Well, this was a joy from start to finish. It is a long time since I read it last so it wasn’t completely familiar although I did remember who the bad guy was. This didn’t spoil the narrative though, just allowed me to spot some of the clues that Pratchett left for the reader.

This is the first of the novels involving Vimes, Colon, Nobby and Carrot. I’d forgotten the alcoholic beginnings of Captain Vimes and how the Watch were a complete joke. Colon and Nobby feel a little less fully formed than in later novels but Vimes has all the hallmarks of the great character that he becomes in later books. (In fact, in a tie with Granny Weatherwax, I would say that Vimes is my favourite Pratchett creation.)

It felt like an apt novel to be reading given the current state of the world. A mysterious brotherhood, led by an ambitious and arrogant leader, summon a dragon, aiming to use it to trick the populous into accepting the king who would appear at just the right moment and kill the dragon (which would helpfully disappear at just the right moment). However, the dragon does not want to stay unsummoned and very quickly becomes the new leader of Anhk-Morpork and not long after that demands that a human sacrifice is made. This does not cause the outrage you may expect amongst the inhabitants of Ankh Morpork who are pragmatic to a man and quickly weigh up the pros and cons of having a dragon leader and come down on the side of as long as its not me who is being sacrificed, life could be worse. Vetinari has this to say about it – “Down there – he said – are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.” This resonates hugely with the current political situation and suggests Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the banality of evil. Bad things happen because we allow them to.

Of course, this is all done in a humorous manner. A lot of the laughter comes from the arrival of Carrot in the city. He has been brought up by dwarves and thinks of himself as a dwarf despite being six foot. His father (the dwarf who took him in after he was found in the woods) writes to the Watch and asks them to give Carrot a position. When he arrives in the city, he has a book of laws which he follows to the letter, leading him to arrest the head of the thief’s guild. The interactions between him, Colon and Nobby as he learns the ropes are comedy gold. There is also the start of one of the funniest running jokes with the million to one chance of managing to shoot the dragon. They are unsure whether it really is a million to one chance and so add other elements to make it more unlikely. We also have one of my favourite jokes when Carrot (who tends to take things literally) actually throws the book at the villain.

Added to this we have the awkward budding romance between Vimes and Lady Ramkin. Lady Ramkin is the sort of posh woman who spends their life in scruffy old clothes in order to look after her dragons. Vimes is a cynical, world weary drunk. Somehow Pratchett makes it feel like they are a perfect match.

While the City Guard novels become more sophisticated than this and the characters may become more rounded, this is a very good start which definitely stands the text of time.