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Feb. 18th, 2013 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOkay, 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!
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!
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Date: 2013-02-19 02:51 am (UTC)