Night Watch

"Yes. Night Watch is also one of the Guards books—that’s his series of police procedurals which began with Guards! Guards! in 1989. That book introduces the character of Sam Vimes, who shouldn’t really be the hero; that should be the character Carrot, a young man who was raised by dwarves in the mountains, who has obviously got a mysterious destiny, a magic sword, all that. What Pratchett does, which is his genius, is that he brings that character in, but makes him a secondary character. That mysterious destiny just never manifests. What that does is that it leaves a hole in the story that pulls in other characters, including this character Sam Vimes, the captain of the Night Watch, who is a cynical, alcoholic curmudgeon, but also as it turns out a great detective and someone with a really well-honed sense of right and wrong, and fury at injustice. That starts in Guards! Guards! and the character grows massively through the series in a way that mirrored Pratchett’s own life—although Vimes got there first. In the books, Vimes ends up one of the richest and most powerful men in the city, becomes Sir Samuel Vimes, later becomes a duke. Pratchett also became massively wealthy and was knighted. So it’s a great example of life imitating art. There was a purple patch of Terry’s writing, from 2001 onwards, before the Alzheimer’s began to take the edge off his writing, sadly. There was a period, though, where he was completely unstoppable: masterpiece after masterpiece after masterpiece. And that really started with Night Watch. “There was a period where he was completely unstoppable: masterpiece after masterpiece after masterpiece” Night Watch is a story about morality. In it, Vimes finds himself zapped thirty years back into the past, and cast in the role of his own mentor. He knows that his mentor dies in a tragic, failed revolution—so he already knows that is going to happen. So this means that Pratchett gets to play with all these ideas of revolution. There’s a lot of Les Misérables in there, a lot of waving flags on the barricades. But there’s also talk about why revolutions are called revolutions—because another one will come along later. And about who it’s for: it’s for the people, but who are the people, and why would you trust them? It’s very cynical and very wise. And it has this ticking clock at the heart, because you know he must die at the end of the story, and he must impart all his advice to his younger self, whilst also—crucially—catching the murderer that he originally went back in time to find. So there’s a nice bit of Terminator in there as well, a time travel parody. It’s an incredibly vivid, visceral book. It’s probably the darkest of his books, and one of the few that are legitimately thrillers . Plus, even with all of this going on, he always finds time to be funny. If you asked a lot of Terry Pratchett fans what their favourite Terry Pratchett book was, if they didn’t have Night Watch at number one, it would certainly be in their top five. It’s an extraordinary book, and one that I always return to. He was incredibly widely read. The only person who gets every joke in a Terry Pratchett book is Terry Pratchett. Because there are just so many. He discovered the joy of reading as a child and was obsessed with the library. First he read all the books about space and astronomy at Beaconsfield library in Buckinghamshire, England. Then he moved into science fiction , which led to fantasy , which led into mythology and history… Soon he was reading, like, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor alongside the Moomins alongside Dickens. He got hold of every copy of Punch magazine in a secondhand bookshop, going back to the 19th century, and read them all cover to cover. He was an absolute sponge for trivia. He was always learning. The Discworld came about in a really roundabout way. He was writing a science fiction book called Strata in the late 1970s, which is about alien artifacts. It’s a kind of parody of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a ring-shaped world that goes around the sun. But he thought: okay, what if it’s not a ring, but a flat world, a disc. That’s mythology. So I could populate that flat world with mythological creatures. That was the original idea. Then he remembered something he read once about Hindu mythology and the ‘world turtle’. So he was taking one idea from science fiction books, one idea from mythology, and channelling the real world through it. He was a widely read polymath who knew so much, and was quite indiscriminate: he knew Shakespeare, he knew Dickens , he knew physics and maths, but he also loved Alien and musicals. So you have all these references, which is one of the reasons that the books work so well: one set of people get one layer of jokes, another set get a different, totally different, layer of jokes. And one group will never notice the other jokes are even there."

"This book is Pratchett at his best, for me. It’s a really solid thriller. What he does with the Vimes character is that he makes a policeman: just any copper. He’s a copper who thinks like a copper. He doesn’t trust clues. And because it’s the Discworld, he’s a copper who knows his frame of reference: he knows about Raymond Chandler, he knows about Poirot. He’s the type of character who’s constantly winking at the genre that he’s also a part of. Somehow, despite all that winking, he’s an actual brilliant character, who solves the mystery by being dogged, in the same way that Marlowe does, but has Sherlock Holmes-like abilities of deduction. He can also sit down and ponder things through like Poirot. So he’s got elements of all the best detectives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But then, it’s a fantasy. It’s also a time travel book. And Pratchett does all these things brilliantly. He gives you everything you’d want from a time travel book – like, he goes back in time and intersects with a younger version of himself, who he has to train up to be the man he’s going to become. Because you’ve seen Vimes grow over the course of the books that he’s been in, in Pratchett’s Discworld, you know the person that this young man will become. Pratchett knows that – you keep getting to these meta levels, and he uses it all. It’s all warm and familiar. He knows exactly what you’re thinking – it’s almost a love letter to his own readers. I actually didn’t read this book until afterwards. When I started Evelyn , I didn’t want to read anything to do with time travel. I didn’t want to see any time travel movies, books, anything even vaguely in the wheelhouse of what I was trying to do, because I was so worried that someone could have already done it, or something so similar that I couldn’t carry on doing what I was doing – or that they would have some great idea that I couldn’t help but steal. And I love that genre! But I tried to recuse myself from as much of it as possible for two-and-a-half years. I found Night Watch on the other side of that."