Guards! Guards!

[fajrdrako]

Today I finished listening to Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, while doing exercises. Then I listened to a good part of it again, while cooking. Then I listened to it as an audio-play, thanks to a tip by filkferengi.

Loved it - Pratchett just gets better and better as I continue. I hadn't read any of the City Guard books before, but I knew from friends that Vimes was worth reading about.

Observations:

1. It made me cry several times, but the best time was near the end, when Carrot was writing home to his mother, and said, "I think this is like happiness."
   
   
2. Loved the scene where Vimes faces the attacking mob with Errol: "Do you feel lucky?"
   
   
3. I was sure either Carrot or Vimes was the real heir of the kings.
   
   
4. Loved the Patrician and the Librarian. How is it that Pratchett's best characters are the most ruthless ones?
   
   
5. On the other hand, I loved Lady Sybil too, and she wasn't ruthless. She was sweet. I used to know a woman just like her. (Only without the dragons.)
   
   
6. I thought there was something weird about the scenes with the Dragon who became King. It wasn't till I got to the end, I realized it was because Pratchett was avoiding using a pronoun in reference to the King. I think. Don't have the written text to check.
   
   
7. I loved it whenever Vimes said, "Not in my city."
   
   
8. The story, and the character of Vimes, is exactly what I most love in a story: the down-and-outer who becomes heroic, but who never considers himself a hero. The sense of team- and family-building is a good part of it, too. (Other examples: Captain Jack Harkness, Francis Crawford, Sydney Carton. In a skewed sort of way, the Doctor fits the pattern, too.)
   
   
9. But the best thing, the very best thing of all, was a bit of word-play that encapsulated the whole plot and theme. When we first meet drunken Vimes, he's thinking, "The city is a woman." When we get to the end of the story, he looks at Lady Sybil and thinks, "This woman is a city." Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, bringing it all to a sort of inverted full circle, thematically and emotionally for Vimes.

Eager now for the next book. Bring 'em on.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

after some of the most heavy-handed foreshadowing I've ever heard

LOL. And here I've been watching Bleak House where it seems to me that you'd have to be deaf and blind not to guess right off who Esther's mother was.

On the other hand, Dickens probably wanted it that way. (And I remembered that from the book, anyway.)