(no subject)

[skygiants]

Okay, 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 spoiler-cut it -- that a good portion of the high army command are women passing as men, all trained by Jackrum, all too scared to do anything except shove other incidences of women doing the same thing under the rug. And Jackrum says, "You made it on your own, ladies. What could you have done if you'd acted together?"

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 Maladicta drags out her reveal as long as she does -- innerbrat says she reads Maladict as trans, but I don't think that's quite it, because when Maladicta gives her reasons for cross-dressing, they're the same as everybody else's, and she's Maladicta from there on out, and in female uniform at the end. Jackrum I do read as trans, and Polly and Maladicta genderqueer to some extent. But I'm curious how other people read them all, and read the whole thing.

I also spent the last thirty pages really puzzled why the internet shipped Polly/Maladicta when the ending seemed to be setting up nice domestic Polly/Shufti, and, I mean, I understand it now, but that was sort of a rapid switch. And I'm not really sure what Vimes & Co. are doing there. (I don't think Vimes knows what he's doing there either, but that's another story.)

And I don't know how I feel about Polly as the new Jackrum. Because Jackrum is terrifying. In a fantastically effective way, but still. But also, if you still need a Jackrum, things haven't changed enough. The war hasn't changed. Nothing is resolved -- but that's part of the point, I guess, that nothing can be. Maybe. I don't know. It's a really weird book!

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!

Comments

[ceitfianna]

Its one of the books that I haven't reread since it struck me as so weird and uncomfortable. I don't remember all the details of it, but it left me feeling at a loss.

[skygiants]

I think right now I like it in sort of the same way I love Diana Wynne Jones' Black Maria -- it's an incredibly bizarre book, and problematic in a couple ways, but it's so strangely ambitious that I find it really fascinating.

[ceitfianna]

That's one of hers I found myself liking a lot for its strangeness, Fire and Hemlock and the science fiction one something Magic both bothered me more and left me feeling rather more unsettled. Black Maria if its the same one that's also sometimes Aunt Maria felt complicated and not easy, but the end fit the world, which wasn't a nice world.

[adiva_calandia]

I should probably reread with an eye to social critique instead of storytelling, but I was just so put off by the reveal at the end that I've been kind of sour on the whole book ever since. PTerry already did the whole "really the whole government is made up of LADIES" thing in Fifth Elephant, and I thought he did it much better there.

[skygiants]

Fifth Elephant is kind of a much more coherent book, overall! I agree, it doesn't really work here. But there are some ways in which I almost like it better here because I feel like it's trying to do more even though it fails, if that makes sense.

[rymenhild]

I remember thinking that Monstrous Regiment must have been early Pratchett. And of course it can't be! Aren't there cameos from The Truth in there too? Maybe I was confusing Monstrous Regiment with Equal Rites, insofar as both are odd, off-kilter books trying to engage with feminism and gender theory and not entirely succeeding. MR does better than ER, yes.

But that army of women, fighting for no reason at all... I get echoes of General Jinjur and Frank Baum's take on the ridiculousness of women soldiers. Baum is mocking the idea of armies of women, not praising it. Pratchett isn't entirely sure, for reasons you articulate, what he wants.

(I wonder if Pratchett has read the Oz books. They're very much American fantasy, and Pratchett is very British, and yet something seems instinctively right to me about the possibility that Oz is an ancestor of Discworld.)

[batyatoon]

Oh that's a fascinating thought, re Oz and Discworld.

(I would be a lot more peeved at Baum for mocking the idea of armies of women, except that he has pretty much never had armies or soldiers of any sort that he didn't mock.)

[skygiants]

There are indeed! It's really pretty late Pratchett -- and I can totally see where you get the comparison to Equal Rites, even though they don't actually much remind me of each other. I can barely even remember Equal Rites, much less engage with it seriously. One thing I will say for Monstrous Regiment is that I can engage with it, confused as it is. The plot structure is completely turned around, but the people in it feel real to me.

