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Feb. 18th, 2013 07:38 pmOkay, Monstrous Regiment is incredibly interesting in the context of all the discussion about Night Watch the other week -- because one of the things we were talking about then, and that comes up in Night Watch, is that Pratchett doesn't really seem to believe in the effectiveness of collective social action. He believes in people. But groups of people are silly at best, and scary at worst.
And Monstrous Regiment reinforces that, absolutely -- witness Vimes at the beginning thinking about how countries can be mad even when everyone in them is perfectly sane -- but it also sort of almost contradicts it. There's this one moment when the reveal comes -- and since it is a legitimate reveal, I'm going to ( put it under a spoiler cut )
And -- like everything in this book -- it's sort of half-followed up on, in the end, and also sort of weirdly puts the blame on women for upholding the social structure instead of the social structure for existing. But that's still better than I thought it was, and better than we've ever seen in Discworld before, so apologies are due; Pratchett, I did not quite do you justice.
I really like Monstrous Regiment, and I like it much more now than I did when I was a teenager; I think I didn't quite know what to do with it then, because I knew how a Discworld book went, and I knew how cross-dressing-girl stories went, and this didn't match either of them. But then, it's a weird book, structurally. It's built out of a bunch of different things that don't necessarily go together; "Sweet Polly Oliver" and World War I and American foreign policy are all kind of wrapped up in it, and those threads are all tugging in different directions. And at first the cross-dressing premise seems like a joke that goes on too long, and then it turns into a sort of surrealist social critique, and then there are about three false endings, and then the actual ending isn't an ending at all. It's also grim, more grim even than Night Watch. Tonks and Lofty's backstory, especially -- there's no lighter side to that.
And I still have no idea why ( more spoilers )
There are other things I could talk about -- Tonks and Lofty, Jackrum vs. Blouse, and how outright creepy the whole book is in places -- but I think I'm going to leave it there for now. But I really want to know what you all make of it, because, as I have already repeated about three or four times, it's such a strange book!
And Monstrous Regiment reinforces that, absolutely -- witness Vimes at the beginning thinking about how countries can be mad even when everyone in them is perfectly sane -- but it also sort of almost contradicts it. There's this one moment when the reveal comes -- and since it is a legitimate reveal, I'm going to ( put it under a spoiler cut )
And -- like everything in this book -- it's sort of half-followed up on, in the end, and also sort of weirdly puts the blame on women for upholding the social structure instead of the social structure for existing. But that's still better than I thought it was, and better than we've ever seen in Discworld before, so apologies are due; Pratchett, I did not quite do you justice.
I really like Monstrous Regiment, and I like it much more now than I did when I was a teenager; I think I didn't quite know what to do with it then, because I knew how a Discworld book went, and I knew how cross-dressing-girl stories went, and this didn't match either of them. But then, it's a weird book, structurally. It's built out of a bunch of different things that don't necessarily go together; "Sweet Polly Oliver" and World War I and American foreign policy are all kind of wrapped up in it, and those threads are all tugging in different directions. And at first the cross-dressing premise seems like a joke that goes on too long, and then it turns into a sort of surrealist social critique, and then there are about three false endings, and then the actual ending isn't an ending at all. It's also grim, more grim even than Night Watch. Tonks and Lofty's backstory, especially -- there's no lighter side to that.
And I still have no idea why ( more spoilers )
There are other things I could talk about -- Tonks and Lofty, Jackrum vs. Blouse, and how outright creepy the whole book is in places -- but I think I'm going to leave it there for now. But I really want to know what you all make of it, because, as I have already repeated about three or four times, it's such a strange book!
