Now this is an outstanding book.

I first read this, very reluctantly, when I was in third or fourth grade,
at my teacher’s suggestion. I went on to read it over and over, and then
eventually I forgot about it. And then the other day, when I was at the
bookstore looking for good books to read aloud to David at bedtime I
happened upon it. Renewing my acquaintance with it has been one of the
most pleasant aspects of the past couple of weeks.

Oh, and Dave liked it, too.

It’s January, 1849. Young Jack’s parents are dead; he and his two
sisters have been living in the old family home in Boston with Aunt
Arabella, and the butler, whose name is Praiseworthy. The family money
has run out, and in less than a year Aunt Arabella will have to sell the
house. Gold has been discovered in California, and Jack resolves to run
away to the gold fields, strike it rich, and return with his fortune to
save the family home. Praiseworthy discovers the scheme, of course–and
thinks it an excellent plan. As the book opens, Praiseworthy and Jack
are stowaways on the good ship Lady Wilma, en route to San
Francisco by way of Cape Horn.

That’s the premise; how they get to California and the gold fields, and
what happens after, is the story. I won’t spoil it by telling it all
here. I’ll just say that Fleischman is an outstanding story teller, and his
prose is a joy to read aloud. More than that, without any lecturing he
manages not only to tell Jack and Praiseworthy’s story, but also to let
us in on quite of bit of historical information about the Gold Rush, and
the gold camps, and how gold mining was done. I learned a lot of what I
know about the Gold Rush from this book, and while I’ve added to that
information in the years since, the book is still striking in its
accuracy. (For example–I’ve been to several of the gold towns Jack and
Praiseworthy visit.)

This is a kid’s book, sure. But if you’re planning a trip to
California’s Gold Country you could pick a worse introduction. And even
if you’re not, it makes a heck of a good yarn no matter how old you are.

This one picks up some time after the end of Guards, Guards.
Sam Vimes, still Captain of the Night Watch, is also engaged to marry
Lady Sybil Ramkin, dragon-fancier and one of the wealthiest people in
Ankh-Morpork. Carrot, watchman and rightful king of Ankh-Morpork, is now
a corporal, and has come to know the city very well. This is a
good thing, as the steady influx of trolls and dwarves to the city is
fueling an equally steady rise in ethnic violence. The Patrician, Lord
Vetinari, has responded by insisting that the Night Watch take on some
new recruits: a troll, a dwarf, and beautiful woman who’s also–but
that’s getting ahead of things.

One of the old writers of hardboiled detective novels–Raymond Chandler,
or maybe Dashiell Hammett–once said that when your plot is stuck, introduce a
man with a gun. And that’s what Pratchett has done here. There’s
exactly one gun on the Disc, and it’s in the hands of a man who thinks
that Ankh-Morpork needs a king again. Will Carrot play along? Therein
lies the tale.

Having just read about Sam Vimes’ earliest days in the watch in
Night Watch, I decided that I’d like to go back to the first
book Pratchett wrote about Sam Vimes and work my way forward. And that
brought me to Guards, Guards!.

When we first see him, Sam’s drunk in the gutter. There are two reasons for
that; one is that he’s normally about two drinks more sober than everyone
else, and needs a drink or two just to reach parity. The other is that
he’s a good copper at heart and there’s nothing of any value for
him to do but drink. When Lord Vetinari came to power he legalized
thievery–chartered an entire Thieves’ Guild in fact. The thieves are
allowed a certain amount of larceny every year, in return for which they
pledge to deal harshly with any unlicensed thieves. More than that, most
well-to-do citizens simply pay the Guild a small fee every year, for
which they are officially immune from thievery for the year.

So all-in-all, things have been pretty peaceful in Ankh-Morpork, and the Night
Watch has become nearly obsolete. Where once it had many watch houses,
now there’s only one, and that houses only three watchmen. Captain Sam
Vimes, Sergeant Fred Colon, and Corporal Nobby Nobbs.

But there are currents of change oozing down the River Ankh. Dwarves and
Trolls have been moving to the city in record numbers, along with
zombies, vampires, and werewolves. Inter-species violence is on the rise.
There will be rioting in the streets if something isn’t done.

