Night Watch

Night Watch, Terry Pratchet

Here we are, almost all the away through the series – only 11 books to go! – and it’s impressive how Terry Pratchett continues to find new ways to expand the Discworld universe. In this installment in the always excellent City Watch stories Sam Vimes is, as we begin, still uncomfortable in his role as the commander of a large and formidable City Watch and with his new titled position as a Duke. In his personal life he is even more uncomfortable about his looming fatherhood, as his wife is ready to give birth at any moment. The City Watch is on the trail of a particularly nasty piece of work, Carcer, who has been thieving and murdering his way through Ankh-Morpork. The Watch chases Carcer to the wizarding school, Unseen University. As is well established in Discworld, too much magic concentrated in one place can make all sorts of things happen and Carcer and Vimes end up sped back in time. To the old Ankh-Morpork, mere days before a revolution that ended one of the previous Patrician’s tenures and while a young and impressionable Sam Vimes was still learning the ropes at the Watch.

Yes, Pratchett has decided to that the best way to further explore Ankh-Morpork is with a prequel, but he clearly enjoys his Vimes character so much he doesn’t want to lose him. Vimes ends up in a slightly sideways past, where the person who had mentored Young Sam Vimes—one John Keel—has been killed by Carcer, and the new Commander Vimes must take his place and try to steer his younger self in the right direction. And find a way to preserve the past – for the most part, preserve his future, survive the revolution, and just do the best he can.

This isn’t the same Ankh-Morpork we’re used to, though, as rough as that one is. It has been alluded to several times in the Discworld series just how bad things used to be, before the current Patrician came to be. Ventinari is considered the least evil option because he keeps things running and doesn’t actively try to make people’s lives worse. In the past, though, curfew and the selling of tax collecting regions meant that there was always a reason to pick on people. Anyone picked up by the Watch could pay a bribe or was delivered to the Untouchables, the torturers and jail wardens and generally disrespectable side of the service – where Carcer unsurprisingly finds himself in a leadership position. Vimes must remember how to navigate all of this, and the upcoming Lilac revolution to depose the current Patrician and put a new, also to be short-lived, one on the throne.

This, as all Discworld books must do, was centered on the Pratchett philosophy that you should just do the next right thing, and that big ideas rarely work out for the little people. But it also showed this philosophy at the most cynical. Vimes keeps the peace in part by helping to build one of the largest barricades in the city during the revolution, and basically keeping things behind it running and running well and not exactly breaking any laws. (Among the more darkly humorous lines in the book, “Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.”) But the book and Vimes are, themselves, very down on the whole concept of Revolutions and trying to make things better at all. It makes a mockery of Reg Shoe, who ends up a zombie on the future desegregated City Watch, for his earnest belief in a revolution. It takes the cynical view that the Revolutionaries never understand or are on the side of the people, but only The People. It believes that nothing changes. “[H]ere’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”

But at the same time it is made clear throughout the book how much better things are in Ankh-Morpork now that there is the current Patrician. Surely Vimes himself would recognize that things are better with a functioning Watch, without tax collecting authority being sold to the higher bidder, without the Untouchables, and any number of other things that were only possible with a change in government. It is a strange book that shows in every way how much life improved with a new leader and better, more responsible institutions, and at the same time mocks the very idea of taking steps to bring in a new leader and better institutions.

The truth is, it’s all very well to say that the little things are what The People actually care about, and joke about wishing for a hard-boiled egg in the Revolution, but sometimes you do need to have a revolution so that people can live their lives and have a hard-boiled egg. Sometimes an ethos of just doing the right thing comes up against a reality that makes it illegal or dangerous or impossible to do the right thing, and that’s when you need a change. Viva la revolution.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

This is a dark, amoral, nihilistic tale of India and capitalism that also happens to be pretty funny. That is quite a trick to pull off.

Balram, our protagonist and our story teller was born in a small Indian town of Laxmanargh, in what he calls the Darkness, the world of the poor masses in India. He is part of a large family run by an overbearing matriarch, Kusum. Balram is clever and intelligent, and so impresses a government visitor to his school that he is told he is special, a White Tiger, and wins a prestigious scholarship to study in Delhi. Unfortunately, at this time his father catches tuberculosis and dies. He could have survived with medial attention, but the local hospital is an empty shell of a building staffed by civil servants who bribed their way to their posts and have no need to show up. With his father’s death, Balram must drop out of school and is thrust into the seemingly inescapable world for all of those in the Darkness.

In Laxmanargh there are four major landlords who run the industries, and whose families have all the wealth and can do as they wish to the town. The rest are left desperately striving, with the dream of most to be a servant or in a service job with a uniform and some prestige. Balram desperately envies the bus driver, with his smart uniform and responsibilities. With this in mind, and wanting to break free of the life that has been set out for him, he and his brother get his grandmother to pay for his driving classes with the promise that he will send much more money back home. He is unsuccessful at getting a new job until, by luck, in a nearby city he runs into the family of the Stork, one of the landlords from Laxmanargh, whose son has just returned from America and needs a driver. They prefer to have someone from back home – someone who will practically be like family, they say—and hire Balram as the driver to Mr. Ashok and his wife, Pinky Madam.

Throughout Balram recounts his desperation to be a good servant, and the story of desperation within India. They eventually go to Delhi, so that Mr. Ashok can run errands bribing politicians for his family. In the background throughout the tale is The Great Socialist, an amalgamation of characters and the seeming title for whoever is in charge. Balram is a bit lost in Delhi and at times Mr. Ashok’s wife urges him to get a new driver, but his family likes having someone from home, with the constant implicit threat that they can harm or kill his family if he ever did anything untrustworthy. The book is a slow awakening for Balram. He has already pulled away by not sending his salary back home, but he starts to consider why he is so subservient, why he must live like this, and what he wants more. Eventually reaching the breaking point where he realizes no matter how good Mr. Ashok may be to him, Balram is still just a servant and this will be forever. He manages to escape the Darkness and his life through a brutal crime, taking the bribe money—and the education he has had from watching the Stork’s family at work—to create his own successful business.

None of this is a spoiler as the trajectory is laid out in the beginning of the book, and in the trailer for the newish Netflix movie. The book is also far more humorous and exciting than I’ve told it here. Balram is, well, not exactly the most likable protagonist, but he is incredibly entertaining. The vignettes and tales of how servants are treated, how they are stuck in the mindset, but also how they are able to cheat their masters were interesting. The small touches of life to show how he is treated (at one point, Mr. Ashok goes to give Balram a bonus and keeps rethinking and pulling sequentially smaller bills from his wallet) are well done. And in fact, the feel of the book, although different in so many ways, reminds me of something like The Awakening. This growing knowledge that no matter how good a ‘master’ he might find, Balram will never be nothing but a servant to them – and neither will the rest of the country.

This is not a fairy tale that rewards hard work, or a story of good and bad. It is a story of cutthroat people in corrupt society set up to reward corruption and amorality. There is no way to like anyone in it. But the book itself? That I loved.