Of Swords and Parasols

Mort’s father thinks that Mort thinks too much to ever be a good farmer, and so he takes Mort to a local hiring fare, hoping he’ll be chosen as someone’s apprentice. It looks like he’ll be left to rot when a cloaked skeleton on a white horse rides up and offers him a job as his apprentice. At least, Mort sees a cloaked skeleton offering him a job as Death’s apprentice. His father sees an undertaker.

This is kind of a take on “Death takes a holiday” except that this Death tries to actually be responsible about it and train a replacement. Mort, however, isn’t very good at it and seems to mess up as often as not, something that Death doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy playing with kittens and trying to make more creative bugs and hint that Mort should marry Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabell. Since Mort and Ysabell pretty much hate each other, Mort is trying very hard not to notice the hints, and Ysabell is hoping that he’s successful at that.

This is my third Pratchett, and probably the one that worked best for me, though I spent a lot of it not really sure what I thought of it. I thought Death was a hoot (though I was briefly worried that he was going to make kitten curry, and if he did, you can just keep it to yourself) and enjoyed the zaniness of Mort’s mistakes and his various allies. I wouldn’t have minded reading an entire book at the princess who was supposed to die but didn’t, but the universe thought she was so she had to forcibly remind everyone she was there.

Also, Pratchett spent a lot of time dwelling on the fact that Discworld is supported by four giant elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. This made me wonder if there were people who lived near the edge of Discworld who could actually see the elephant’s heads, or see over the side. Or is that one of the things Pratchett would say their brains protected them from and would create an alternative?

This is the first book in what I understand is a subseries of Pratchett’s Discworld series.

The book focuses on the Night Watch of the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Watch is essentially a joke. Guilds have made everything that should be illegal legal, and the Watch is composed of a group of misfits who seem to spend their time drinking and avoiding work and looking for things to steal. This changes (maybe) with the introduction of Carrot, a human foundling who was raised by dwarves who was sent to the Watch because people objected to his sniffing around a certain dwarf girl’s skirts to gain character and experience. Carrot has memorized all the laws and ordinances of Ankh-Morpork and is determined to uphold them.

Which results in his arrested the leader of the Thieves Guild on his first day. While his fellow Watchmen try to make him understand how the city works, it also inspires their leader, Vimes, to take a closer look at some recent events in the city.

“Recent events” being that, prior to Carrot’s arrival a secret society decided that they were being oppressed by…well, really, but pretty much everything that exists. To get rid of the oppression, they decided to replace Ankh-Morpork’s Patriarch. To do so, they summoned a dragon so they could create a hero to defeat it and become a puppet king.

This is a very fun, very tongue-in-cheek, mostly straightforward parody of your standard Fantasyland city and plot. I had fun, but I’m afraid I didn’t retain a whole lot. That, however, may have more to do with my being rather exhausted a lot lately. I found it disconcerting, however, when I realized about 2/3 through that only one woman seemed to have a speaking role, and that primarily becomes she seems to be being set up to be Vimes’s love interest (but she breeds swamp dragon’s and when told she has to be a sacrifice to the dragon, she misdirects her fetchers then does her best to run away screaming for help, so I can’t complain about her). Other women are mentioned, but either because they’re the girl Carrot left in the dwarven mines, prostitutes, or in the context of whether or not their virgins, and thus suitable as dragon sacrifices. All of which makes perfect sense in the context of the Fantasyland parody that the book has going for it, but it was an odd realization.