Guards! Guards! by: Terry Pratchett

A redemption story is one that can always draw in a large audience as its one of those story types that lends itself well to sympathetic characters.  The down on their luck protagonist always has to overcome some sort of problem of their own making and bring glory to their surroundings, returning them to a point where they can live their lives.  Guards! Guards! at its heart is a redemption story about returning the Ankh-Morpork City Watch to its original purpose as men of the law protecting the city from near do wells.  Terry Pratchett’s redemption arc is created through a simple, yet effective plot about a power hungry brotherhood overthrowing Patrician Vetinari and unleashing a dragon on the city.  Dragons, at least the big, fire-breathing, burn down the village, dragons, the draco nobilis, have not been seen on the Discworld in eons, being cast into another dimension by a book that our villains steal under the nose of the Librarian of the Unseen University so they can instate a puppet king by slaying the dragon.  It’s up to the Watch to bring the villains to justice and reinstate Vetinari at all costs.  The plot is constructed simply as to keep everything moving at a brisk pace and the 400 pages of the novel devote a large amount of the book to fleshing out our characters.

The City Watch is led by the rather drunk Captain Samuel Vimes, introduced in a bar, drunk, and unable to remember his own name.  Vimes has this cynical attitude about him throughout the book, attributed to the fact that he was born two drinks too sober, and unable to find any enjoyment out of life.  It’s because of his mismanagement and the fact that Ankh-Morpork has organized crime that the Watch has fallen apart after all of these years.  Yet, with his laziness and cynicism, Vimes still doesn’t want to see the city fall apart and is ready to go to almost any lengths to save the city.  He even gets a love interest in the form of Lady Sybil Ramkin, a breeder of swamp dragons, aristocrat, and all around swell woman.  Ramkin’s role in the novel, apart from the understated romance, is to be the motivator to the Watch.  She is responsible for giving them a new headquarters when it burns down because of the dragon and is the one who gives them the confidence to fight back against the dragon, and as Ramkin and Vimes fall in love, the solution to the novel is the dragon mascot of the Watch (Errol) and the dragon king fall in love.

The behavior of the dragons in the novel is reflective of dragons of classic literature, especially Beowulf and The Hobbit, with a nature of hoarding for gold and wisher of virgin sacrifice.  They like to burn things down and have short fuses overall.  Yet the dragon’s reappearance leads to some great gags from Pratchett involving people selling merchandise as the city burns.  Our protagonist of the novel is Carrot, a volunteer to the Watch.  Carrot was raised by dwarves and identifies as one, in spite of his six foot, six inch height, causing him to have a strong sense of justice and a literal mind.  Tell him to throw the book at someone, he will do just that.  His adoptive parents volunteered him for the Watch and he immediately gets in trouble for arresting the head of the Thieves Guild.  He’s read all the laws of Ankh-Morpork and that thick book is what guides him through his everyday life.  He’s the one who initially teaches the Watch what it means to be in the Watch.  There are also a couple of supporting characters in the novel who all have their own little quirks and things.  There are more members of the Watch who all have their own problems: they steal things off murder victims.  There are also plenty of normal citizens, especially merchants which Pratchett uses to help give the story some sense of a life.  There really isn’t all that much more to say about the novel except that it is the first of the works of Terry Pratchett that are worth a 10/10.