See, yeah, and this is the problem with mixing "Sweet Polly Oliver" and World War I together. It's not that it's an army of women fighting for no reason, or that women soldiers are ridiculous -- Sergeant Jackrum is the last thing from incompetent or ridiculous. It's that Pratchett thinks pretty much any reason to fight is no reason. And he does do a good job of evoking the horrors of war and the ways in which it's more complicated than just "stop fighting," and if this were just a book about that, it would be a better and more complicated one than Jingo, really, which is about sort of the same thing. But because he's trying to do that PLUS the gender stuff, the sort of mis-aimed points about gender distract almost entirely from the points about war and the entire thing gets pulled off-kilter.

(. . . huh. Yeah, you know, I totally bet it is.)

[gogollescent]

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

This is the best description of Monstrous Regiment I've ever read.

And yeah, I think Polly is set up to perhaps become as effective and ruthless as Jackrum--certainly as scary in her own way--but at least from her personality in the book I didn't quite buy the direct-successor line; Polly struck me as a quiet, subtle operator type who wouldn't bother to disguise her intelligence with anything other than nondescript competence, as opposed to Jackrum's enthusiastic violence.

You're also right about the collectivist notes to Jackrum's speech at the court-martial, which I'd never really considered before; it's funny because, Pratchett being Pratchett, you still get this idea floating through Polly's head that really everything hinged on Wazzer getting to the right place at the right time. On the other hand, Wazzer is given remarkably little focus in the book except as a plot device, compared with, like, Brutha, and despite her intercession with the war with Ankh-Morpork Borogravia is back at it in the spring, with its main hope presumably lying in the reform of its military hierarchy. Which we… do not get solid promise of; inklings of change, but not more than that, bar the happy endings for individual characters. Man, such a weird book. I do remember being pretty enthused about the possibility of a practical domestic arrangement with Polly and Shufti and Paul right up until I reached the ending, at which point I submitted to my earlier impulses and went with the time-tested choice of vampire/cute blonde.

[skygiants]

Not to overuse a word beloved of English majors, but, man, the whole last third of the book is SO KAFKAESQUE. None of the actual plot points make any sense except on a surrealist level!

And yes, that's the thing about Polly. She's very competent, and she's learning a lot from Jackrum, but I don't think she can be Jackrum, because she's a very different sort of person. The "you are my little lads" bellowing is going to fall flat for her after a while.

Wazzer is SUCH a plot device, which is partly because there are so many subplots floating around this book that it's hard to keep track of any one character who isn't Polly -- like, Jade and Igorina basically get entirely lost in the shuffle, and that should be quite hard to do, considering they're a troll and an Igor. And in the long run I'm not really sure she does resolve anything, except possibly the gender stuff, maybe? Like, Polly and Maladicta are making an effort to resolve it anyway, and there's hope for that? But the war's still going, and God's still dead and crazy, and there's not been much progress on any of those fronts, so . . .

I mean, that said, I still want to go seek out all the Polly/Maladicta fic, so.

[gogollescent]

She also just seems to lack the lung capacity. Maybe she can get Maladicta to do the shouting for her, when necessary.

Yeah, I remember wondering what the hell happened to Jade and Igorina--I think there are throwaway lines about a date for Jade with an Ankh-Morpork watchman and Igorina starting her own private practice? but that's about all I can dredge up. Though I also remember that I really liked that Monstrous Regiment was a book full of women who weren't actually in line with Pratchett's usual mold of smart, attractive-but-not-too-attractive (or else resignedly fat) young women protagonists who go around being more sensible than everyone else and sorting things out thereby. Even Polly feels really quite different from Tiffany or Susan or Adora Belle Dearheart, because Polly is… I don't know, she's kind of an asshole in ways that have nothing to do with meddling with other people's affairs or thinking she knows best? She's in fact pretty self-interested and focused for most of the book, which is great; she's genre savvy but doesn't have the same cognizance that she is not and will never be the hero. I love Polly.

