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Summary
Summary
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all.
But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck...
Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion.
There's a problem:if he wins, he's got no wife, no child, no future...
A Discworld Tale of One City, with a full chorus of street urchins, ladies of negotiable affection, rebels, secret policemen and other children of the revolution.
Truth! Justice! Freedom! And a Hard-boiled Egg!
Author Notes
Terry Pratchett was on born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, United Kingdom. He left school at the age of 17 to work on his local paper, the Bucks Free Press. While with the Press, he took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency class. He also worked for the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle. He produced a series of cartoons for the monthly journal, Psychic Researcher, describing the goings-on at the government's fictional paranormal research establishment, Warlock Hall. In 1980, he was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board with responsibility for three nuclear power stations.
His first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. His first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. He became a full-time author in 1987. He wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime including The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Truckers, Diggers, Wings, Dodger, Raising Steam, Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales, and The Shephard's Crown. He was diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007. He was knighted for services to literature in 2009 and received the World Fantasy award for life achievement in 2010. He died on March 12, 2015 at the age of 66.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British author Pratchett's storytelling, a clever blend of Monty Pythonesque humor and Big Questions about morality and the workings of the universe, is in top form in his 28th novel in the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series (The Last Hero, etc.). Pragmatic Sam Vimes, Commander of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch, can't complain. He has a title, his wife is due to give birth to their first child any moment and he hasn't had to pound a beat in ages but that doesn't stop him from missing certain bits of his old life. Thank goodness there's work to be done. Vimes manages to corner a murderer, Carcer, on the library dome at Unseen University during a tremendous storm, only to be zapped back in time 30 years, to an Ankh-Morpork where the Watch is a joke, the ruling Patrician mad and the city on the verge of rebellion. Three decades earlier, a man named John Keel took over the Night Watch and taught young Sam Vimes how to be a good cop before dying in that rebellion. Unfortunately, in this version of the past, Carcer has killed Keel. The only way Vimes can hope to return home and ensure he has a future to return home to is to take on Keel's role. The author lightens Vimes's decidedly dark situation with glimpses into the origins of several of the more unique denizens of Ankh-Morpork. One comes away, as always, with the feeling that if Ankh-Morpork isn't a real place, it bloody well ought to be. (Nov. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Sam Vimes is living the good life. He's a duke, his lady wife is about to give birth to their first child, and he is no longer just a shoddy watch commander. Even so, he can'st stop thinking about the good old days. He finds himself missing going on patrol, reading the streets, being part of the Watch rather than a nobleman who has to see the big picture. Suddenly, caught by a surge of occult energy, Vimes is back in the good old days. Somehow, they are less good than he remembered. And then he discovers he is responsible for the future: if he doesn't make history turn out the way he remembers it, he may never get home again. Quite aside from that predicament, a criminal mastermind, also whisked up by the occult energy, is making Vimes' future-building job significantly harder, and only Vimes knows what the fiend is capable of. On the positive side, Vimes does get to just be a copper again, which he rather enjoys. Discworld remains a place of punning, entertaining footnotes, and farce, in which Ankh-Morpork is still a great city. This time, though, the metropolis has a sense of its history and of the Right Thing to Do, which makes for something of a departure from the norm for many of the characters longtime Discworld readers know and love. Still, Pratchett has really developed the characters of the Watch, at least, since their early days in Guards! Guards! (1989), and it shows! --Regina Schroeder
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Samuel Vimes, Commander of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch, starts the morning fishing a would-be assassin out of his cesspool and writing a letter to the parents of a watch-dwarf murdered by Carcer, a homicidal maniac. By the end of the day, thanks to a freak, magical accident, he is transported back more than 30 years in the city's less-than-glorious past. Unfortunately, Carcer is taken with him. Revolution is brewing and though Vimes and Carcer know what is supposed to happen, both are determined to change it. Readers familiar with the characters from other "Discworld" tales will be fascinated by the glimpse into their pasts. Tension is generated as Vimes, a good man in a corrupt world, struggles to find the right path through the morass of history. He has to stop Carcer, but success in the past may mean losses in the future. In addition, Vimes is in charge of training a new recruit, young lance constable Vimes, and must teach himself to be a good copper, so the Watch as it is known can exist. The stakes are high, yet Pratchett injects humor into the mix. This gripping novel is essential for fans of the series, and is also recommended for those who haven't had the pleasure of traveling there yet.