| $@%&! level: Medium “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Medium Back Cover: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday will barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside. But not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. Rather, many, many bodies—and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, occasionally snookered and out of his mind. But never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase, and there must be a punishment. They say that in the end all sins are forgiven. But not quite all...” |
It’s interesting that so many of the Watch books have to do with race, one way or another. Maybe because that kind of unthinking prejudice is the foundation of an awful lot of crime. The number of racial (or rather, species-ist) feuds is kind of surprising actually. The trolls and dwarfs hate each other. The vampires and werewolves, ditto. Everyone looks down on the golems, but apparently the undead especially resent them. And the Watch has to deal with all this because Ankh-Morpork has officially declared that all these species are equally protected and punishable under the law. But they haven’t gotten around to goblins, yet. And that’s where the story really picks up. This one not only has to do with race, but also with slavery, and how society decides to define who is a “person” and who isn’t. Vimes gets pretty darn worked up about that, which causes all sorts of problems, especially because he’s way out of his jurisdiction. Not that that stops him. Or even slows him down much.
Just to make things even more amusing, of course, you have the supporting characters, which in this case include Willikins, the prim and proper butler who is also capable of homicidal mayhem when the situation calls for it; Lady Sybil, the ultimate authority in Vimes’s life and a siege engine of social change when she wants to be; and Young Sam, who is growing up and, being a six-year-old boy, is forensically interested in various bodily functions (especially poo) and is also willing to cuddle anyone who looks like they might need it. He’s just so cute. And the various Watchmen show up as well, of course, because it just wouldn’t be the same without them, but they’re really working on a secondary but tightly connected story. For me, the real action is always with Sam Vimes.
And in spite of huge amounts of excitement, flood, fire, storm, battles aboard river barges, and so forth, which I truly love reading, my actual favorite part of this book to come back and re-read is when Vimes takes some time to talk some sense into a bunch of “gently born” young women and introduce them to the idea that they don’t actually have to spend their lives being utterly useless. Basically, it’s Discworld meets Jane Austen, and if you want to know why I like it so much, just imagine the modern woman’s reaction to the idea that a man would expect to be paid to marry her (which is basically the description of a dowry). Much as I enjoy the books by Jane Austen, any man who actually expected modern women to behave anything remotely like that would be doomed to have his thinking forcibly readjusted, possibly with a brick. And sometimes it’s fun to have that kind of thing pointed out.