And you never get anyone like Shufti or Tonker or Lofty in the other books, where the female characters who aren't, uh, classically headstrong usually just make up for it by turning out to have a secret core of resilience at a critical moment, rather than mixing weakness with stubbornness in fairly complicated ways. At least in my memory. Hell, where else in Discworld do you get a kind of powerful, high-handed woman like General Froc, who reminded me more than anything of Prince Cadram? So much of Pratchett's feminist stuff happens with the witches, and the thing is that while there's lots of variety and depth to the cast of the witches books they're also all, basically, nosy intelligent helpers defending the world against evil, which is not at all the case for the Borogravian military.

[skygiants]

Yeah, Jade ends up hooking up with a troll dude and there are the usual jokes about troll romance, I do remember that. But Jade was never much of a personality onscreen anyway except for "the troll." But yes, one hundred percent word on the book full of complicated and different women. I LOVE Polly when she is a judgmental jerk. I love all the ways in which she tells herself that she's doing this out of altruism/family loyalty, which is definitely true in part, but also tied just as much into how she wants to secure her own future. (Which makes the ending where she walks away from the inn make even less sense, although now that I think of that, that sort of echoes Shufti -- you spend the whole book pursuing the sure future you don't want, and then find out you're a different person at the end of it. So maybe that does work, after all.)

Tonker and Lofty, especially, I don't think it would be even possible to have in another Discworld book, because there's nothing funny about Tonker and Lofty, and nothing that leavens the intensity of them. The anger they both have and the way they take it out on the world -- Pratchett usually doesn't let his good-aligned characters be that frightening, unless they're, like, Granny Weatherwax, who is terrifying, but who is working on a generally higher altruistic plane out of a sense of duty. And Tonker and Lofty aren't that, and their happy ending is going off together in their fierce codependency and burning down more buildings, which is actually pretty amazing.

[gogollescent]

Yesss, the layers of motive! And I love that section where she acknowledges it and thinks through the fact that as much as she cares about her brother and has tasked herself with protecting him, she also needs him for her own ends--and the fact that she's having these slow cold thoughts because for the first time the terror is settling in. I think I bought Polly outliving those goals as Shufti did hers, but it definitely could have done with more attention paid to it; it gets backloaded against all the other kerfuffle and when she finds Paul it's just that one gorgeous image of him and the chalk buzzard, which doesn't conjure up all that earlier pragmatism.

Tonky and Lofter are so removed from his ordinary run of one-off heroes. I mean, when are his protagonists even the survivors of that degree of abuse? When do his victims come away full of rage, rather than going the route of Mr. Nutt? Monstrous Regiment in general seems more willing to engage with the kind of humanity that Pratchett frequently talks about in his other books, the people-are-people-in-all-their-fucked-up-ways part of humanity that usually just ends up as a faceless mass to be defended by more exceptional paragons. I mean, I don't want to generalize too much, but like… somehow the combination of anti-war themes plus Secret Women Everywhere plus yet another run at awful religion made for a degree of unsentimental sympathy for the population at large that isn't always present? People feel more desperate in Monstrous Regiment than in Interesting Times or Small Gods or any of the Watch books that feature Cockbill Street; not because their circumstances are necessarily worse but because they seem to have more dimension. Some of them really weird dimensions.

In the same vein, I can't think of a grand antagonist in Monstrous Regiment, though there are a lot of people who would totally have been the grand antagonist in another book--Jackrum is like two degrees to the left from one of Pratchett's time-tested inexplicable serial killer villains, and slightly more degrees to the right from one of his blind warmongerers, which is a pretty narrow strip to walk. I dunno. Who else is there--Strappi? Nuggin? Evil's very diffuse, and so the solutions feel messy. It's not just Vimes sitting on a boat internal monologuing about how politicians are dirty after a comparatively bloodless solution.

