The new Discworld novel Night Watch has the power and energy that characterizes Terry Pratchett at his occasional best, as well as the wild surreal humour he always gives us. Sam Vimes, running hero of the Guards sequence, finds himself cast back in time to the Ankh-Morpork of his youth--a much nastier city, with an actively deranged Patrician and a sadistic secret police--and finding himself filling in for Keel, the tough honest copper who teaches the young Vimes everything he knows. And, more worryingly, who dies heroically in the insurrection Vimes knows to be imminent. With a psychopath from his own time rising in the vile ranks of the Cable Street Unmentionables complicating things, Vimes has to ensure that history takes its course so that he will have the right future to go back to, and to keep his younger self alive--this is Pratchett's plotting at its most thoroughly constructed and wonderfully devious. Ankh-Morpork has for a long time been one of the most thoroughly imagined cities in fantasy--here Pratchett gives us a fascinating gloomy glimpse of its past and of the younger selves of some of his best-loved characters, and of the brief-lived People's Republic of Treacle-Mine Road. --Roz Kaveney

2008-01-11 An Excellent Pratchett

Sam Vimes, one of the recurring characters in Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series, has been doing well. The humbly-born, pragmatic, streetwise, but basically honourable cop has risen to become Watch commander in Ankh-Morpork, chief of police in one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities of the Discworld. He has married late, and it is a love match, but the fact that his wife is an aristocrat and the wealthiest woman in the city has done his career no harm. He has come to the notice of the city's ruler Lord Vetinari (the Machiavellian politician's Machiavellian politician), who uses him for diplomatic missions where his talents will be more useful than those of the usual run of diplomats. This happened most memorably in "The Fifth Elephant", one of the best books of the series.
But now something has gone horribly wrong. A psychopathic cop-killer has been cornered in the wizards' university and Vimes is about to make the collar when an accidental discharge of magical energy throws them both thirty years into the past. In the less well-run city of those days he must act as mentor to his younger self, a rookie Watchman, he must try to foil, and then lead, a revolution, and he must try to get home, while keeping both his selves safe from the cop-killer who has quickly found a natural place in the secret police.
The "Discworld" novels can vary in quality, but overall seem to be getting even better as the series progresses. Entertaining and thought-provoking, "Night Watch" is definitely in the top rank.