Guards! Guards! | Terry Pratchett | A classic romantic comedy, and one of Pratchett's best

Guards! Guards! | Terry Pratchett | Dragons, Drunkards, and the Paths to Power

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Guards! Guards!

	Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett HarperTorch, 2001 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 78 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A classic romantic comedy, and one of Pratchett's best

This is a particularly enjoyable Discworld novel. I've read about 10 so far--started with a few at random, and then decided the only sensible thing was to start at the beginning and read them all in order. "Guards, Guards!" has some memorably funny bits (you'll never hear the phrase "It's a million-to-one chance, but it just might work!" quite the same again.) But more importantly, it has believable character development. Our initially disaffected band of watchmen rise to the occasion. Pratchett has created a lovable band of misfits, and in the end they each in their way get to help save the day.

One mark of good writing in the fantasy genre is that you want to go there. For me, this is the first Discworld novel that rises to that level. I'm waiting for Lady Ramkin to invite me over for tea. Perhaps I can help muck out a swamp dragon stall or two while I'm there.

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Dragons, Drunkards, and the Paths to Power

A foul and eldritch plot is afoot in Anhk-Morpork! A clever hidden hand is attempting a coup d'etat against the Patrician, manipulating disgruntled secret societies, stolen magic, and popular opinion to replace him with a figure head king who will front the hidden power behind the throne. The plotter summons a great dragon (long believed extinct) in an attempt to control it to create a panicked situation in the city where the sham king can ride in to save the day, and thus be swept into power by popular acclaim, replacing the discredited Patrician. Once loosed, however, the dragon demonstrates that it has its own agenda, and the situation rapidly spirals out of control. Scariest of all, only the beleaguered Captain Sam Vimes and the ranks of his pathetic, despised, and largely ineffectual Night Watch can save the city from its doom.
Thus begins another Discworld adventure, as Terry Pratchett once again uses his wickedly sharp wit and insight to skewer real world foibles and pretensions with the mirror of his fantasy world. This time around he targets the myriad ways in which public opinion and action is manipulated by those in power, those seeking power, and those resisting power. We grin as he shows us the plotter manipulating the petty jealousies of small men into the service of his cause, all the while making them feel that they are great men serving noble ends. We chuckle knowingly as we see the crowds of Anhk-Morpork easily swayed by staged events and spectacle, jumping herd-like onto the monarchy band wagon. And we fall apart in stitches as he shows us the absurdity of sloganeering resistance to real, ruthless power (chanting "The people united will never be ignited!" to a dragon). Along the way, he makes us smile as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler shows how certain commercial interest don't give a wit for who is in power so long as they can still make a buck, and Lady Ramkin illustrates the peculiar tendency of the aristocracy to immerse and lose themselves within a world they create out of odd hobbies and odder causes.
Pratchett is at his most insightful when creating the dynamic tension between Sam Vimes, Captain of the Watch, and the Patrician, ruler of the city. Vimes is a good man, who wants to make the world (or at least his city) a good place, but despairs at his lack of power to accomplish that goal, and is often driven to the bottle by that despair. The Patrician is a clever man who has gained power through shrewdly manipulating the world as he finds it, using a practical cynicism about the nature of how things are in order to make his city work rather than making it good. In `Guards! Guards!', Pratchett shows us how these two men sometimes need each other, illustrating the value of both attitudes and approaches, depending on the circumstances.
`Guards! Guards!' is among the best of Pratchett's Discworld series that I have yet read. The characters he creates or revisits here are outstandingly well done and memorable. Also, he begins to come into his matured voice here, as he shifts from the light lampooning he used in previous Discworld books into a fully fledged satirical style that may be the sharpest and funniest we have seen since Swift. If you have not yet been introduced to Pratchett's Discworld, this is a fine place to begin, and if you are already a fan, you must not miss this one!

Theo Logos

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My favorite Terry Pratchett book

This is IMHO one of the best of the Discworld series. Guards! Guards! is filled with all the wry humor that makes Mr. Pratchett so enjoyable to read, and has very real elements of basic human struggles (alcoholism, job respect and many other problems) that we or someone we know deal with everyday.

While reading this the characters are so real and yet so funny, you don't know whether to laugh at them or cry for them.

Terry Pratchett is one of the few authors that can make me laugh out loud. With this book, the laughter was non-stop.

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Full of funny, ironical and absurd situations

I was told that Terry Pratchet resembles in his style of writing Douglas Adams and that he is very funny too. So I decided to read one of his many books about the Diskworld. And it turned out that those rumors about people dying out of laughter while reading Pratchett are the mere truth. There were lots of funny, ironical and absurd situations that made me smile or laugh.

The story takes place in Diskworld main city of Ankh-Morpork. A guild is lead by a person who plans to summon and control dragon and later make him disappear so that his protege can take the throne pretending to have killed tha dragon. The City Watch should defend the city. However the Watch is obsolete because the Patrician Lord Vetinari has legalized guilds of criminals which in their turn are responsible to keep crimes in decent count. A young and sturdy lad named Carrot that still believes is a dwarf, volunteers and joins the Watch with enthusiasm to chase every criminal. Captian of the Watch is one of the main characters who in the face of the danger from the Dragon (who becomes king) decides to do all he can to save the city. The woman presence is in the face of Lady Ramkin (far away from beautiful woman, away even from woman) whose hobby are little swamp dragons, one of which eventually fights the evil Noble Dragon.

As a whole the story is very interesting and dinamyc. Characters are well developed, each with his unique characteristcs - from the very naive Carrot to the extremely witty Patrician Lord Vetinari. What surprised me pleasantly is that through the funny plot there are numerous lines that can be interpreted in serous ironical way. While reading a person could very often be able to make parallel to the real world and possibly get a moral for hismelf.

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Best so far...

I'm working my way through the discworld series and I definitely think this is the funniest so far. Pratchett is completely comfortable and I think it shows.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

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