Okay also I kind of got away from Tonker and Lofty there but have you ever wondered what would happen if they broke Azula out of good guy jail? Like, when the giant space lion turtle that bears the Avatar planet runs across the Great A'Tuin, and hilarity ensues? I hadn't until five minutes ago. Now I'm fixating.

[skygiants]

People feel more desperate in Monstrous Regiment than in Interesting Times or Small Gods or any of the Watch books that feature Cockbill Street; not because their circumstances are necessarily worse but because they seem to have more dimension.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely it. I mean, the vast mass of people-who-are-people in most Discworld books are basically comic types when you get down to it -- it's pretty rare that you get background characters who are kind of looked at seriously. Even in Night Watch the background people are, like, the bourgeois couple who argue about putting Granny's rocking chair on the barricade, that kind of thing.

It always amazes me that Jackrum isn't an antagonist -- and it amazes me that Blouse, comical as he sometimes is, isn't incompetent. Like, it amazes me that the Blouse vs. Jackrum bits in the middle of the book are a serious contest, and one in which there is no clear right and wrong. And Nuggan is dead, and Strappi disappears, and the prince of the enemy nation is just kind of silly, and the war machine chews everybody up equally.

sdjf;slkdfjWHY HAS NO ONE WRITTEN THIS YET.

[batyatoon]

I remember so little of it, except that I didn't enjoy it much at all and I didn't buy the ending. I should give it another shot with a more critical eye.

[skygiants]

I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it this time around, given how ambivalent my memories were from the first time. Like, structurally it's a mess, but there were some parts and some people that really got me, in a good way.

[carmarthen]

I read Mal as trans, but a trans character Pratchett doesn't know what the fuck to do with because trans anything is so far out of his worldview (I have the same issues with a lot of how he writes about dwarf gender) so he ends up shoving Mal in the expected 'girl' box the same way he implies that dwarves who perform human-female-gender obviously must have the plumbing to match, and that human-female-gender IS female gender and dwarf-mono-gender must therefore be equivalent to human-male-gender...anyway, a lot of people with more authority have written about dwarf gender much more coherently than I can.

Otherwise, I should probably reread to have any other thoughts on the book.

[skygiants]

From a Doylist perspective, that makes total sense. I am totally willing to buy Mal as trans. I'm glad there isn't even any canon to ignore with Jackrum, though -- even though Polly's suggestion of going back to interact with Jackrum Jr. as Grandpa Jackrum rather than Grandma is phrased as social convenience, we really don't ever get any evidence that Jackrum sees himself as female in any way other than inconvenient body at all. Which I'm glad of!

OH MAN DWARF GENDER. I do not in any way have the qualifications to talk about the problematics with dwarf gender stuff, buuuuut yeah, as you say. Boxes.

[carmarthen]

Normally I don't go for Doylist interpretations, but I can't do much Watsonian with Pratchett and gender, alas.

[skygiants]

FAIR AND VALID.

[damselfish]

Do you happen to have any links on the writings of dwarf gender? Because now I'm curious to see if much younger me was anywhere near the point when she was like "wait. Pratchett. Stop. No."

[kate_nepveu]

Here is a fic that you may find interesting! http://archiveofourown.org/works/10603

[carmarthen]

http://nemertea.tumblr.com/post/40772599663/moar-discworld-rambling - very brief. I know he's written more extensively about dwarf gender elsewhere, but I can't find it and I'm not sure it was a public post anyway.

[minkhollow]

I haven't read this one in ages, but I would go with Maladict as trans these days. When I was 16 and didn't know that was a thing I was more '...no, that's overkill, CAN'T ONE OF THEM JUST BE A DUDE.' These days? Okay, sure, dude.

Also, because I was raised on a healthy diet of Vietnam-protest-era classic rock, I laughed my ass off at "What We Are Fighting For."

[skygiants]

I read the whole thing as overkill as a teenager. Now I read it as . . . man, I don't even know what I read it as. But whatever it is, it's fascinating!

