#2: Men At Arms
Re-Reading Terry Pratchett #2
Although Terry Pratchett was best-known as a funny writer, he was always so much more. He enjoyed a good (and a bad) pun, and it’s an unusual person who can make it through one of his novels without laughing out loud. But even as a young teenager reading Discworld for the first time, I could sense that there was more to Terry Pratchett’s writing than playful exuberance. Beneath the fantasy trappings and the brilliant one-liners lay a profound sense of morality; one fuelled by a burning drive to expose not only the injustices of the world, but – more importantly – the darkness concealed within our own hearts.
Pratchett was also known for his ceaseless creativity, regularly producing two Discworld novels a year in his heyday. So it’s a little surprising that the basic plot of Men At Arms is so similar to Guards! Guards!. There’s no secretive Brethren and no dragon this time, but once again we find a socially-maladjusted conspirator – Edward d’Eath – unleashing a diabolical weapon on Ankh-Morpork in the hope of overthrowing the Patrician and restoring a king to the city’s moribund throne.
The first time I read Men At Arms, I loved it and barely noticed those similarities. I was just thrilled to return to the world of the City Watch and excited to meet the new recruits. I remember feeling stunned when Lord Vetinari – usually the man with all the answers – crumples to the ground after an assassination attempt; and I shed a quiet tear when one of the new watchmen is suddenly and brutally murdered. Discworld was becoming darker, and I was all the more transfixed because of it.
The Return of the Kaiser?
Men At Arms is an energetic read; you’re carried along by its pace, crackling dialogue, and dazzling wit. Roughly speaking, the plot goes like this: Edward d’Eath is a talented assassin who’s enraged that his noble family is broke, powerless and irrelevant. He blames this decline on the transformation of Ankh-Morpork into a modern, cosmopolitan city increasingly dominated by dwarfs, trolls, and other ‘lower classes’. In Edward’s romantically-unhinged mind, the only way to restore both the city’s greatness and his family’s honour is to unleash sufficient havoc that the Patrician is overthrown, the true king restored, and the nobility placed firmly back in the driving seat.
It’s a wild tale, but it’s more realistic than you might think. A German friend saw me reading the book and asked me what it was about; so, trying to keep things simple, I told him it was about anti-progressive conspirators plotting to restore the monarchy in a fantasy world. My friend isn’t a Fantasy reader, so I was surprised when his eyes lit up: ‘but that’s exactly what just happened in Germany!’ he exclaimed. It turns out there’s more than a few Edward d’Eaths alive and well today: just this year, a group of armed, immigrant-hating nutcases conspired to bring back the glory days of the German Empire.
Like Edward, this ‘Reichsbürger’ movement believed that only the return of the king could restore honour and greatness (and, of course, secure themselves a place in the future government). They even found a distant descendant of the old German Kaiser to figurehead their cause. Unfortunately for Edward, the true king of Ankh-Morpork is Corporal Carrot of the City Watch – a man dedicated to the city, but who won’t be so easily tempted by the promise of power as the self-important German real-estate investor whom the Reichsbürger leadership converted to their cause.
To set his plan in motion, Edward d’Eath steals a forbidden weapon from the vaults of the Assassins’ Guild (the Discworld’s first and only gun, or ‘gonne’ as the Olde Worlde spelling of the Disc has it) and then sets about killing people. The murders certainly stir up major civic unrest, but (and here’s where it gets confusing) it turns out that Edward is swiftly killed by the head of the Assassins’ Guild, Dr Cruces, who then takes over Edward’s mission. Dr Cruces doesn’t have a family name to restore, but he believes just as fervently that the city is going to the dogs and that the guilds and noble families need to retake control.1
Vimes and the Night Watch are forbidden from investigating the murders because Vimes constantly upsets the city’s rich and influential figures in his dogged pursuit of the truth. But, in the end, the Watch saves the day, Dr Cruces is killed, and the Patrician agrees to expand and develop the City Watch into a serious, well-equipped police force that will serve and protect all citizens, rather than bowing and scraping to the guilds and the gentry.
What makes the book such a joy to read is the brilliant character development, psychological depth, and razor-sharp social commentary. But there’s more to it than that, too. Bubbling beneath the surface is a fascinating story about the corruptive dangers of power, prejudice and rage, and a penetrating exploration of how difficult it can be to deal with change – social and personal – without losing our way or even losing our identity.
