![]() ![]() If Pratchett turned around and said that all these characters were only facets of a single ‘hero with a thousand faces’, ‘eternal champion’ archetype, it would be perfectly believable. This isn’t so noticeable reading them in isolation, but when you go through a stack of them, it’s hard to read about Rincewind, Eskarina, Mort, the Fool, Pteppic, Victor and all the others and not join the dots. Pratchett has an unfortunate, though comforting, tendency to make all his viewpoint characters fundamentally the same. The first innovation Pratchett makes here concerns his central character. ![]() ![]() But more than that… it’s actually a pretty good book. Guards! Guards! feels like a landmark in the Discworld series, the first book that really throws us into the living city of Ankh-Morpork (every previous book had at least a cameo appearance from the city, but this is the first one to be set there for the whole book), and in the process the first book to introduce us to those most essential of Ankh-Morpork citizens, the Night Watch (and, of course, in passing to C.M.O.T. Which frankly I regret a little, since I’d have liked to read this in its own place. I read this one a little out of sequence because I couldn’t find my copy (it turned out to be almost exactly where it should have been – it’s sometimes easier to find things when they’re in the wrong building than when they’re four inches to the left of where you expect them to be…). Part of my ongoing project to re-read (or in a few cases read for the first time) the entire Discworld series. ![]()
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