Fantasy

Review: Men at Arms

Jay
Cover of the book, featuring an old fashioned-looking brass pistol on a background of swirling blue.

Title: Men at Arms

Series: Discworld #15 (City Watch #2)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, major character death, blood, gun violence, murder, body horror, injury, fantasy racism, animal cruelty, alcoholism, xenophobia

Spoiler Warning: This book is fifteenth in a series, but both this book and this review contain only mild spoilers of Guards! Guards!

Back Cover:

Be a man in the City Watch. The City Watch needs men.

But what it’s got includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-Constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-Constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-Constable Angua (a woman…most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving). And they need all the help they can get. Because they’ve only got twenty-four hours to clean up the town – and this is Ankh-Morpork we’re talking about…

Review:

This book is difficult to review, for a couple reasons. One is that it’s not particularly remarkable. I mean that in the sense that there’s not a lot to remark on – it’s still a solidly good book, with the absurd humor and wacky shenanigans you expect from a Discworld story. But nothing really jumped out at me to say “this is worth mentioning.”

I think a large part of that – and the second reason it’s so hard to review – was because there were just so many characters running around. There’s Corporal Carrot and Captain Vimes, of course, as well as Corporal Nobbs, all of whom I’m familiar with from the last City Guard book. Then there’s the three new recruits, Lance-Constable Cuddy, Lance-Constable Detritus, and Lance-Constable Angua. The obnoxious talking dog from Moving Pictures is back and only slightly less obnoxious. And that’s just the major characters! There’s also an assortment of dwarves and trolls, some assassin’s guild members, some fool’s guild members, a couple beggar’s guild members, Lord Vetinari, Lady Sibyl, and I’m sure a few more that I’m not remembering off the top of my head.

With that many characters happening, the plot feels spread out and disjointed even though it really isn’t. The main plot is a mystery, trying to figure out who is committing a series of murders and how they’re doing it. There are also subplots of Captain Vimes’ impending marriage, romance between Carrot and Angua (she’s a woman and he’s the protagonist of this sub-series, it was predictable), a brewing race war between dwarves and trolls, and also a scheme to depose Vetinari and put a king on the throne of Ankh-Morpork that’s brought up in the beginning like it’s going to be the main plot and then almost completely forgotten until the end. If this book only focused on Carrot, I think it could have been manageable. But with so many sub-plots spread out across so many characters, it lost a lot of its coherence and also a lot of its impact.

It feels like this book is trying to do a lot of social commentary in a very small space. The Night Watch gets some “diversity hires,” there’s a plot to give Ankh-Morpork a king again, someone invents a gun. But this book is not spectacularly long and there’s so much happening that very little actually came through clearly. The messages “kings = bad” and “guns make people more violent” came through, but not very strongly. The clearest message was in support of diversity.

Don’t get me wrong, this book is good. It’s fun, entertaining, wacky, funny, and occasionally emotional. It’s just trying to do more things than it has space for, and ends up feeling diluted and occasionally disconnected. It’s still a perfectly solid book and a very enjoyable read – one of those that you don’t really start to notice the issues until you try to write a book review about it – but I think it could have used a little streamlining.

The Discworld series:

  1. The Colour of Magic
  2. The Light Fantastic
  3. Equal Rites
  4. Mort
  5. Sourcery
  6. Wyrd Sisters
  7. Pyramids
  8. Guards! Guards!
  9. Eric
  10. Moving Pictures
  11. Reaper Man
  12. Witches Abroad
  13. Small Gods
  14. Lords and Ladies
  15. Men at Arms
  16. Soul Music
  17. Interesting Times
  18. Maskerade
  19. Feet of Clay
  20. Hogfather
  21. Jingo
  22. The Last Continent
  23. Carpe Jugulum
  24. The Fifth Elephant
  25. The Truth
  26. Thief of Time
  27. The Last Hero
  28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
  29. Night Watch
  30. The Wee Free Men
  31. Monstrous Regiment
  32. A Hat Full of Sky
  33. Going Postal
  34. Thud!
  35. Wintersmith
  36. Making Money
  37. Unseen Academicals
  38. I Shall Wear Midnight
  39. Snuff
  40. Raising Steam
  41. The Shepherd’s Crown