Sam Vimes’s Dark Night of the Soul
Let’s begin with my favourite character, Captain Sam Vimes. In Guards! Guards!, thanks to the kindness and encouragement of Carrot and Lady Sybil, we saw Vimes crawl out of the gutter and begin, tentatively, to put his life back together. Now, after decades lost to apathy and alcohol, Captain Vimes is set to become a new man. I’d forgotten how difficult this process would be. After the events of Guards! Guards!, I expected the canny and capable Sam Vimes I remember so fondly to show up for duty, fully-formed and ready to crack the case.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Vimes in Men At Arms is still standing at the crossroads of change. In a few days he plans to retire, get married, and leave his old life behind. As the clock ticks down, Vimes is increasingly undone: he’s the head of the Watch and there’s a murderer on the loose, but in this book he just gradually fades into the background while Corporal Carrot solves the case and saves the day. Because, for Vimes, this isn’t a story of case-cracking detective work; it’s a story of profound personal crisis.
The kind-hearted Sybil Ramkin (‘a woman out for all she could give’, as Pratchett puts it) hopes that introducing her fiancé to her high society friends will help this battered, ever-overlooked man begin a new life of comfort and significance.2 This doesn’t go well, and not only because Vimes struggles to stomach the ignorant, entitled attitudes of Ankh-Morpork’s elite. It’s not just that he struggles to imagine himself as part of society’s upper crust. This glimpse of his future provokes a painful, visceral reassessment of his past.
After the Patrician throws him off the case, Vimes drinks himself into a stupor and retreats to his old, shabby lodgings. When his fellow watchmen find him there, one day before his retirement, Vimes rants wildly:
I’m retiring from the Watch tomorrow. Twenty-five years on the streets […] and what good’s it all been? What good have I done? I’ve just worn out a lot of boots. There’s no place in Ankh-Morpork for policemen! Who cares what’s right and wrong? Assassins and thieves and trolls and dwarfs! Might as well have a bloody king and have done with it!3
He’s mixing everything together, all the sources of his uncertainty and insecurity; all the violence, hatred and lawlessness which disfigure his beloved Ankh-Morpork, stacked up against his own unfulfilled potential. This is a man whose world is falling apart.
It’s not that Vimes was happy in the gutter, but at least he understood it.
However broken and powerless the City Watch had become, Vimes at least knew what he was supposed to be; he had a role and a purpose, even if he seldom fulfilled either. As Sybil soon realises – more quickly than Vimes himself – without his watchman’s badge, Sam Vimes isn’t really Sam Vimes anymore.4 For him, confronting retirement is practically a near-death experience.
We’re all likely to face a crisis like this at some time in our lives, whether it’s a painful break-up that leaves us unsure of who we are without the other person, or, like Vimes, as a retiree struggling to get up in the morning without a job to go to. Looking back, I wish I’d been old enough to appreciate the warning when I first read this book – I might have been more cautious of entwining my sense of identity and self-worth with my work and career aspirations.
If he can’t bear to move on, shouldn’t Vimes go back to what he knows? He doesn’t have to hand in his badge and become a full-time toff just because he’s marrying Lady Sybil. But things aren’t quite that simple. Looking back on his life and career, Vimes is tormented by the feeling that he was never a decent copper anyway. The problem, he thinks, is that he’s always carried ‘a certain core of stubborn bloody-mindedness […] which upset important people, and anyone who upsets important people is automatically not a good copper’.5
He’s wrong, of course. He might upset influential people with his suspicious mind, cynical eye, and rejection of status games, but these are precisely the qualities that make him one of nature’s finest detectives. These are the traits which, in time, will garner him a Disc-wide reputation as utterly incorruptible, and why, soon enough, even the Patrician will come to depend on him.
But here and now, Ankh-Morpork is no place for honourable men who speak their minds.
It’s a city of vested interests and powerful guilds; the law doesn’t apply to the pompous peers at Lady Sybil’s soirée; it’s merely a cudgel to keep the lower classes in line. As he stands at the threshold of his new life, Vimes is paralysed by doubt: if he hates this corrupt system from down in the gutter, how can he justify climbing the social ladder?
