Reading with Fanfan: Guards! Guards!

[terresdebrume]

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Terry Pratchett is one of those authors you just can’t avoid hearing about whenever you get into their genre. Sometimes, you spend years convinced they’re not for you and wishing people would just stop looking so horrified when you say you’ve never read them (and privately add that you’re not particularly interested in reading them beyond ‘well, since everyone loves it I might as well read it too’).

Then you fail to recognize a reference to said book and a friend sends it to you from Germany, and about a month later you’re ready to tackle Pratchett’s entire bibliography and personally apologize to everyone who talked about him and wasn’t met with proper enthusiasm.

So, alright, I’m not going to literally do that, but I will very much add Guards! Guards! On my list of books to put into the hands of as many people as I can possibly manage because it is, by and large, a very good book.

It’s entertaining, with a solid mystery plot and absolutely hilarious passages for one, and then there’s the characters, whom Pratchett manages to render utterly ridiculous, surprisingly noble, and deeply likable at the same time (granted, in various proportions).

I loved Carrot’s unyielding determination to do things by the rules—he’s the kind of characters where yo start out wanting to pat his head and ignore him and then you find yourself rooting for him the way Nobby somehow can’t help but follow Carrot into delicate situation. He is, to paraphrase the friend who sent me the book, everything the fandom says Steve Rogers should be. Carrot is a deeply noble character with a bone-deep sense of Justice and what’s right or not, and the ability to make you believe in it.

I loved Sybil Ramkin and her intense self-confidence, the kind I’d very much like to borrow in real life. I loved that she was a big woman in every sense of the words, who never takes no for an answer without even leaning towards being a bully. I loved that she didn’t give a fig what she looked like or what people thought of her crazy passion for dragons until she met this washed-out mess of a Guard Captain and saw worth in him that pretty much everyone refused to see. I loved that, even though she’s a secondary character, even though she’s described as a fearsome creature every stem of the way, it never felt like I was supposed to despise her. I loved everything about Sybil, let’s be very clear.

And then the one I loved most, was Vimes. Vimes, out of this giant mess that is Ankh-Morpork, is probably the person who needed Carrot the most (I think at some point, he probably tried to be Carrot, but didn’t have the fists, dwarven determination or adequate protections to make it work). Vimes is a huge cynic, but you can tell it’s mostly because he’s an idealist who got beaten out of it and somehow got convinced that failing to change the world around him meant he wasn’t worth much, if anything. And meeting Carrot does him a world of good.

There’s only so many ways of saying you loved some thing (which does kind of make it hard to review five-stars read beyond mindless keymashing) but I still do want to reiterate how much I loved it. I love fantasy as a genre, because it gives me heroes—it gives me people who want to and do everything in their power to do the right thing and help the people around them. Usually, as the men of the Night Watch put it, there’s a hero who comes in the nick of time and things kind of magically rearrange around that, and it’s an awesome escapist fantasy that I do love to enjoy it.

Pratchett’s fantasy, as far as I can tell through this one novel, is the kind that makes you feel like, if you remove the dragon, it could happen in your neighborhood—right there in the street next to yours.

And I love it.