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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: 2013-02-20 04:37 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2013-02-20 11:11 pm (UTC)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.