But Vimes is lying to himself. His personal crisis isn’t simply about the crooked system or his troublemaker’s tongue. The real source of his pain is fear; the fear of actually giving a damn.
A few pages after his drunken, despairing rant, we find him reflecting that,
You couldn’t be a real copper in Ankh-Morpork and stay sane. You had to care. And caring in Ankh-Morpork was like opening a tin of meat in the middle of a piranha school.
In the course of those 25 hard, thankless years, Vimes allowed himself to stop caring. He withdrew from life and betrayed his deepest self, locking his conscience in a cell guarded by booze and excuses. But now, scant hours before retirement, ‘[t]he Vimes inside hammered on the walls’, demanding to risk tasting life again, in all of its bittersweet glory.6
Caring can be a risky business. When I first read Men At Arms, I thought of several schoolteachers who couldn’t stand my Vimesian aversion to authority and impulse to ask awkward questions and speak my mind. In their classes, I too gave up; why risk caring, why risk trying, if I’d only end up ignored or dismissed?7 But reading this now, troublingly close to 40 years old, I can see a bigger, more balanced picture emerging.
For all their differences, Sam Vimes and Edward d’Eath are standing at the same crossroads. Both of them are social misfits, unable to find their place in a harsh and changing world. But if Vimes chose to gradually deform his values and his character in an attempt to fit in, Edward decides that society must change to fit him.8 When I first read the book, half-drowning in a teenage cocktail of angst, hormones and identity confusion, I might have agreed with Edward. Why should I change myself to fit a system that didn’t seem to want or respect me?
Today, I can appreciate the sharp wisdom Pratchett shares when he first introduces Edward:
Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are … well … human beings.9
Edward, in short, is a Discworld incel, retreating ever deeper into fantasies of his own genius, avoiding rejection by rejecting society first. He may not have lived in his parents’ basement ceaselessly surfing the darker corners of the internet, but he’s the same kind of person who eventually snaps and takes his impotent rage out on society.
I’m very glad I didn’t follow Edward’s path.
Like most people, I needed the world and other people to knock off some of my rough edges. On the other hand, Vimes’s crisis warns us that sometimes this can likewise go too far: if we allow society to chip away and sand us down too much, eventually there’ll be nothing left of our own identity.
‘The Current Ethnic Problem’
Pratchett wrote six other Discworld novels between Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms, but as we return to the world of the City Watch, we learn that only a year has passed since Vimes and his comrades saved the city from a fire-breathing dragon. The Watch is still a ramshackle band of misfits, but change is clearly afoot. After their heroic efforts in Guards! Guards!, it seems the Patrician has decided that the Watch should become more than ‘a bunch of incompetents commanded by a drunkard’, and has ordered they begin taking on new recruits from ethnic minorities.10 On Discworld, this push for diversity means that the new recruits are a dwarf (Cuddy), a troll (Detritus) and a werewolf (Angua).
From this point on, the City Watch series gave Pratchett the perfect setting to explore the tensions and prejudices unleashed by Ankh-Morpork’s rapid transformation into a multi-ethnic city. While Edward d’Eath and the old nobility reject these changes on principle, the rest of the city has to live in reality, and the City Watch are often the ones who have to pick up the pieces.
In this book, though, the Watch itself struggles to handle the change. Dwarfs and trolls are historic enemies; it’s something so entrenched that disliking the other is practically a condition of their own identity. When Lance-Constables Cuddy and Detritus are paired up, it’s only a matter of seconds before bitchy comments and nasty stereotypes are strobing across the page. But, like any odd-couple, buddy-cop tale, they’re soon well on the way to becoming fast friends. It’s a little clichéd, perhaps, but Pratchett is so masterful at breathing fresh life into familiar stories that this relationship of evolving respect and mutual affection is one of the most realistic and emotionally compelling parts of the novel.