And then there’s an ambitious fool with a plan to give Ankh-Morpork a
king again. It’s been almost three hundred years since King Lorenzo got
a well-deserved axe in the neck, but he had a son who escaped. What’s
more romantic, more proper, than the notion that the line of kings have
bred in hiding all these years, disguised in humble garb, only to come
save the city in its hour of need. All that’s necessary is to summon a
handy dragon to give the city something to be saved from.

And then, and then, there’s the Night Watch’s first new recruit in ages.
Corporal Carrot, the dwarf. At least, he thinks he’s a dwarf, although
he’s well over six feet tall. He was raised by dwarves; they found him
when he was a baby in the wreckage of a wagon destroyed by bandits. The
people with him were all dead. Hidden in the body of the wagon was a
sword. And on Carrot’s arm, there’s a birthmark in the shape of a
crown….

The tone here is entirely different than in Night Watch, which
as I’ve said is hysterically funny and dead serious at the same time.
Here Pratchett is simply having fun with the idea of the “City Guard”,
those poor sods (rather like the Red Shirts in Star Trek) who get called
out in every fantasy novel just so they can get killed. And, like many
of the Discworld books, Pratchett has a lot of fun with the idea of
“narrative causality”.

The Disc is a very magical place; it has to be,
just to exist. It doesn’t have much use for natural laws, but it does
have things it uses for natural laws, and one of them is narrative
causality–the fact that stories have power, and when a story is
happening, certain things just have to happen in a certain way. Thanks to
narrative causality, million-to-one shots can be trusted to come up nine
times out of ten….

This is Pratchett’s latest novel; as usual when a new Discworld book
comes out, I commenced to read it to Jane on the way home from the book
store. It occupied our evenings quite nicely for the next week or so.
It was a delight to read aloud, as is usual, it was sometimes
sidesplittingly funny, as is usual, it was a good time all the way
around, as is usual.

Sam Vimes is one of Pratchett’s ever increasing cast of continuing
characters. He first appears in Guards, Guards as the
alcoholic Captain Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch. Over the
next several books in which he appears, the city grows over more diverse,
and Vimes rises in rank. By the time of this book he is Sir Samuel
Vimes, Duke of Ankh, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and a
power in the city. And (though no longer a drunk) still the same
hardnosed irascible copper he started out as.

As a thunderstorm brews, Vimes’ watchmen (and dwarves, and trolls, etc.)
have run a silver-tongued psychopath named Carcer to ground atop the
roofs of Unseen University. Vimes himself mounts the dome of the
University Library to capture him, just as lightning strikes.

On the Discworld, a lighting strike is always accompanied by a strong
magic field. And as anyone familiar with Unseen University can tell you,
the last place you’d want to be hit by lightning and the accompanying
magic field is any part of the University Library. Both Vimes and Carcer
are thrown thirty years into past, into an incredibly busy and fraught
week.

It’s the week after Vimes first joined the Night Watch. It’s the week
that Mad Lord Winder’s madness reaches its peak. It’s a week of
revolution in the streets. And thanks to the cheerfully murderous
Carcer, one of the most important players during that week is
dead-on-arrival to Ankh-Morpork. As Vimes soon discovers, he has to
take on the dead man’s name and role–or history will be changed, and
he’ll never get back to his own time.

So much for plot summaries. This book is markedly different than its
predecessors. It’s still funny, it’s still well-written, it’s still
greatly entertaining–but at the same time, it’s also dead serious. It’s
about cities and civilization, and about making things work; it’s about
being responsible for your own job and your own patch of ground and
insisting that here, at least, Evil Will Not Be Tolerated.

It isn’t Pratchett’s out-and-out funniest book; but it might well be his
best to date.

When Neil Madden reviewed Look to Windward last month, I was
both pleased and disappointed. Pleased because it meant there was
another Banks novel on the horizon; disappointed because I figured he was
reading a British edition and that it might be months before it hit the
shelves in the U.S. Much to my surprise, I found a copy of it the next
time I went the book store.

I won’t repeat the plot; Neil covered that in Ex Libris.

This is one of the more accessible Culture novels; and as always the
scenery is gorgeous. Banks has an outstanding imagination. The story
itself, however, is only so-so; some of his other books (notably
The Player of Games) are much better. But I have to admit,
the scenery is just about worth the trip. I wish I had Banks’ gift for
names; the “dirigible behemothaur” just about made my day.