Guards! Guards! – Bonus Material
I’ll be adding one of these ‘Bonus Material’ posts to complement each of the main articles in the Re-Reading Terry Pratchett series.
There was so much more that I wanted to say about each book which didn’t make it into the essays, so I’ve gathered together some of the best parts and will present them as a series of short sections.
Some of these will be self-contained riffs on aspects of the book; others will explore in more detail certain ideas I glossed over in the main article; still others will be openly geeky commentaries and notes – like the one we begin with here:
Inconsistencies
Terry Pratchett wasn’t shy about admitting that he ‘made it all up’ as he went along, and before Stephen Briggs created The Discworld Companion, it seems that, aside from his own memory, not even Terry had a means for keeping tabs on what he’d already written. This inevitably led to some inconsistencies. I’m picking out a few of the more interesting ones here, which give us a sense of how the Discworld evolved.
1. Death and All His Friends?
When Death comes to take the shade of the dragon’s first victim into the afterlife, we learn that the Grim Reaper only turns up in person on ‘special occasions’ (being immolated by a dragon definitely counts as one of these). We hear the same thing in Mort, in which we learn that Death has various minions to do most of the heavy lifting. This is completely at odds with (most) later books, however, in which Death himself turns up for everyone (and for every creature aside – for reasons we’ll discover in Reaper Man – from fleas and rats).
Pratchett seems to have progressively abandoned the ‘special occasions’ clause over the years, which is certainly an inconsistency, but one which feels like getting something gradually more right. Of course Death comes to us all, and, like the Hogfather, the normal rules of space and time aren’t going to prevent him from doing so.
2. Forgotten Kings
In this book, Captain Vimes is completely unaware that Ankh-Morpork used to be ruled by kings (he has to ask Lady Ramkin about it). This is odd in itself, given how staunchly republican he is. But it’s a much bigger inconsistency when, just one book later (in Men At Arms), we find him waxing encyclopaedic on the history of Ankh-Morpork’s royalty – not least because his own ancestor, ‘Old Stoneface’ Vimes, was the man who executed the city’s last king.
In the books to come, Vimes frequently bristles over his regicidal inheritance – both because he’s disgusted by the idea of an absolute ruler who stands outside the law and because he has to fight against his own desires to take justice into his own hands.
But it seems clear that Pratchett hadn’t dreamt up this vital backstory quite yet.
3. Sherlock Holmes
Early on in the book, we find Vimes having a Sherlock Holmes moment. Pratchett has him riffing on the classic crime-solving wisdom that, once we carefully eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, will surely be the truth. (This is immediately undercut by Vimes musing on how to decide what’s ‘impossible’ when there’s a bloody great dragon involved.)
If that wasn’t enough, he then wonders what to make of ‘the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time’, which is a direct reference to one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most popular Sherlock stories, ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’. In that tale, Holmes solves the case when he realises that, curiously, a dog did not bark in the night – indicating that the criminal must have been someone the dog recognised.
This is a good gag and an entertaining riff, but it’s completely at odds with Vimes’s character in later books. He loathes all things Sherlockian and, as we’ll see, he regularly exhorts his officers to be highly suspicious of ‘clues’. For Vimes, footprints in the flowerbed are complete nonsense – they’re more likely a deception and a distraction from what really matters: asking questions and understanding people’s motivations.
We might charitably see this as part of Sam Vimes’s evolution, but I think it says more about Pratchett’s growing prowess, in the later City Watch books, in writing detective stories that don’t rely on obvious ‘clues’ and unlikely coincidences.
Evolving Book Covers
Like all the Discworld novels, the cover of Guards! Guards! has undergone a few changes over the years. Putting aside the complete redesign for the Discworld series presently underway, there’s a few rather odd changes between my original paperback and the current edition (published in 2012). My 1996 paperback features the dragon itself, spiralling menacingly above the frantic, sword-wielding City Watch, but the 2012 edition centres on a completely different part of Josh Kirby’s original painting. Now, the chained figure of Lady Ramkin takes centre stage as the dragon’s first human sacrifice.
But there’s some Photoshop at work here: the dragon’s tail should still be writhing its way across the top-right corner, but it isn’t… Instead, someone has cut out a number of the background figures (a crowd of onlookers pulling various faces), flipped them, and pasted them into the scene to fill up the dragon-less space. As a result, although the illustration still brims with Kirby’s irrepressible energy, we’re left with a cover that shows neither the dragon, nor the City Watch – the two most important elements of the book.
Although the eye is undeniably drawn to the bound figure of Lady Ramkin, it’s hard to understand why this redesign was commissioned. If it was an attempt to broaden the book’s appeal to people turned off by the fantasy trope of a dragon, it surely failed: the word ‘dragon’ appears in the book’s first sentence, so there’d be no hope of keeping this under wraps until a hesitant reader was too deeply immersed in the story to care.
To think symbolically for a moment, the City Watch fighting the dragon is actually the perfect visual summary of the book’s central theme. The dragon represents the chaos and destruction unleashed by the bitter selfishness of the Elucidated Brethren. The Watch are the other group of ‘Have-Nots’ in this story, and it’s their struggle to walk a different path – to shrug bitterness aside in order to do the Right Thing – that we can see represented in their heroic stand against the dragon.
Perhaps the redesign can only be put down to a publisher that clearly doesn’t understand what the book is actually about (as I said in the main article, neither the old nor the more recent jacket blurbs make any sense)… But who knows?