But Detritus and Cuddy are clearly the exception. Just as Edward and Cruces hoped, the murder of the dwarf Bjorn Hammerhock is instinctively blamed on the trolls, and not only by the angry dwarfs taking to the streets, axes in hand. As Vimes and the Night Watch are squeezed out of the picture, their counterparts in the Day Watch are more than happy to accept easy answers. The conventionally small-minded Captain Quirke hopes to put the matter to bed by arresting the first troll he can find because, after all: ‘He’s a troll. He’s guilty as hell of something. They all are’.11
If Guards! Guards! confronted us with the ubiquity of everyday acts of moral compromise, Men At Arms deftly but persistently shines a light on humanity’s weakness for petty prejudice. Captain Quirke’s attitude is brazen and cruel; we can all agree this man is a dangerous bigot. More interesting – and cumulatively disturbing – are the myriad subtle examples throughout the book which nag at us like a stone lodged in our shoe. Off-hand remarks and moments of casual disrespect take on additional weight as social unrest reaches boiling point.
It's Vimes’s struggle with prejudice that I found most interesting and nuanced. He still believes the City Watch should be men at arms, and he’s only agreed to the affirmative action hires because he’s retiring and won’t have to deal with the change.12 Nevertheless, when his fiancée introduces him over wine and nibbles to Ankh-Morpork high society, Vimes is soon incensed by their bigoted views on what they call ‘the current ethnic problem’.13 Sipping port and smoking cigars, these lords and ladies wax resentful on how uppity dwarfs and trolls are ruining the city. They’re lazy parasites (but, very suspiciously, also work hard all night, when ‘real people should be getting some sleep’); the dwarfs in particular are clearly incapable of rational thought (but are also, somehow, alarmingly cunning).14
Disgusted as he is, when Vimes is pulled aside by Lady Sybil, she points out, quite reasonably, that Vimes himself often makes ‘rude’ remarks about dwarfs and trolls. Flustered, Vimes replies, ‘That’s different. I’ve got a right’, because he actually knows dwarfs and trolls and encounters them every day.15 His prejudice, he reasons, is based on actual experience, which he thinks counts for a lot more than prejudice formed in an ivory tower. Troubled by his own hypocrisy, Vimes tries to find some kind of moral high ground, musing to himself that, well, he might not like dwarfs and trolls very much, but, in the end, he doesn’t like anyone very much… so isn’t that kind of fair?16
I remember the sense of confusion I felt when I first read this book. Coming home from school, where we were told over and again that ‘racism is bad’ and ‘bad people are racist’, it was disconcerting to open Men at Arms and find myself confronted with a more complex reality. I was genuinely perplexed: how could Sam Vimes be a racist and a character I deeply admired? And why wasn’t Terry Pratchett making it clear how I should make sense of this?
At the time, like Vimes, I shoved my confusion in a mental box and moved on. But now, two decades later, I can more fully appreciate Pratchett’s refusal to provide easy answers and simple characters. What distinguishes the heroes from the villains in his stories isn’t that one bunch are simply ‘good’ and the other outright ‘evil’; both are at times conflicted, closed-minded and confused. The difference is how they change when confronted with new realities. Detritus and Cuddy become close friends as they work to solve the case and watch each other’s backs; Carrot abandons his fear of the undead when he realises that the woman he’s fallen in love with, Angua, is a werewolf.
Vimes takes longer, and in the successive City Watch books, we see him gradually – if grumpily – expand the limits of his tolerance outwards until the Watch is the most diverse workplace in the city. That doesn’t mean he abandons all prejudice; powerful stereotypes don’t vanish overnight just because he works daily with dwarfs, trolls, vampires and zombies. Once again, it’s Vimes’s struggle to be a good man which makes him feel so alive and so real to me.
After all, I’ve never met a single person in real life who carries no prejudices, preconceptions, or politically incorrect ideas. Looking back, I’m glad I had Terry Pratchett’s fantasy world to give me a more accurate picture of reality than I got at school. I’d rather be confused by new experiences and challenged by different people than told to expect the world to be something it’s not.
This is pretty deep stuff to discover wrapped up inside an often very silly comic fantasy. And that’s what made Pratchett so great. If capital-L Literature is fiction which tries to teach us something, and pulp fiction is stories which hope to distract and entertain, then Terry Pratchett sits somewhere in the Goldilocks zone between the two. In many ways, the madcap adventures of the Discworld series are folklore for modern times: crazy, fantastical stories which smuggle in some deeper – often challenging – truths just below the surface.
