{"id":4459,"date":"2018-02-15T05:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4459"},"modified":"2018-02-11T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T17:41:07","slug":"mark-reads-night-watch-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2018\/02\/mark-reads-night-watch-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘Night Watch’: Part 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fifth part of Night Watch<\/i>, Vimes learns the rules. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whew, this is so dense and exciting LET ME YELL ABOUT ALL THE THINGS I ENJOYED IN THIS SECTION.<\/p>\n

\n
I actually did<\/i> dig the Garden of Inner-City Tranquility, especially since it reminded me so much of what it felt like to live in downtown Los Angeles nearly a decade ago. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where I was the year before I moved up to Oakland, and I can honestly say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s changed a lot<\/i> since I lived there. Was it for the better? I dunno, I feel like a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clean up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of a neighborhood usually means that someone had to be pushed out for that to happen. Progress routinely happens at the expense of someone else, you know?<\/li>\n
BUT OKAY, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122M HONESTLY NOT TRYING TO GET ALL SERIOUS HERE. I have a different tolerance for the sights, smells, and sounds of a city, especially since I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve gravitated to large metropolitan areas once I was able to. For example: I know people are disgusted by the way New York City deals with garbage. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do big-ass dumpsters or recycling bins; my super packs our garbage into large black trash bags (recycling goes into clear bags on the day it gets picked up) and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s piled on the sidewalk just off the way from the alley behind our building. I should note that sidewalks in my neighborhood are two to three times wider than I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m used to in most places in California, so it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually block anyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s path.<\/li>\n
The point I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m making is that this is just the standard here, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already gotten used to it. So I feel like that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part of the joke of Lu-Tze\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garden. Life is just different<\/i> here, and thus, Lu-Tze manages to pull meaning from everything that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the garden.<\/li>\n
Well, not everything. Not that damn beer bottle!<\/li>\n
In the Garden of Inner-City Tranquility, Lu-Tze walks Vimes through the ground rules of multiverses so that he can understand why he can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just be popped back home and why the universe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s magic may have deliberately<\/i> dropped him into this specific moment. What upset the timeline enough to pull Vimes here is still a mystery, but I suspect it has to do something with Carcer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arrival and his first crime: murdering John Keel a day earlier. Is this all a course correction? Is history trying to repair itself?<\/li>\n
That question is almost unnecessary, though, because Lu-Tze does his best to impart the importance of Vimes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s will. More so than perhaps ever<\/i> before in Vimes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life, the man has the chance to change the entire<\/i> universe. Without the nudge that happened at this exact time, a multiverse option may become reality: Vimes will become a terrible<\/i> cop. And how can he not, when he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s surrounded by people like Sergeant Knock, Corporal Quirke, and Constable Colon?<\/li>\n
I found it interesting that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re flat-out told that these two new characters were awful people, but not shown that. Normally, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a weird way to tell a story, right? Why wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we be shown why this might unfold into the darkest timeline? But I think this was necessary for a different reason: we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already seen good<\/i> Vimes. These secondary characters aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as important when compared to the main conflict, which is that Young Vimes lost the mentor that guided him towards being a good person.<\/li>\n
(Admittedly, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m curious why Colon is included here. I suspect he will be shown to be even more<\/i> bigoted than he has been in past books?)<\/li>\n
Thus, this is a quantum paradox, since two timelines are currently existing side-by-side, and the History Monks can only maintain them for a few days before one of them takes hold of history and becomes reality. And at this point, the bad<\/i> timeline has got the upper hand, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it?<\/li>\n
I love this because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not<\/i> the traditional time travel story I normally read. Time is not relative to Vimes, and his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153present\u00e2\u20ac\u009d timeline could be overrun by the multiverse one. Thus, the main conflict has REAL tension. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s believable, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scary, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s absolutely an engaging idea. Vimes has to stop himself from becoming a nightmare<\/i>.<\/li>\n
QU. At least I figured out the reference not long after it was made. I UNDERSTOOD IT.<\/li>\n
Can we appreciate that he made a privy that dumps waste into a volcano ten million years in the past? LET\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S MAKE A LITTER BOX FOR CATS THAT DOES THIS, TOO.<\/li>\n
So, with this weighty and important mission in mind, Vimes is snapped back into the Watch House, where he proceeds to BEAUTIFULLY manipulate Captain Tilden into GIVING HIM A JOB. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, he got arrested and GOT A JOB OUT OF IT. He literally threatened Tilden to WALK OUT THE DOOR AFTER BEING ARRESTED IF HE DIDN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T GET HIRED. I just??!??! I ADORE VIMES.<\/li>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about authority. Pratchett takes it to an extreme length, of course, but y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Vimes just acts<\/i> like he has authority, and he is given literally everything he asks for. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s incredible!<\/li>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also incredible to see the transformation come over him. I recalled how much he missed the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153good ol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 days,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d before he ran the Watch, before he cared so much. And look: he got what he wanted. He gets to walk a beat in boots whose soles are nearly worn through.<\/li>\n
But the time he is in is bleak<\/i>, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Pratchett only gives us a small sense of the chaos; the curfews; Lord Winder; the violence. Vimes is comfortable being a Watch man, but he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not comfortable in this time. It seems there are constant reminders of that on the page, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m really<\/i> invested in seeing how these reminders will continue to manifest in the story.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122M SO EXCITED FOR THIS BOOK.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/youtu.be\/SNvh5lwJ7n0<\/p>\n
Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n
– My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now available for pre-order!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the fifth part of Night Watch, Vimes learns the rules. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[463,541,248],"class_list":["post-4459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-night-watch","tag-terry-pratchett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}