And now for the second installment of ‘the flatland chronicles’. As I mentioned the last time around, I am currently rereading the Discworld series, and a couple of days ago I finished ‘Guards! Guards!’ Seeing how this is the first book in the whole ‘City Watch’ series it is also probably among the best suited to serve as an introduction to the Discworld universe as a whole. Yes, the members of the watch still have some growing up left to do (Carrot’s commas are almost invariably in the wrong place in this one), but at least the characters that are actually there are clearly recognizable, and the Discworld itself comes across as being more fully fleshed than it was in ‘The Colour of Magic’.

As for the book itself, one of the things that caught my attention was how Monty Pythonesque some scenes actually were. A perfect example of this would be the first secret society scene, which I felt would have been right at home in either ‘The Life of Brian’ or in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’. Yes, it can be said that Monty Python is one of Pratchett’s most obvious influences throughout the series anyway, but in addition to that there is something about the Watch’s storylines themselves that makes them particularly well suited for such treatment (or at least that was the case at first, though even as the book progressed and the author grew more comfortable with his own characters that influence seemed to become a little more nuanced).

Oh, the fact that an author will grow more comfortable with a book’s characters as s/he becomes more acquainted with them is not really all that unusual, but the sheer extent of the Discworld series, and the fact that there wasn’t a single overarching story that the author wanted to tell when he set out to write this whole thing in the first place, combined to give him an unusual degree of freedom, and it also provided the rest of us with a particularly interesting case study in character maturation. That is, as far as I am concerned, one of the things you can get out of rereading this series (in case you need an excuse beyond the obvious entertainment value of the books themselves, that is).

After thinking it over for a while I decided to go back to the beginning and reread at least the first few books of the Discworld series… though I’m not ruling out the possibility of going over the whole thing again (in case you were wondering, I am currently in book 7, Pyramids). So far I have to say that it has been a very revealing experience, one that has given me an interesting perspective to how that particular universe has developed. One of the most interesting details that jumps out on a second reading is how vague Terry Pratchett’s idea seems to have been when The Colour of Magic was first published (or rather how far has his original idea come since then). Oh, there are some familiar elements. The Luggage is there, as is a prototypical Rincewind, who at times is barely recognizable… okay, he is not quite irrecognizable but he is clearly different from the character he will eventually become (in fact it could be argued that it is not until we get to Sourcery that he becomes the wizzard we know and love). As for Ankh-Morpork, the city is barely outlined, if at that… but then again, even though Ankh-Morpork serves as a starting point, it is not the main stage for this one.

On the other hand, while Rincewind and Ankh-Morpork are embryonic at best, the nature of the Discworld as such is front and center in a way it is not in later books. This is not surprising considering that the nature of that world is the starting point of the whole thing, and I suspect that one of the best decisions the author ever made was precisely the one allowing that nature to fade into the background. Sure, that nature never really goes away, and it remains a critical element of the story throughout –the series is called, after all, Discworld— but as amusing as the basic premise happens to be, by itself it probably wouldn’t have been enough to carry an almost forty book series. It was only when the disc was set aside that the world as such, with all of its assorted characters, was allowed to flourish.