Power & Rage
Whereas Guards! Guards! explored the dangers of silent complicity – of not standing up to the abuse of power, of saving yourself and looking the other way while bad things happen to other people – Men At Arms considers the other, equally dangerous, side of the coin. What if you were granted power; what if you suddenly had the agency to right the wrongs that you see in the world?
Power is incredibly seductive – an idea Pratchett brings to life through the spirit which seems to inhabit the rifle-like gonne. Whoever lays hands on the device – the most powerful weapon on the Disc – immediately hears a voice in their head, tempting and urging them to use its destructive authority.
Pratchett was too smart to turn this into a crude analogy for gun violence in our own world. He understood that what really matters is our tendency to be overcome and morally diminished by the tools of power.
Re-reading Men At Arms, I was shocked to see how narrowly Vimes escapes the same fate. Only Carrot’s intervention prevents him from beginning his own bloody rampage. If we can write off the murders Edward and Cruces commit as merely bad men doing bad things, we can’t do the same for Vimes.
The voice of the gonne whispers words into his mind that shake him to his core: ‘All that you hate, all that is wrong – I can put it right’. It doesn’t tempt him with the promise of personal power; it knows that in order to seduce a fundamentally good man, it must use the language of righteousness. It tells him to ‘Shoot them all’, but it promises that doing so will mean Vimes can finally ‘Clean up the world’.17
The voice knows how to hit him where he’s vulnerable because the gonne isn’t some magical trinket. The alluring words each man hears when he touches its power aren’t spoken by some enchanted spirit. No: this is the voice of their own darkness.
Vimes is in the middle of a personal crisis, questioning whether anything he’s done in life has made a difference. He feels weak, insignificant… and very, very angry. Once again, we feel the stirrings of Vimes’s shadow – ‘the Beast’ within, formed of smouldering rage at all the pettiness, injustice, and needless suffering of the world. The Beast he struggles daily to shackle and deny. As he levels the gonne at Dr Cruces and softly caresses the trigger, Vimes finds himself at another crossroads: could unleashing his inner darkness somehow redeem his impotent life? Or would it be the final betrayal of the ‘the Vimes inside’?
Carrot’s intervention saves Vimes from having to make the choice, but he’ll continue to struggle with the temptations of his inner darkness throughout the City Watch series, until it eventually comes to a head in the shocking climax of Thud!, one of Pratchett’s final novels.
Reading this scene, I felt some potent words echoing in my head, too. Not the dangerous words of the gonne, but the haunting wisdom we found at the core of Guards! Guards! – people accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. And here, in this moment, even Vimes does not say no.
But more disturbing than seeing my favourite character about to tumble over a moral precipice was the realisation that I wanted him to fall. I wanted him to release the Beast so that I could enjoy a vicarious taste of what might happen if, for once, a good man didn’t have to play by the rules.
It’s easy to write off acts of cruelty or vigilante violence when they’re committed by weird and unsavoury misfits like Edward d’Eath. And yet most of us happily enjoy stories of wanton violence and murder if we can tell ourselves it’s for a just cause. James Bond; John Wick; Liam Neeson’s Taken movies. We love these stories because part of us wants to shake our everyday impotence and live out these violent fantasies; like Vimes, part of us wants – at long last – to have the power to set the world to rights.
These escapist fantasies whisper to us in the seductive voice of the gonne, letting us pretend for a while that the terrifying complexity of the world can be made clear and simple, black and white.
But Terry Pratchett refused to let either his characters or his readers retreat into moral monochrome. By unleashing the temptations of the gonne and its destructive consequences, Pratchett shines a powerful spotlight into the darker recesses of human nature, forcing us to see what’s lurking in our own shadows.
Man of the City
Carrot is the only person who’s able to touch the gonne and not be overcome by its seductive power. We could dismiss this as just more ‘fairytale’ proof that he’s the true, incorruptible heir to the throne. But I think there’s something more interesting going on here.
Carrot has come a long way since we first met him: just one year ago, he arrived at the gates of Ankh-Morpork, fresh-faced, utterly honest, and almost terminally naïve. But with Vimes sidelined and a dangerous conspiracy to unravel, the watchmen turn instinctively to Carrot for leadership. With responsibility thrust upon him, Carrot is rapidly, profoundly transformed. He learns to be savvy without becoming cynical; he discovers how to be deceptive without lying; and, above all, he embraces his charismatic power over others without demanding he become their leader.