[esmenet]

Monstrous Regiment is my favoritist favorite Discworld book (though it wasn't really until I listened to the audiobook three times) so it's really hard for me to do any sort of coherent critique of it. I do rather love the ending, though, because all this grand mythic stuff happens with Wazzer and the Duchess and the high command, and Polly hammers a deal out with Vimes so Borogravia can begin putting itself back together -- and then no, everything isn't fixed, we're back to war again. And then again, Polly is the Jackrum of her generation, yes, but this generation is different. They've got newspapers, they've got the clacks, they've got women openly in the army. And Polly is planning to fight /this/ war the same way she ended up fighting the last one -- with information and public image. Like ... things aren't resolved, because you can't fix something that big that quickly, but now we've got a foot in the door.

...idk, I love this book beyond all reason so I can't be coherent about it. And Polly/Maladict is my absolute favorite kind of ship, too, so when I picked it up on the third or fourth reading I was just like YES PLZ.

[skygiants]

Haha, I'm happy to have someone pop up in here who actually likes it! I've been a bit surprised to see everyone come express vague distaste for it, to be honest; I mean, I know it's not a fully comfortable book, and also that I didn't like it at first, but Polly and Jackrum and Mal and Blouse and Discworld's very first canon lesbians!

I don't think it's possible for the ending to have been fully resolved, I agree. I mean, I also don't think the non-resolution was actually well done from a structural standpoint -- and it's jarring, because in all other Discworld books things do get resolved. This is an experiment, and a pretty weird one, but I'm glad he tried it.

[carmarthen]

I like it, too!! It's actually one of my favorites, even though I find Mal a little frustrating.

[tree_and_leaf]

It feels to me as if it naturally needs a sequel - but also that Pratchett doesn't actually know how to do it. I'm not sure whether I want to see him try or not...

[skygiants]

. . . man, I have no idea what a sequel would even look like. But then I guess presumably neither does Pratchett . . .

[opusculasedfera]

It is such a weird book, and yet for me it's overwhelmingly the book of ...everyone is a girl? FUCK YES, EVERYONE IS A GIRL. YES. THAT. It was something I appreciated tremendously when I first read it, though I really should do a reread and see how it feels to me now that I have a more nuanced understanding of genderqueer issues because yeah, there's some definite weirdness about "real" gender going on. (The first time, I was young, and dumb, and generally in favour of trans people being allowed to do their thing, but also completely ignorant of what that really meant.)

I think of Polly/Maladicta as being at least partially based on their friendship from before the reveal, but I may be misremembering the degree to which that was emotionally meaningful as opposed to just more memorably funny than Shufti's story.

[skygiants]

Weirdly, I actually respond more to it in that way now than I did when I was a teenager -- like, at the time, it was like "but this isn't how that story GOES!" and now it's like "but damn, look at ALL THESE different women! Just look at them!"

And, like, in some ways, I sort of like that there's room to read all different levels of queerness into the girls, that it's not just flat "identifies female" and "identifies male," because sometimes it is even more complicated than that! And I'm not sure that's what Pratchett actually intended at all, but I like being able to read that anyway.

[oracne]

I totally have to reread this now.

[skygiants]

It rewards it, I think! It's just such a fascinating tangle of a book.

[raven]

I'm glad to see someone else express their discomfort with this one! I like a LOT about it - I love Polly, and Jackrum, and Maledict, and a lot of the social commentary (I especially like the nod towards performative gender with the scene where the women pretend to be men pretending to be women!) but it doesn't hold together for me in the end. The ending, with the war beginning again, straight-up annoys me - I feel like he can't have it both ways, he can't have this big myffic ending and the war-is-endless-hell trope. And yeah, Maledict ought to have been explicitly trans, dammit, that's where the novel is going and going and going - until it's not? Yeah. Apparently I have lots of suppressed feelings about this one!