-Susan Salpini, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Terry Pratchett, like TS Eliot's Webster, has always been much possessed by death. The short biography he used to have on his book jackets began with the information that he was born in 1948 and is still not dead. It went on to say that he began work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, "work experience meaning something in those days". Like all good storytellers he writes against death, creating impossible escapes, thrilling dangers, the come-uppance of the wicked and so on. But unlike many creators of fantasy worlds he makes sure his readers know death is real, while at the same time finding ingenious devices to help us to accommodate that knowledge. His characters die quite frequently. When they do, they take time to realise what has happened. They are met by Pratchett's personified Death - a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie - who has organised himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behaviour, prompted by his long association with our agitated species. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting - people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. The device means that good characters can die without outrage, though I remember being shocked by the first death I encountered - that of an ordinary, brave dwarf in Men at Arms who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. Pratchett invented the City Watch of his squirming and insanitary metropolis Ankh-Morpork, he once said, so as to make heroes of the supernumerary guardsmen and extras who are present in most stories simply to be killed in droves to show how bad the bad characters are, before the hero deals out justice. Corporal Carrot of the Watch is just such a hero - with a twist. He is the lost heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork, has the birthmark and sword to prove it, can control crowds by a kind of charisma, and turn marauding desert Dregs into football teams. But he has the sense - or innocence - to remain a simple guardsman, under Captain Samuel Vimes, who was, when we first met him, a drunken and despondent good cop, and has grown, in the Discworld series, to become commander and then Lord Vimes, keeping order with Carrot and the wily Patrician, or politician, who rules the city, Lord Vetinari. At the end of Jingo , one of the best of the novels, Vimes arrested a whole army and its blimpish commanders for disturbing the peace. He is married to Lady Sibyl Ramkin, a large lady who breeds swamp dragons, and is expecting his child. In Night Watch, Vimes finds himself - along with a peculiarly unpleasant criminal called Carcer - caught in a time-warp, back in his own early days as a Watchman, trying to change the course of a bloody revolution. He is also concerned to prevent his own callow self as a lance-constable from getting killed, so that he may get back to the present and his child may be born. He has become a dead hero called John Keel, who helped to organise the barricades, but was also a Watch captain at Cable Street. His opponents include the corrupt Unmentionables, who arrest and torture people. It is a way of adding to a cumulative tale-series that by now - on ordinary human time-scales - has more unknown events at the beginning than at the end. Its world is, as Vimes has always said it was, rough and nasty. Pratchett has said once or twice recently that his imagination is getting darker. The storyteller's dealings with death have become grimmer and not so calmly comic. The series began as a parody of the fantasy world of sorcerers and magic, with the adventures of the cowardly wizard Rincewind who is always being projected through space-time, accompanied by a bad-tempered piece of luggage on hundreds of little legs. Rincewind survived by being a survivor, and by invoking the million-to-one chance that is a dead cert in a magical tale. He has not appeared for some time now, whereas the characters from the tales of the witches of Lancre and the complicated polity of Ankh-Morpork have appeared more grimly. Evil in Discworld has been getting more solid and nastier, while the ordinary defenders of com mon sense and practical morality have been suffering from exhaustion. Granny Weatherwax, the senior witch in Lancre, began like Vimes as a ribald comic "character" and grew into complications and intelligence. She faces real moral problems. She plays (and fiddles) a gambling game against Death for the life of a mother or a child, and then has to choose which to save when she wins. She makes the practical choice, and doesn't ask the husband, who would have made the sentimental one. She has recently been faced with a genuinely nasty set of vampires whose comic edge only makes them nastier - like Pratchett's elves they are supremely speciesist and egocentric. She is given to entering a state of suspended animation during which she carefully hangs a label on herself - "I aten't dead", or, more recently, when readers had believed she might have been defeated, "I STILL aten't dead". Vimes too, inhabiting his own past as a dead hero, is in a state of suspended animation. I have never liked stories where characters visit either the past or the future of their "real" lives - except possibly for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . Such stories attenuate both their reality and the hopes and fears they meet in the story they are now in. This feeling is strong in Night Watch . The alternative Vimes is only a hypothesis. But the nastiness he faces - loosely based on the fascist nastiness of the real Cable Street and on police corruption and torture everywhere - is unusually nasty for Pratchett, and Death's appearances are only perfunctory and not consoling. Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. Our ends are Death and, as I said, Pratchett likes to move wild laughter in its throat. His real horrors are the Undead, and the bad witch trapped in a hall of mirrors unable to find the door to life or death, and the ghouls who try to invade from beyond the confines of space-time. There is something a bit sleight-of-hand about turning Vimes into an Undead and making him face real horrors in an alternative past. This weakening of fictive reality is not compensated for by our meetings with the young Vetinari as a junior member of the Assassins' Guild, or the urchin Nobby as a police informer, or the dead-rat salesman Dibbler before he got his slogan of "Cut-me-own-throat". But there is one lovely touch. One of the dead Watch heroes is the stolid Reg Shoe - who will reappear as a conscripted zombie, greenish, smelly and prone to lose body-parts, in the multispecies Watch of the fictive present. Stories both trap people in a continuum and console them with images of beginnings and ends. Pratchett is a master storyteller. AS Byatt's A Whistling Woman is published by Chatto. To order Night Watch for pounds 15.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. To win a signed copy of Night Watch , the entire Discworld backlist and signed artwork visit www.guardian.co.uk/ books. Caption: article-byatt.1 His characters die quite frequently. When they do, they take time to realise what has happened. They are met by [Terry Pratchett]'s personified Death - a skeleton with a scythe, an hourglass and a white horse called Binkie - who has organised himself to resemble what human beings think he is, is courteously inhuman, but has increasing bouts of oddly caring behaviour, prompted by his long association with our agitated species. These matter-of-fact deaths are curiously comforting - people shake themselves and stagger or stroll off in the direction of the horizon. The device means that good characters can die without outrage, though I remember being shocked by the first death I encountered - that of an ordinary, brave dwarf in Men at Arms who, by normal fairy-story rights, should have survived to triumph over evil. Pratchett invented the City Watch of his squirming and insanitary metropolis Ankh-Morpork, he once said, so as to make heroes of the supernumerary guardsmen and extras who are present in most stories simply to be killed in droves to show how bad the bad characters are, before the hero deals out justice. Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. Our ends are Death and, as I said, Pratchett likes to move wild laughter in its throat. His real horrors are the Undead, and the bad witch trapped in a hall of mirrors unable to find the door to life or death, and the ghouls who try to invade from beyond the confines of space-time. There is something a bit sleight-of-hand about turning Vimes into an Undead and making him face real horrors in an alternative past. This weakening of fictive reality is not compensated for by our meetings with the young Vetinari as a junior member of the Assassins' Guild, or the urchin Nobby as a police informer, or the dead-rat salesman Dibbler before he got his slogan of "Cut-me-own-throat". But there is one lovely touch. One of the dead Watch heroes is the stolid Reg Shoe - who will reappear as a conscripted zombie, greenish, smelly and prone to lose body-parts, in the multispecies Watch of the fictive present. Stories both trap people in a continuum and console them with images of beginnings and ends. Pratchett is a master storyteller. - AS Byatt.
Kirkus Review
Another Discworld yarn-#28 if you're counting (The Last Hero, 2001, etc.). Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch has it made: he's a duke, rich, respected, and his wife Sybil is about to give birth. But then Vimes is called away to deal with a notorious and ruthless murderer, Carcer, now trapped on the roof of the university library. Amid a furious storm, lightning and magic hurl Sam and Carcer 20 years back in time. Sam's younger self is a rookie Night Watch cop. History, and Sam's memory, tells that Sam learned his street smarts from a skillful, straight-arrow cop named John Keel. But Carcer's arrived in the past, too-and he's murdered Keel. In the same fight (coincidentally?), Sam received an injury he remembers Keel having. Must he somehow impersonate Keel, and teach young Sam how to survive? What will the History Monks-the holy men who ensure that what's supposed to happen, happens-do? Adding further complications, Sam knows that the current ruler of the city, Lord Winder, is both mad and utterly corrupt: revolution's a-brewing, with riots, street barricades, cavalry charges, and thousands dead. And the horrid Unmentionables, Winder's secret torturers and jailers, must be curbed-especially when Carcer turns up in charge of them. Not a side-splitter this time, though broadly amusing and bubbling with wit and wisdom: both an excellent story and a tribute to beat cops everywhere, doing their hair-raising jobs with quiet courage and determination.
Library Journal Review
A freak accident hurls Commander Sam Vines back into his own past, where he must assume a new identity and watch his younger self struggle to rise in the ranks of the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork while tracking down a dangerous criminal and finding a way to return to his own time. The 28th addition to Pratchett's "Discworld" series explores time travel and historical inevitability with cleverness and humor. The author's talent for comedy does not falter as he continues to set the standard for comic fantasy. A good choice, particularly where the series is popular. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.