Carrot slams the gonne against the wall, breaking it apart. He advances on the slumped figure of Dr Cruces, ready to clap him in handcuffs, but the temptations of power are only just beginning. Cruces has compiled a dossier of hard evidence that Carrot is the long-lost king of Ankh-Morpork; he begs Carrot to claim the throne and take the city back to its supposed glory days. Carrot examines the documents, pauses… and then executes Cruces with his sword.
If Carrot was accidentally responsible for killing the ‘bad guy’ in Guards! Guards!, this time it’s fully intentional. What is going on here? Why would Carrot stop Vimes from killing Cruces, resist the violent temptations of the gonne, but then murder the man anyway after discovering he’s the heir to the throne?
Reading the scene this time, another story came to mind – a story retold by the great mythologist Joseph Campbell. In this tale, a samurai has hunted down and cornered the man who murdered his overlord. But as the warrior draws back his sword to avenge his master, the terrified murderer spits in the samurai’s face. Everything stops. The samurai sheaths his sword and leaves. Why?
As Campbell explains, the samurai walked away
because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act. And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance.18
Vimes would have killed Cruces with all the anger, desperation and despair he’s struggled to contain throughout the book. But Carrot dispatches the half-mad assassin dispassionately, in service to a cause higher than himself. It’s not personal for him; he does it for the good of the city.
Several times in the book, Carrot proudly tells anyone who’ll listen that the word ‘policeman’ originally meant ‘man of the city’. And that’s how he sees himself: a man who belongs to the city, not the other way around.
Unlike the others, who killed for power, Carrot kills in order to refuse it. He’s smart enough to know that the city’s many problems aren’t going to be solved by turning back the clock and crowning a king. He also recognises his own limitations; as just another ‘man of the city’, he knows he doesn’t have all the answers. But, more importantly, he’s seen up-close the dangers of absolute power, even for his mentor Captain Vimes. When Carrot rejects the crown and puts a final end to the conspiracy, he does it for the sake of the city, whose future, he knows, will be infinitely brighter without regressive fanatics trying to reject new times, new ideas, and new people.
To be cynical, I suspect the real reason was simply to allow Pratchett to surprise us later on. Because we spend the first half of the book ‘knowing’ that Edward is the killer, there’s little sense of mystery to the story – we’re just waiting for the Watch to catch up to what we already know. Revealing that – aha! – he’s not the killer after all manages to shake things up a bit, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ultimately, both characters do exactly the same thing for essentially the same reasons, so the surprise ‘reveal’ doesn’t make much difference to the story.
Men At Arms, p.120. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.
MAA, p.253.
MAA, p.422.
MAA, p.69.
MAA, p.262.
To most of those teachers, I apologise; I could be a nightmare that you certainly didn’t deserve on a hungover Monday morning. But to the others… you had it coming.
Reflecting on Vimes’s crisis, I thought back to a classic Pratchett footnote earlier in the book. Pratchett often used footnotes to let his imagination run wild, dancing away on wild and hilarious tangents. In this one, he tells us that, among other strange delights, Ankh-Morpork offers the paying customer ‘Retrophrenology’. Unlike Phrenology – a bizarre practice popular in the nineteenth century, which claimed that your personality is discernible from the dimensions, lumps and bumps of your head – this Retro version promises customers a personality upgrade by having their skull reshaped. The first time I read this ridiculous little riff, I enjoyed it as a simple game. This time, I realised that it perfectly and painfully mirrors the way Vimes has lived his life up to this point. Unable to fit himself to the world, he’s deformed himself over the years just to try to get by. But, like a man taking a hammer to his own skull, this is painful, damaging, and doesn’t bloody work. (MAA, p.176.)
MAA, p.13.
Guards! Guards!, p.114 (2012 paperback edition).
MAA, p.324.
MAA, p.30.
MAA, p.132.
MAA, pp.130-5.
MAA, p.138.
MAA, pp.146-7.
MAA, pp.399-400.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (Doubleday: London, 1989), p.75.