Detritus
Detritus the troll makes an appearance as a pub ‘splatter’ at the Mended Drum (like a bouncer, but he hits much harder). For all his massive bulk, he’s such a one-dimensional, bit-part character in this book that it’s truly surprising to think he’ll become a pivotal, beloved part of the City Watch just one book later (in Men At Arms). Between now and then, he’ll find the love of a good wo–, er, female troll – Ruby – in Moving Pictures, which perhaps sets him on a more aspirational path.
What Makes a King?
We’re left in no doubt that Lance-Constable Carrot Ironfoundersson is the true heir to Ankh-Morpork’s ancient throne, but it turns out that his sword quite defiantly has nothing special about it at all. Unlike the sparkly, bejewelled one that the Brethren give to their would-be puppet king, Carrot’s is simply ‘a long piece of metal with very sharp edges’, which definitely ‘hasn’t got destiny written all over it’. Pratchett notes wryly that, as a sword in a fantasy novel, that makes it ‘practically unique’.1
This is a fun way of toying with clichés, but once again it also pushes the fantasy closer to reality. Pratchett always energetically undermines hackneyed stories, but in the process, perhaps by mining down so far beneath things, he actually discovers their true value. An ordinary man with an ordinary sword is more or less what any king is… or perhaps what a king should be.
Million-to-One Chances
Sometimes, poking at a cliché only draws attention to the author’s artifice, which is what we find in this novel’s running joke about ‘million-to-one chances’ always – somehow – working out. Pratchett does a brilliant job having the cliché-conscious watchmen try to make sure that the odds against them bringing down the dragon with a single arrow to its vulnerable spot are precisely a million-to-one (otherwise, it obviously wouldn’t work, right?).
I love the silliness of having Sergeant Fred Colon standing on one leg, helmet on backwards, and a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth, as he gets ready to fire his lucky arrow at the beast.2 But in the end – as the joke rumbles on for the rest of the book – it feels a little forced. Like the idea of the return of the ‘true king’, we often cling to the belief that when things have to work, somehow they will. But while the first myth breathes symbolic life into our innate and important desire for a fair and just society, the second isn’t nearly so helpful. Million-to-one chances feel more like another example of how addicted we are to consuming stories with our critical minds switched off; is it really a good idea to live our lives believing that whenever things are truly desperate, it’ll all work out just fine for us?
Pratchett Philosophy: What Are We Owed?
One of Pratchett’s greatest skills – and a key to his phenomenal popularity – was to smuggle big moral and philosophical thoughts into his comic fantasies. The Discworld novels can easily be read as hilarious adventure stories, but along the way Pratchett plants some big questions in our minds.
We took a look at how he explored the nature and banality of evil in the main article, and when Brother Watchtower of the Elucidated Brethren dies, we get another, subtler taste of Pratchett Philosophy.
The shade of the newly-deceased Brother Watchtower stands up and comes face-to-face with Death. As guilt trickles its way through the cracks in his ugly self-justifications, Brother Watchtower mumbles that ‘We never intended this. Honestly. No offence. We just wanted what was due to us’. Death pats him gently on the shoulder and says simply, ‘CONGRATULATIONS’.3
I think the message is clear: in Pratchett’s mind, death is the only thing any of us is entitled to in this life; that’s what is ‘due to us’. It sounds bleak, but ‘memento mori’ (remember we’re going to die) is a far better guide to living a good life than to expect the universe and other people to hand you everything that you desire.
Always Arresting
After the dragon has plummeted out of the sky and lies in a crumpled, semi-conscious heap, the Watch rush forward to… arrest it. This unlikely (and potentially suicidal) move will soon become their signature manoeuvre.
Whether it’s a dragon, a dictator, or even an entire army, Vimes and his officers always go in for the arrest. The incongruity of it makes for a good laugh, but I can’t help thinking there’s more going on beneath the surface here.
For Vimes, this is part of his ongoing fight against ‘the Beast’ within – against the part of him which would prefer to meet injustice with violence and rage. If he doesn’t do things (more or less) by the book, he fears that he’d be just another bitter, angry man enforcing his will on the world at the point of a sword. In other words, he’d become no more than the tyrannical dragon itself.
And it’s also about the importance of the small things in life – of doing the Right Thing every time, not only when it suits you or when other people are watching. When the world gets out of control, it’s easy to think all bets are off and survival is the only thing that matters. But in Guards! Guards! we saw the price that comes with selfish survival: if we don’t say ‘no’ to injustice, injustice is all we have left.
Over the series, it becomes a tenet of Pratchett Philosophy that the small, everyday things matter as least as much as the big, dramatic ones. In fact, it’s usually the one which causes the other. After all, it was small acts of kindness from Carrot and Lady Ramkin which inspired Vimes to be a hero, just as it was the everyday sense of social humiliation and alienation (stoked by Lupine Wonse’s poisonous words) that led the Brethren to unleash murder and mayhem upon their fellow citizens.
In Pratchett Philosophy, we’re often invited to view the big picture through the lens of the little one. In Jingo, Vimes tries to arrest a whole army because, he reasons, if murder is a crime, then war is simply the same crime on a larger scale. No doubt Lord Vetinari would consider this hopelessly naïve, but there’s something provocative and powerful in seeing characters whose moral compass will not allow them to accept the difference.
Guards! Guards!, p.35. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.
GG, pp.356-9.
GG, p.247.