A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of Discworld’s most frequent recurring characters, Death.  This week, let’s look at my favorite group of regulars, the City Guard of Ankh-Morpork.  There are eight books focused on this group of rather hapless police officers, and they’re the one subseries I’ve read all the way through (but completely out of order).

The City Guard are led by Sam Vimes, the relatively sane focus point in the middle of some very odd characters.  I think Vimes is what makes these my favorite set of books.  Besides being an awesome character, he’s the straight man who makes the comedians even funnier.  Vimes is a world-weary police officer with a cynical streak a mile wide, who nevertheless believes in honor and justice and above all, the rule of law.  He’s uncorruptable while completely practical about the corrupt city he guards.  He undergoes more evolution than most Discworld characters, and even though I read him all out of order it’s interesting to see his character grow through the books.

Vime’s righthand man is Corporal Carrot, biologically a six-foot human and culturally a dwarf (it’s complicated).  He’s simple, but not stupid.  He also believes in honor and honesty, but unlike Vimes, he believes everyone else is honorable and honest too.  The funny thing is, around Carrot, they are.

Sargeant Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs typically appear together.  Colon always knows the best place for a drink or a smoke, and the best ways to avoid any and all trouble.  Nobby has to carry around a card to verify that he’s human; descriptions are vague, but I picture him short, skinny, pimply and hairy.  He’s convinced of his own vast wisdom and sophistication, and is a guardsman who is nevertheless addicted to petty theft.

There are a few women on the force: Cheery Littlebottom is a dwarf who breaks dwarfish taboos by openly admitting to being female, and Angua is a brilliant fighter and tracker, largely because she’s a werewolf.

There are some other regulars among the guards, but those are my favorites.  They’re a motley and very funny crew, who generally manage to pull success out of chaos.  Guards! Guards! is the first in the subseries, and Jingo, Night Watch and Thud! are among my favorites.  But really, they’re all good, and you can probably just grab any you like.  It’s Discworld–you’ll figure things out.

Today is Friday the 13th, and I’m currently hosting a Discworld reading challenge–so there’s really only one appropriate topic today.  Death.  Specifically, Pratchett’s character of Death.

There are several books with Death as a major character, and you can trust him to make at least a cameo in most of the books.  He looks rather as you might expect Death to look, a skeleton with a dark hood and a scythe.  Despite appearances, he isn’t really a frightening character.  Death never kills anyone; he appears as a guide when someone has died, which I think is an important distinction.

And did I mention also that Death is frequently extremely funny?  He talks IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, so you always know when he’s arrived.  He’s both insightful and a little baffled by humanity, he takes pride in his work, and he seems to be well-meaning as a rule.  One way or another, whether its telling knock-knock jokes or explaining that he really can’t take off his mask, even his briefest appearances tend to be wonderful.

The two Death-focused books that stand out the most for me are Reaper Man and Hogfather.  In the first, Death’s bosses decide he’s going soft and fire him.  He goes off to find a new job on a farm, while elsewhere no one’s dying anymore…  One of my favorites bits of the book is when he’s out cutting wheat (with a scythe, of course).  The woman who owns the farm notices that he’s very fast, but is cutting the wheat one stalk at a time.  She asks why he doesn’t cut a swathe at once, and Death is horrified.  That would be wrong–every stalk must die in its own time, with individual attention.

Hogfather is Pratchett’s Christmas book.  The Discworld’s Santa Clause equivalent goes missing (more or less) and the fabric of mythology and belief begins to unravel–despite Death’s best efforts to fill in.  This is largely focused on Death’s granddaughter, Susan.  You see, Pratchett’s Death has a family.  He has an adopted daughter, who got married and had a daughter.  Susan desperately wants to be normal, but that’s difficult when she’s inherited some of her grandfather’s talents.  There’s a movie version of Hogfather that’s very good; Susan is played by Michelle Dockery, who you might know as Lady Mary from Downton Abbey.

In other Discworld books, if a character dies you can pretty well expect Death to turn up to guide them to whatever awaits.  And odd though it may sound, it’s always fun when Death arrives.

Today is our first installment of the Going Postal group-read.  Read the details about the challenge, and see my review of Going Postal if you’d like a little more context.

We’re starting off the discussion with a few questions about the first hundred pages of the book.

1)      For those new to Pratchett or Going Postal, what are your first impressions?  For re-readers, is anything striking you this time that you didn’t notice on a first read?

I’m obviously a re-reader.  This is actually one of my first Discworld re-reads–there are so many books, I’ve mostly been seeking out new ones to explore!  I find that the satire is making a bigger impression this time around–I noticed it before, but I’m seeing it more now.  I think I get distracted by all the wonderful humor on an initial read, and while a second time through is still very, very funny, the deeper aspects of the book are coming through more clearly as well.  In just this first section Pratchett has already started touching on so many ideas, about government, truth, civil rights, collectors culture…  I’ll leave it at that for now, as I want to discuss the satire in more depth in a later post, after it’s been developed further!

2)      We’ve started to get to know our protagonist, Moist von Lipvig, by now.  What are your thoughts on him so far?

Pratchett’s makes a lot of Moist’s charm.  Everyone seems to love him, despite the fact that he’s a crook and a scoundrel–and somehow they seem to love him because of it.  I love that Moist himself directly observes this paradox.  I also feel like Pratchett is playing the reader much the way Moist plays the crowd.  We fall under the spell of Moist’s charm too.  He’s friendly, he’s pleasant, he’s completely honest about being a crook, and he has style.  I think readers always love a scoundrel, especially one who never really hurts anyone.  Pratchett makes a point early on that Moist cons people, but he doesn’t kill anyone, or even hit people over the head.  He starts out as the charming rogue that we want to root for.  Having read the book before, I know Pratchett is going to delve into this idea more, and I’m enjoying watching its initial set-up.

3)      We’ve also met quite a few rather unusual supporting characters.  Who are you most looking forward to reading more about?

Strangely enough, Moist is a relatively normal main character surrounded by even weirder figures.  Groat stands out, completely bonkers in some ways but he also has such devotion to the post office, and to the memory of how it used to be.  He’s almost a tragic figure–in a really bad toupee!

I’m also really enjoying Vetinari.  He shows up in a lot of Discworld books, and I think he gets a particularly good turn in this one.  I love that he’s a tyrant who makes things work.  I think I’m stealing that phrase from one of the City Guards books, but it describes him so well.  He’s always four steps ahead of everyone else, nothing ever ruffles him, and despite a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness, he always makes things work for the greater good.

4)      What are your favorite quotes or moments from this section of the book?

Oh, so many…Pratchett really hits the ground running with the humor.  For instance:

Mr. Groat, re: Stanley: “Orphan, sir.  Very sad.  Came to us from the Siblings of Offler charity home, sir.  Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.”

“Surely you mean on peas, Mr. Groat?”

“By peas, sir.  Very unusual case.  A good lad if he doesn’t get upset, but he tends to twist toward the sun, sir, if you get my meaning.”

I don’t get his meaning at all, but it’s hilarious.  If he explained it, it would ruin everything.  A more philosophical favorite moment:

“It was…odd to think of all those letters heaped in that old building.  You could imagine them as little packets of history.  Deliver them, and history went one way.  But if you dropped them in the gap between the floorboards, it went the other.”

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If you’re participating in the group read, leave a comment with a link to your first post.  I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks!  And if you’re thinking you’d like to join in, it’s not a long read and there’s plenty of time still to catch up; just let me know, and I’ll send you the questions for next Tuesday’s post. 🙂