The Night Watch in the City of Ankh-Morpork
has been run down to skeletal proportions - Captain Vimes, Sergeant Colon, and
Corporal ‘Nobby’ Nobbs – mainly due to the eminently sensible arrangement
between the city leader ‘the Patrician’ and the Guild of Thieves whereby only
licenced crime is permitted, within an agreed budget, with the Guild itself
responsible for ensuring that “unauthorised crime was met with the full force
of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in”.
For those unfamiliar with Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’,
it is a revolving disc that moves through space supported by four giant
elephants standing on the back of Great A’Tuin the Sky Turtle. Other than that,
it holds an only slightly distorted mirror to our own world, with technology
replaced by wizardry.
For example, secret societies with arcane
rituals abound, including the Supreme Lodge of the Elucidated Brethren, whose
Grand Master has a cunning plan to overthrow the Patrician and install a puppet
king. Not on Captain Vimes’ watch!
The plot thicken to the consistency of the
city’s pestilent river, seasoned by characters ranging from the eccentric
dragon-breeder Lady Sybil Ramkin, through Carrot the naive new night watch
recruit (who was taken in as a baby by dwarves but at six foot plus is proving
a bit of a vertically challenged liability in the family gold mining business),
to the unfortunate librarian of the Unseen University (home of the wizards)
who, since a spell backfired has been trapped in the body of an orang-utan (yet
continues unhindered in his post).
What happens is mayhem, and is largely irrelevant
as it is in the telling of the tale that the book’s strength lies. The language
is expansive and witty, with the footnotes alone worth the reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment