Night Watch

Reviews / Votes

Compulsively readable. . . . Like Jonathan Swift, Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent. He shares with Aristophanes a sense of the comedian's mission to teach, and with Sophocles a concern to examine the rule of law versus the rights of the individual * Guardian * Night Watch can hold its own with the best of the Victorians and it beats the hell out of Bukowski. It has profound moral complexity, hard emotional impact, careful plotting, gritty political insight and, best of all, raw, urgent humanity * Sunday Times * In Night Watch, Vimes finds himself - along with a peculiarly unpleasant criminal called Carcer - caught in a time-warp, back in his own early days as a Watchman, trying to change the course of a bloody revolution. He is also concerned to prevent his own callow self as a lance-constable from getting killed, so that he may get back to the present and his child may be born. He has become a dead hero called John Keel, who helped to organise the barricades, but was also a Watch captain at Cable Street. His opponents include the corrupt Unmentionables, who arrest and torture people... [A] master storyteller... He is, of course, writing about us -- A.S.Byatt Both comic and dark, blending high fantasy, twisted storytelling and all manner of wordplay... a fine place to start reading Pratchett * New York Times Book Review * The book's rapid cinematic pace - quick cutting, multiple plot lines converging - never flags . . . [Pratchett's] using his wit and brilliant talent for characterization to attack every kind of intolerance . . . Night Watch turns out of be an unexpectedly moving novel about sacrifice and responsibility, its final scences leaving one near tears. . . Terry Pratchett may still be pegged as a comic novelist, but as Night Watch shows, he's a lot more * Washington Post Book World *