put a label on Pratchett’s philosophical point of view, I would call it “humanist,” in that the starting place is examining what humans are, then building ideals out from there. One of the villains of the book, named Swing, is the inverse of this view:
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?”
Swing’s ideals ultimately (inevitably?) lead to cruel ends.
The hero of the story is Sam Vimes, a policeman for the city of Ankh-Morpork, who is sent back in time via magic to the eve of a revolution. It’s a dark time to be on the side of “law and order,” when the government is corrupt and terrorizing the populace. And yet Vimes knows how the story ends, that things do get much better in the future. But now that he’s back in time he might alter the course of history, which means he has to figure out how to turn a morally dubious police force into a good one, a police force that includes a younger version of himself.
And if you were lucky and they were sensible, they found somewhere between impossible perfection and the pit, where they could be real coppers—slightly tarnished, because the job did that to you, but not rotten.
The goal is not perfection (the way of Swing) but a little bit better than before. Tarnished but not rotten. And that little bit has to be protected and nurtured and watched. The title Night Watch suggests this duty: The work of preserving the good of humanity during evil times is the night watch.
Useful stuff
To this end, Vimes exploits every perceived detail of the city:
And the rain gurgled in the downpipes and gushed from the gargoyles and swirled in the gutters and deadened all sound.
Useful stuff, rain.
Vimes must summon all his talents, his charisma, his experience, his intuitions, and his own potential for violence and rage (what he calls The Beast) to make something good that will last.
“In that case we just keep the peace, Snouty,” he said.
“Not a lot of that about, Sarge.”
“We’ll have to see what we can find. Come with me.”
The question that hangs over the story is: How do you get good men out of bad societies? And the answer is something like this: In a crooked world, it’s not enough to be good, you also have to be clever.
Related:
The Winter’s Tale and the myth of redemptive technology
Bernard Cooper says that “Now is a tenuous tightrope between history-future and history-past”. Can we be sure that anything is ever that linear? Everything seems far more circuitous. A series of arcs and spirals. Clumsy movements finding purchase. Every movement iteerative. Every step steadier than the prior one. Sometimes backward. Sometimes forward. Sometimes back again. But always, come hell or highwater, one way or another, always moving on...
"The goal is not perfection...but a little bit better than before. Tarnished but not rotten. And that little bit had to be protected and nurtured and watched."