[skygiants]

Yeah, my feelings about it are as muddled as the book itself is, really -- I really like it, and I think it's really interesting, and says some things that are absolutely right, and some things that I think are pretty much just wrong, and it's hard to disentangle them. And the ending just . . . isn't. But, like, I can sort of see what he was trying to do with it, I think, if I squint! Maybe? I DON'T KNOW.

[lacewood]

I remember feeling the story was quite odd and not what I'd expected from Pratchett, but I didn't necessarily dislike it, I think. I should re-read it again and see how I feel now that I know to expect the off-kilter sense of weirdness and the rather depressing overall view. XD

[skygiants]

Heh, yeah, it is very un-Pratchett-ish Pratchett. And really, that's sort of to be expected -- it's one step further than Night Watch, and that book was already a step away from your usual Discworld fare -- but then, the next one is Going Postal, and I feel like that book takes a leap and a bound back into safe normal Discworld territory. (But I haven't actually reread it yet so I could also be talking out of my ass with that.)

[elsane]

Ah, Monstrous Regiment.

I have to admit that I really liked this book, because, girls! They're all girls! And some of them are religious nut balls, and some of them are domestic by preference, and some of them are militant and angsty, and some of them are straight up competent, and some of them are Igors, and some of them are lesbian, and some of them are Maledict, and they are all women. Hit me in my id, why don't you. Except the ending is absolutely weird and unbalanced, no question about it. It's definitely a have a cake and eat it too ending, and I don't know what to make of it. The climax has that sweeping id-nature, but the ending shows that any change is incremental, and it just doesn't go. Is it a problem that I liked Polly too much to care? (Possibly.)

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I never read Maledict as trans, or Polly/Maledict as a ship, before the gentle suggestions of the Internet, though when led to the light, both of them are obvious. Part of this is me reading my own issues into it, as I'm both cis and het but strongly gender-nonconforming, so Polly-Maledicta as friends/colleagues/comrades-in-arms was hugely meaningful to me. And I can understand Maledicta's reluctance to admit her commonality with the rest of the corps as part of her "I can't completely let go of the idea that I'm better than you", instead of being trans, though I am intrigued by the trans reading! As a woman in a male-dominated field, I've seen all too often the few trailblazers ahead of me get used to being the only woman, and special, and enjoying the status that gives them; admitting commonality with a community of women is a huge step for them, and not one they're always happy to take.

[skygiants]

Oh my gosh, I love all the DIFFERENT women in the regiment, and how all of them are awesome in different ways -- even though Polly comes in judging pretty much all of them (because that's who Polly is, and she enjoys her sense of superiority, which is of course one of the reasons I love her) and then they all turn out to be far more complicated than she expected.

I mean, I don't think it's necessary to read Maladict as trans necessarily; as I said in a comment above, I think, there's a part of me that sort of likes that it's not as clear-cut as "identifies female" and "identifies male," that a lot of these people are still sort of struggling with who they are and what they want to be. But then, you get that with Polly, who is firmly gender-straddling by the end of the book, and I can totally see why anyone would want to have Mal as firmly trans and representing that identity that really doesn't get shown very often. I really like your reading also, though! And I think that ties in very much to the class stuff with Mal, too, which is as much or more a factor in her relationships with the rest of them as the vampire thing and the gender thing.

[miss_s_b]

I love monstrous regiment. In less enlightened times I could totally see myself as a Jackrum, because although I'm not trans, given the binary choice available I would totally go sergeant over housewife, and be bloody good at it to.

Also I am reliably informed that you're awesome and this post seems to beat that out, so I'm adding you.

[skygiants]

Hah! I would be such a terrible sergeant. I can't really see myself as any of the ladies except maybe (bizarrely) Igorina, but nonetheless I truly love them all.

And heh, hello and welcome! :) I will endeavor not to disappoint.

[miss_s_b]

I'd be a terrible officer, because I actually care, but I think sergeant would suit me ;)