This is part of the Pratchett Project.
The blurb:
Insurrection is in the air in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again.
Captain Sam Vimes of the city's ramshackle Night Watch is used to this. It's enough to drive a man to drink. Well, to drink more. But this time, something is different - the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they don't fully understand, and they're about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city.
Time for Captain Vimes to sober up.
The thing about writing a book about universal, timeless sorts of concepts is that you can come along and read it and write a review starting off with how prescient the writer is.
But, yeah, Pratchett nailed it. Ankh-Morpork is run by the Patrician, Vetinari. He's a dictator in that he wasn't voted into power and runs the city as he wants to (One Man, One Vote: he's the Man and he has the Vote), but he's not a despot. He's a practical dictator and the city does actually run pretty well under his rule — most people's lives run along in pretty orderly fashion. And still, when a mysterious, robed Brotherhood starts conjuring up dragons in order to have an Air to the Throne of the city come along and 'kill' it, people immediately start going nuts for a monarchy. The mysterious leader of the mysterious Brethren does have a little meditation on how easy it is to lead people into thinking how you want them to.
Then, when the dragon proved less tractable than anticipated, barbecues the new king and decided that it will rule Ankh-Morpork, the choice is suddenly between offering up the occasional genteel virgin as tribute to the new king (plus a lot of riches for the hoard), or facing certain death by dragonfire. The dragon, frankly, is horrified at how people react to this. As long as it's not their daughter...
You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."
...and...
"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no."
I mean, the whole arc of how the dragon arrives in Ankh-Morpork and how leopards it eats people's faces...it's absolutely applicable today.
But aside from that, Pratchett understands that it's hard to resist when doing so will cost you your life; even Vimes has a moment where his legs just won't work, even when someone else's life is at risk. It doesn't last long, but it happens. The difference is, Vimes bucks up anyway and does the right thing (a contrast to the start of the novel, when he's mourning the death of a Watch member who got a bit brave). When the chants of 'the people united can never be ignited' trail off in terror when they're actually confronted by the dragon, Pratchett understands.
This is also where Carrot Ironfoundersson arrives in the city. He's got a sword that was found with him as a baby, he's got a suspiciously crown-shaped birthmark, he's got a way of telling someone what to do that almost invariably results in that someone doing what Carrot thinks they should. He's got an amazing sense of right and wrong and a spectacularly inabiliity to recognise metaphor or nuance that I hope does get tempered a little bit in future books. Carrot does not become the king of Ankh-Morpork and doesn't seem (in this book at least) to even realise that some fairly anvil-link hints have been dropped that he might in fact be descended from kings. It'll be interesting to see where that goes in future books — I can't see Pratchett ever writing Carrot as a king, it just seems out of character.
Lots of funny asides and jokes over the top of some very serious contemplation of power and what people want it for, or do with it.
Started: 20 February 2025
Finished: 24 February 2025
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