Review:
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Series: |
Discworld #15 |
Publisher: |
Harper |
Copyright: |
1993 |
Printing: |
November 2013 |
ISBN: |
0-06-223740-3 |
Format: |
Mass market |
Pages: |
420 |
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel and a direct plot
sequel to
Guards! Guards!. You could
start here without missing too much, but starting with
Guards!
Guards! would make more sense. And of course there are cameos (and one
major appearance) by other characters who are established in previous
books.
Carrot, the adopted dwarf who joined the watch in
Guards! Guards!,
has been promoted to corporal. He is now in charge of training new
recruits, a role that is more important because of the Night Watch's new
Patrician-ordered diversity initiative. The Watch must reflect the ethnic
makeup of the city. That means admitting a troll, a dwarf... and a woman?
Trolls and dwarfs hate each other because dwarfs mine precious things out
of rock and trolls are composed of precious things embedded in rocks, so
relations between the new recruits are tense. Captain Vimes is leaving
the Watch, and no one is sure who would or could replace him. (The reason
for this is a minor spoiler for
Guards! Guards!) A magical weapon
is stolen from the Assassin's Guild. And a string of murders begins,
murders that Vimes is forbidden by Lord Vetinari from investigating and
therefore clearly is going to investigate.
This is an odd moment at which to read this book.
The Night Watch are not precisely a police force, although they are moving
in that direction. Their role in Ankh-Morpork is made much stranger by
the guild system, in which the Thieves' Guild is responsible for theft and
for dealing with people who steal outside of the quota of the guild. But
Men at Arms is in part a story about ethics, about what it means to
be a police officer, and about what it looks like when someone is very
good at that job.
Since I live in the United States, that makes it hard to avoid reading
Men at Arms in the context of the current upheavals about police
racism, use of force, and lack of accountability.
Men at Arms can
indeed be read that way; community relations, diversity in the police
force, the merits of making two groups who hate each other work together,
and the allure of violence are all themes Pratchett is working with in
this novel. But they're from the perspective of a UK author writing in
1993 about a tiny city guard without any of the machinery of modern
police, so I kept seeing a point of clear similarity and then being
slightly wrong-footed by the details. It also felt odd to read a book
where the cops are the heroes, much in the style of a detective show.
This is in no way a problem with the book, and in a way it was helpful
perspective, but it was a strange reading experience.
Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed
one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be
in a street without breaking the law.
Vimes and Carrot are both excellent police officers, but in entirely
different ways. Vimes treats being a cop as a working-class job and is
inclined towards glumness and depression, but is doggedly persistent and
unable to leave a problem alone. His ethics are covered by a thick layer
of world-weary cynicism. Carrot is his polar opposite in personality:
bright, endlessly cheerful, effortlessly charismatic, and determined to
get along with everyone. On first appearance, this contrast makes Vimes
seem wise and Carrot seem a bit dim. That is exactly what Pratchett is
playing with and undermining in
Men at Arms.
Beneath Vimes's cynicism, he's nearly as idealistic as Carrot, even though
he arrives at his ideals through grim contrariness. Carrot, meanwhile, is
nowhere near as dim as he appears to be. He's certain about how he wants
to interact with others and is willing to stick with that approach no
matter how bad of an idea it may appear to be, but he's more self-aware
than he appears. He and Vimes are identical in the strength of their
internal self-definition. Vimes shows it through the persistent, grumpy
stubbornness of a man devoted to doing an often-unpleasant job, whereas
Carrot verbally steamrolls people by refusing to believe they won't do the
right thing.
Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as
simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple
meant the same thing as stupid.
There's a lot going on in this book apart from the profiles of two very
different models of cop. Alongside the mystery (which doubles as pointed
commentary on the corrupting influence of violence and personal weaponry),
there's a lot about dwarf/troll relations, a deeper look at the
Ankh-Morpork guilds (including a horribly creepy clown guild), another
look at how good Lord Vetinari is at running the city by anticipating how
other people will react, a sarcastic dog named Gaspode (originally seen in
Moving Pictures), and Pratchett's usual
collection of memorable lines. It is also the origin of the
now-rightfully-famous Vimes boots theory:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because
they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars.
But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or
two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about
ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and
wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in
Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man
who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be
keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could
only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in
the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic
unfairness.
Men at Arms regularly makes lists of the best Discworld novels, and
I can see why. At this point in the series, Pratchett has hit his stride.
The plots have gotten deeper and more complex without losing the funny
moments, movie and book references, and glorious turns of phrase. There
is also a lot of life philosophy and deep characterization when one pays
close attention to the characters.
He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on
strength, but attack weakness without mercy.
My one complaint is that I found it a bit overstuffed with both characters
and subplots, and as a result had a hard time following the details of the
plot. I found myself wanting a timeline of the murders or a better recap
from one of the characters. As always with Pratchett, the digressions are
wonderful, but they do occasionally come at the cost of plot clarity.
I'm not sure I recommend the present moment in the United States as the
best time to read this book, although perhaps there is no better time for
Carrot and Vimes to remind us what good cops look like. But regardless of
when one reads it, it's an excellent book, one of the best in the
Discworld series to this point.
Followed, in publication order, by
Soul Music. The next Watch book
is
Feet of Clay.
Rating: 8 out of 10