ately, Terry Pratchett's extensive Discworld series has mostly been focusing on City Watch Commander Samuel Vimes, and the 27th Discworld book follows the trend. The book first tunes in on the doggedly
mostly-honest policeman as he and his fellow watchmen are commemorating the 25th of May by wearing lilacs and visiting a set of old graves. Chief among them is the headstone of a man named John Keel.
But duty calls, and before long Vimes is pursuing a dangerous, bloodthirsty psychotic named Carcer. Fate puts both men together on a rooftop of the highly magical Unseen University just as lightning strikes, and when Vimes wakes up he's traveled several decades into the past. Disoriented and suspicious, he tells the people who attempt to help him that his name is John Keel.
Vimes quickly runs afoul of the City Watch, including younger versions of some of the same men he worked with in the present. He's landed in an unpleasant era: the present Patrician of Ankh-Morpork is an insane tyrant, the City Watch are lax, violent, corrupt and cowardly, and they routinely haul curfew-breakers and perceived troublemakers off to be tortured and murdered by the Patrician's secret police. Vimes almost can't help but join the Watch and try to fix things. Especially once the Monks of Time (who played a significant role in the last Discworld book, Thief of Time) inform him that he can return to his own timeline after a few loose ends are wrapped up.
For one thing, Carcer has killed the real John Keel, and the 25th of May—which Pratchett is coy about until the book's end—is fast approaching. Carcer has to be dealt with, and Keel's role needs to be filled. Vimes, having adopted the name, is halfway there already. If nothing else, a naive young man named Sam Vimes has joined the Watch, and since there's no longer a John Keel to take him in hand and teach him how to be a good cop instead of a lax, violent, corrupt and cowardly one, Vimes is left with the duty of teaching himself everything he knows, and fast.
A pleasant but minor tale
Leave it to Terry Pratchett to turn the plot of a bad action movie into a decent fantasy novel. In most of its plot particulars, Night Watch seems like something Michael Crichton would come up with on a bad day. But Pratchett is an expert at taking advantage of the English language's many vagaries, and he keeps Night Watch moving along lightly with clever characterization and wry sentences like "His movements could be called catlike, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things." And at this point, Vimes and his crew are well enough established that Pratchett can coast along easily on the portraits he's painted of them already.
This makes Night Watch a poor place for new readers to enter the Discworld series, of course. Some of the book's fun comes from its images of familiar characters as they were in the past: Nobby Nobbs as a grubby street urchin, for instance, and Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler as a fresh-faced hopeful who hasn't even evolved his signature catchphrase. (Vimes, it turns out, is responsible for that, as he's responsible for many other things. Star Wars fans who rolled their eyes at Phantom Menace's revelation about C-3PO's origin had best be warned: Time-travel involves a lot of in-jokey, incestuous causal loops, and Vimes' tutelage of himself is chief among them.)
Night Watch's major flaw is that doesn't go as far as it might in exploiting its circular plot. Pratchett's decision to obscure the 25th of May situation until the last moment actually robs the book of a great deal of potential tension: Readers don't know what happened in the "original" timeline, and thus never know whether Vimes' actions have any effect whatsoever, or what the consequences of his failure might be. Since Pratchett makes it clear early on that Vimes is going home eventually, his own fate is never in doubt, either. Carcer is creepy, but he seems like an insignificant (and fairly generic) threat compared to Vimes' considerable skills and the weight of a self-repairing history. Pratchett tells this tale better than Crichton would have, with more verve and wit and far more trenchant observations about humanity, but as fun as Night Watch is, it still feels like a missed opportunity, and a relatively minor entry in a major series.
