Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! (1989) Terry Pratchett

I love Terry Pratchett, and I think I may love the Watch story arc best of all the Discworld stories.

It was a five hundred mile journey and, surprisingly, quite uneventful. People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, ‘Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

Especially because:

‘A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch,’ Carrot drew himself up proudly, ‘because someone’s taken a book? You think that’s worse than murder?’

The Librarian gave him the kind of look other people would reserve for people who said things like ‘What’s so bad about genocide?’

THE LIBRARIAN.

Very senior librarians, however, once they have proved themselves worthy by performing some valiant act of librarianship, are accepted into a secret order and are taught the raw arts of survival beyond the Shelves We Know. The Librarian was highly skilled in all of them, but what he was attempting now wouldn’t just get him thrown out of the Order but probably out of life itself.

And do NOT skip the footnotes.

The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

I miss Terry Pratchett.

Publisher: HarperCollins
Rating: 9.5/10

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