James Nicoll Reviews

2002’s Night Watch is the 29^th work in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series¹. It is the sixth Discworld novel² to focus on Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch.

Thirty years to the day after the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reluctantly leaves his pregnant wife Lady Sibyl to pursue the cheerfully homicidal psychopath, Carcer. Vimes’ intention is to arrest Carcer without losing more members of the Watch to the knife-wielding madman. Thanks to a bolt of magical lightning, both Carcer and Vimes vanish.

Slightly more than thirty years previous, two strangers suddenly appear in an Ankh-Morpork on the precipice of revolution.

In the Year of the Dancing Dog, Patrician Lord Winder is as paranoid as he is repressive. Convinced that assassins lurk in every shadow, he surrounds himself with guards and food-tasters while his secret police, the Cable Street Particulars (AKA the Unmentionables), brutally abuse anyone unwise enough to come to the Unmentionable’s attention. Thanks to the extremes to which Winder goes to discourage plots and revolutions, the city is rife with plots and would-be revolutionaries.

Vimes is quite familiar with the end result of Winder’s reign. In the history Vimes lived through, Winder’s excesses provoked the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, gave rise to the short-lived Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road, saw Winder replaced with the not-entirely satisfactory Mad Lord Snapcase, and laid the foundation for modern Ankh-Morpork under Patrician Vetinari.

Vimes and Carcer’s dislocation throws a spanner in the works. Barely had Carcer arrived than he mugged and murdered one John Keel. In the history Vimes knows, Keel was a central figure in the events leading up to the 25^th. Not least of Keel’s accomplishments was serving as mentor to a very young, very naïve Sam Vimes. Can the future to which Vimes desperately wants to return exist without John Keel to play his role?

If the City Watch cannot have the John Keel, it can at least have a John Keel. Vimes masquerades as the dead Keel, bluffing his way into a senior position with the Watch. All Vimes need do to protect the future is to recapitulate the real Keel’s actions.

Furthermore, Vimes has allies just as keen as he is to see Vimes returned to his proper time and place. The Time Monks are, as the name suggests, monks whose purview is time and the many trouser legs of history. Time monk Lu-Tze provides what help he can.

Except… the past is already different. Not only is Keel dead, but Carcer joins the Unmentionables. Carcer is a man who would gleefully derail history simply to enjoy the chaos. Furthermore, can Vimes stick to the history he remembers, knowing the injustice and misery to come? Will his better nature force him to act even though that will change history? If Vimes can play Keel without deviation, what of the events of May 25^th, the day John Keel died?

~oOo~

Yes, this is running on a Sunday, when I’d normally have a Tears review. The patron who commissioned this specified a May 25^th publication date and try as I might, I was unable to find a second May 25^th in 2025 that fell on a day other than Sunday.

I tried a bold experiment with this novel, opting to listen to the Stephen Briggs audiobook narration. While Briggs’ narration is perfectly acceptable, I spotted the issue with this approach after six hours. Humans speak far more slowly than I read, and six hours in, I was barely past the mid-point. Lesson learned.

As you know, the Discworld books began as broad sword-and-sorcery parodies. Somewhere around Mort, Pratchett became far more ambitious with his comic novels. Would someone who read coverless copies of The Colour of Magic and Night Watch back-to-back believe them to be by the same person? This is a test easily performed.

Night Watch is driven by the friction between faith that people can, if they try, better themselves dramatically, and the knowledge that people won’t try or even if they do try, they will somehow sabotage themselves. It’s no coincidence that the most outspoken revolutionary is earnest nincompoop Reg Shoe, that the cool, rational reformers manage through great effort to replace ineffectual madman Winder with all too effectual madman Mad Lord Snapcase, or that the most effective characters are Vimes, who leavens reluctant idealism with cynical pragmatism, and Vetinari, whose idealism, if he has any, is highly theoretical.

One suspects it’s no accident that the explanations Time monk Lu-Tze provides Vimes are straight-forward, persuasive, and according to the other Time Monks who overhear them, wrong. Sure, you can try getting people pointed in the right direction with complex, nuanced truths, but simple, well-crafted lies are more effective.

The result isn’t entirely anything to regard with cynicism. Vimes spends a lot of time nudging the Watch away from ​“easy but wrong” towards ​“inconvenient but less wrong,” while resisting his own violent urges. Simply killing Carcer would end Carcer’s homicidal career, but there’s a valuable point to be made by arresting him and conducting a fair trial. Likewise, the revolution is doomed, but things will improve in the long run³.

All of which is to say that this is another Pratchett I greatly enjoyed — perhaps his best novel — as long as I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of the narrative. Which isn’t to say that Pratchett was necessarily wrong to see the masses as idiots who might well drown looking up at rain-clouds to see where the water was coming from; also that the occasional bright person was even more easily led astray. Pratchett’s take on politics isn’t exactly heartening.

Perhaps because the friction between ​“people can do better” and ​“but they won’t” is a prominent part of the plot, this is one of the darker novel. Yes, there are funny bits… and also torture chambers whose contents are so horrific that only the effect on witnesses is described. Nevertheless, the novel rewards reading, particularly as a reminder that comedy can be far more ambitious than the occasional Conan and Elric jokes.

Night Watch is available here (Penguin), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Wouldn’t the whole of Discworld be a great review project? If I began January 2026 and read one book a month, I could get from The Colour of Magic to The Shepherd’s Crown by June 2029. Or if I were judicious about review frequency, I could ensure that The Shepherd’s Crown is my 10,000^th review, some time in 2033. (Total includes all my Bookspan, Romantic Times, and Publishers Weekly reviews.)

2: The City Watch novels are:

Guards! Guards! (1989)

Men at Arms (1993)

Feet of Clay (1996)

Jingo (1997)

The Fifth Elephant (1999)

Night Watch (2002)

Thud! (2005)

Snuff (2011)

Of which I have read only the first six.

3: Things will improve as long as Vetinari is in charge. To his credit, his plots often involve trying to shore up vital institutions… but who’s to say that the next Patrician won’t tear down those institutions out of pure spite?

Oh, and USA delenda est.