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Loading... Thud!by Terry Pratchett
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Raven | May 13, 2009 |  3   Thud! started very slowly and for a good hundred pages I thought reading the rest was going to be a chore, rather than a pleasure. However, I was relieved that not only the pace picked up, but some quality Pratchett appeared too. It's not as dark as Night Watch, but borders along that edge. It's clearly a different genre than his early quirky fantasy-comedy work, and I imagine that if Pratchett was churning out identical books his work would be quite stale. Thud! was clever as usual, progresses the Sam Vine storyline, has the requisite number of old characters and introduces quite a few new ones. Worth reading, but you won't laugh out loud and it's not quite sharp enough to have you on the edge of your seat. (  )SonicQuack | Apr 15, 2009 | www.snigel.nu | Apr 11, 2009 | When you think about it, this is a very complex murder story. It's still very entertaining, and perhaps more thought-provoking for being so. (  )sarams | Mar 22, 2009 | Thud! is a fantastic addition to the City Watch books. (  )ZanKnits | Feb 11, 2009 | 0.044 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Download Description (ISBN 0385608675, Hardcover)"It's a game of Trolls and Dwarfs where the player It's the noise a troll club makes when crushing It's the unsettling sound of history about It's the most extraordinary, outrageous, Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch admits he may not be the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer -- he might not even be a spoon. But he's dogged and honest and he'll be damned if he lets anyone disturb his city's always-tentative peace -- and that includes a rabble-rousing dwarf from the sticks (or deep beneath them) who's been stirring up big trouble on the eve of the anniversary of one of Discworld's most infamous historical events. Centuries earlier, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom Valley, a horde of trolls met a division of dwarfs in bloody combat. Though nobody's quite sure why they fought or who actually won, hundreds of years on each species still bears the cultural scars, and one views the other with simmering animosity and distrust. Lately, an influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens with incendiary speeches. And it doesn't help matters when the pint-size provocateur is discovered beaten to death ... with a troll club lying conveniently nearby. Vimes knows the well-being of his smoldering city depends on his ability to solve the Hamcrusher homicide without delay. (Vimes's secondmost-pressing responsibility, in fact, next to being home every evening at six sharp to read Where's My Cow? to Young Sam.) Whatever it takes to unstick this very sticky situation, Vimes will do it -- even tolerate having a vampire in the Watch. But there's more than one corpse waiting for him in the eerie, summoning darkness of the vast, labyrinthine mine network the dwarfs have been excavating in secret beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. A deadly puzzle is pulling Sam Vimes deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear -- and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself. "(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:25 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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So... I think I'm glad I re-read it. Pratchett can usually do no wrong in my eyes, and really, this one isn't a break in that pattern. Vimes is his usual glorious self, the Watch are chaotic and marvellous, and the story is full of glorious grace notes - A.E. Pessimal, the government inspector who wasn't named but initialled; Detritus bonding with a juvenile delinquent troll; Wilkins, Vimes's Jeeves-like butler with an improbably violent past; and the crowning touch, and also in other ways the core of the novel, Sam getting to know Young Sam, his baby son who must be read to every day at six o'clock (and if mountains have to be moved and major roads have to be closed in order for this to be achieved, well, so be it). It's its usually delightful self.
The one thing I would note with this one, though, is that it seems to be part of a progression. Guards! Guards! is very much a parody of generic-fantasy; then Men At Arms and Feet of Clay are police procedurals in a demented Discworld setting; Jingo and The Fifth Elephant are less about the Watch, and more about politics. Night Watch is a serious novel, with very little jokes. And this one... well, it has jokes in it again, but I get the distinct feeling that Pratchett has actually gone all the way round again, and the fantasy elements are starting to be taken seriously - the gloomy presence in this novel, the dwarfish mine-sign the Summoning Dark, is written to be explicitly creepy. It's done very well, of course. But it's interesting, that the parody of the genre is more or less gone (not that there isn't parody of other things - The Da Vinci Code is deliciously lampooned throughout), but the Watch books seem to have become a genre of their own. And that's... pleasing, I think. (