Monstrous Regiment
Once upon a time, when the world was still enormously old but I was a good deal younger, a friend with whom I played D&D pressed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic on me, telling me it was the best thing ever. So off I went and read it and it was indeed the best thing ever.
Well, I was 14 at the time.
I reread it again recently and it’s still funny, but it’s only really funny if you grew up reading huge amounts of sf and fantasy. Structurally it’s a mess, both character and plot are subservient to jokes. The jokes are good, but there’s nothing else there. A couple of books later I bought my first hardback Pratchett, Equal Rites1 in which Terry discovered the art of writing real characters, but which isn’t as funny as the first couple. With the fourth book, Mort he really hit his stride and he’s been turning out Discworld books at a rate of slightly less than 2 a year since then.
That’s a phenomenal workrate. It would be tempting to assume that books produced so quickly would surely become repetitive, formulaic, joyless lumps of prose. A few years ago I might have agreed that things were to looking a little worrying; the books were still great fun, but there wasn’t really anything new happening.
Then, around the time of Maurice, Pratchett seemed to find a new gear, or possibly a whole new engine. The last few books have had a depth and power and, well, a seriousness that the earlier books (with a few glorious exceptions) lack.[2]
This brings us to Monstrous Regiment, Terry’s latest effort. I’m finding it hard to say anything coherent about it at the moment beyond “It’s utterly fabulous! Buy yourself a copy now, I don’t care if you’ve always hated Pratchett, you owe it to yourself to read this book.” However, honour dictates that I have a go.
Monstrous Regiment opens with Polly Perks dressing herself in man’s array and running off to ‘list as private Oliver Perks in the old In-and-Outs. Pratchett has long been outed as an old folky so Polly/Oliver comes as no surprise to me at least, and my expectations were nicely set up by the traditional themes of folksongs like Polly Oliver, Jackie Munroe and all the others (Terry even manages to work in a nice variant of the broken token theme later on) which, this being the Discworld, are both confounded utterly and realised beautifully.
Polly’s squad of recruits under the fearsome Sergeant Jackrum includes a troll, a vampire and an Igor (Igors are henchmen, they generally have surgeon’s hands - if they didn’t when they started there’s usually some other Igor about who’ll find them a decent pair - and talk with thpectacularly affected lithpth).
It’s almost impossible to describe the plot without giving away huge chunks of it, and there’s a good deal of pleasure to be had simply from Terry’s handling of plot and character. But that’s not why this is such a great book.
Monstrous Regiment pulls together all of Terry’s big themes, and a few current concerns and presents us with a view of how the world could be. The Discworld is often described as a ‘mirror of worlds’, and that mirror is used with particular skill here. Almost in passing Terry sets up Ankh-Morpork as the Disc’s only super power and then shows us a much more humane use of economic power to quell a ‘rogue state’ than anything we’ve seen in this world. At the same time, he sets up Polly’s country, Borogravia, as a mirror of Victorian England, ruled over by an ancient Duchess who’s been in mourning since her husband died. Except, the war is remarkably like the idiocy of the first world war rather than any of those fought during Victoria’s reign. Oh yes, and then there’s the Joan of Arc figure. And the Magdalene Laundries, and… You can spend an awful long time playing ‘spot the reference’ with any of Terry’s books. Many of the references are deliberate.
And he shows us how worlds are often changed not by kings and ministers, but by individuals who just want to make their lives and the lives of their family and friends a little bit better. The desire to make the world a little bit fairer and more compassionate can be a remarkably powerful force on the Disc, I like to think the same applies on this Globe.
Although Monstrous Regiment draws together a lot of the threads and themes of earlier Discworld books, it’s also one of the most accessible of Terry’s recent books for anyone who’s never read his stuff before. The only catch with starting here is that you’ll be starting from a very high point indeed. So, as I said earlier, buy this book. It made me laugh, cry and think. All at the same time.
1 This seems to have been a remarkably astute investment given some of the prices I’ve seen people asking for it. Now if I could just find the bloody thing.
2 Actually that’s not quite fair. Terry’s ‘juvenile’ books generally talk about serious themes in ways which the Discworld books have only recently started to approach.
