Men at Arms

Men at Arms (1993) Terry Pratchett

Another reread and another Night Watch story.

This one also had several passages that stuck with me. Such as,

And this was right. And it was fate that had let Edward recognize this just when he’d got his plan. And it was right that it was Fate, and the city would be Saved from its ignoble present by its glorious past. He had the Means, and he had the end. And so on….Edward’s thoughts often ran like this.

He could think in italics. Such people need watching.

Preferably from a safe distance.

But the passage that comes frequently to mind is the one where Vimes considers the difference between the rich and the poor.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. These were the kinds of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years time, when a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

That is so true it’s actually disturbing.

But there are still plenty of things that are true and hilarious.

…when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, ‘Oh, random-fluccuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!’ or ‘Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!’

And I need to stop, or I’ll be here for hours typing in some of my favorite quotations.

Oh yeah. Captain Vimes is getting married, the Night Watch is being forced to integrate dwarves and trolls and someone has stolen a terrible artifact from the Assassin’s Guild.
Rating: 9/10

Published by Random House

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