Time to build the barricades…
Summary
Vimes wakes up with the seamstresses, who have brought him to their place to talk to Madam Meserole. She asks him a lot of questions to determine his loyalties, trying to win him over to their side of the conflict. Vimes tells all of them that Snapcase will not be better than Winder, and that the guild he has promised the seamstresses will not come to fruition under his rule. He also insists that he means to go home, nothing more, and is dismissed. (It turns out that Havelock Vetinari was present for their entire conversation, and he chats with his aunt about having the distraction he needs.) Vimes is back at the Watch House, and gets intel from Nobby about what’s happening around the city. Captain Tilden is gone, putting him in charge, and he decides that he’s going to teach the men how to fight properly. Ned Coates comes out with his truncheon and sword and tries to fight Vimes in front of everyone, knowing that he’s not who he claims to be. Vimes manages to sucker punch him and gets them all training, when Swing shows up and gives them a sealed envelope and informs them of Tilden’s replacement. Vimes draws a line, asking everyone who wants to stay on and keep the peace to cross it. Coates says they’re all going to die and leaves.
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Vimes follows him, reveals that he knows he’s with the revolutionaries, and that Ned should leave the city. That conversation shakes him badly, and he manages to find his way back to the history monks’ hideout by the soles of his boots. He tells Lu-Tze that he needs assurances that the future he came from is still real, that it’s all slipping away from him. The Sweeper promises to give him something to hold onto, but insists that once Vimes leaves, he has to play his part as John Keel. Vimes agrees, and finds that history has changed when he heads back out—their new captain is Ronald Rust this time around. He demands to inspect the troops and believes their only purpose is to do what they’re told. He insists on going out on patrol, finding out which citizens are putting up barricades, and putting a stop to their flagrant disobedience. When they find one, Rust tells Vimes to find their ringleaders and bring the barricade down, but Vimes spirals in his own head as soon as he steps forward, aware that he’s in no position to tell these people what to do at a time like this. Vetinari signs out of school for the evening and steals an envelope from the office containing orders for another assassin. There are explosions in the street. Vimes finds his cigar case has been returned to him.
Moored once again by the future he knows, Vimes knocks out Rust, tells his men to lock him up, and tells the revolutionaries to rebuild their barricade in a better spot to keep everyone safe and make them all easier to defend. He meets Reg Shoe—not a zombie yet—who means to fight in his revolution. Vimes tells the men to push the barricades out farther and absorb more of the city so it’s easier to defend what they’ve got. They let in folks from other parts, including watchmen who’ve quit on account of the orders they were given. Then they absorb the Unmentionables Watch House and head in, finding all the people that were tortured. Vimes straps the torturer into the chair and handcuffs the clerk, and young Sam comes out from the cells crying and horrified at being complicit in all of this. He moves to kill the torturer, but Vimes won’t let him. They take the living prisoners outside (after Vimes mercy kills a few who are too far gone), and set fire to house. Only after does Vimes realize he left the torturer inside, and he goes back in to make sure the man has a fighting chance. There, he runs into Swing; they finally have it out. Vimes manages to kill Swing with a ruler and limps out of the Unmentionable Watch House.
Vetinari is watching the palace grounds from the whiskey distillery, finding out that the assassin who had been sent on the job he stole the information for has already met an untimely end. Vimes gets stitched up by Doctor Lawn and hears that the barricades have been pressed out farther than he’d like. Reg and the seamstresses are arguing about what should go into the charter for their new government, the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road. Carcer goes to the men in charge of the private armies of the city and tells them that Treacle Mine Road is the center of the unrest despite reports to the contrary. He tells them that he requires their assistance, and that this is a matter of martial law. The men are reticent (they can plainly see that he’s mad), but they’re not sure they can refuse him. Vimes talks to Colon because the barricades are now keeping in a quarter of the city, defending it from the chaos outside. Colon keeps letting in more people, to Vimes’s dismay, and he demands that they take everyone’s weapons just in case some of these folks aren’t actually on their side. He preps for the fight he knows is coming and behaves like Keel did so he can set an example for himself. And he finally takes a nap.
Commentary
The pacing and place of it all in this book is excellent because it’s muddy and perplexing in terms of the where and how and why of it all. This happens frequently in Pratchett books, the awareness that we’re only seeing part of what’s happening, and how it gives events an almost dreamlike quality. We’re given little bits and pieces around the events of the 25th of May, but we don’t know the specifics. Now we’re coming up on the main event and… we still don’t really know exactly why everything is unfolding as it is. There’s unrest, and the unrest is spreading, and we’ve got an idea of the players and how it looks from Vimes’s end of things, but that’s it.
And in truth, that’s how it should feel from the ground level—we upend narrative to make sense of it after the fact. While it’s happening everything is personal and messy and confusing. There are barricades, and then we take over the barricade, and then we push out the barricades, and some people are making a charter and who can really say why, or who’s in charge of the movement, or what any of it means?
In addition to the Les Mis connection, the explanations around the events read so much like the narrative built around Bloody Sunday that I have to assume it’s intentional: the military clashing with civilians when they’re not meant to be interacting at all; stories around who “shot” first; the way that people speak afterward about how none of these people “should have been there” at all. The reinvestigation into those events was up and running by the time this book was written, so they aren’t a surprising place to pull from.
This entire section features a complete breakdown in Vimes’s thought patterns, a reckoning with all he’s learned in the intervening years and a slow unspooling of his connection to the future he comes from. It’s brilliant, really, the way Vimes knows the connection is tenuous, how he starts faltering in his belief in it, the fact that it takes so little to restore his faith when Lu-Tze returns his cigar case. These are the places where Vimes is a great protagonist; he’s smart enough to know he’s doesn’t know everything, but he gets enough to philosophically angst about it.
He also thinks of how he’s learned that governments aren’t staffed by people who have a clue, and that “plans were what people made instead of thinking.” And that seems relevant when taking into account that it’s yet another place where he and Vetinari meet in the middle. I imagine most of the mulling he does around revolutions would resonate with his Patrician too.
This maybe hurts more than any paragraph in the English language, also:
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Just… don’t even look at me right now, I can’t.
There’s a deep awareness in Vimes of the tacit agreement among city people, a social contract that keep things running. He extends this to being a Watchman, noting that they don’t have numbers or good equipment, and people only have to listen to you until they decide they don’t. Of course, this is only true for the time he is currently occupying; it’s relevant that the Watch of his era is much better equipped, close to matching the militarization of the police we’re seeing in plenty of countries around the world. (Detritus’s bow is literally a siege weapon, after all, and Vimes always has to remind him not to use it instead of, y’know, not equipping him with such a heinous thing.)
Vimes knows he’s no better in the scheme of this, too; he even says as much to himself when he tries to tell young Sam that you can’t just take your rage out on others, only to have young him points out that he’s hit people over the head and knocked them out. He knows that the only difference is that he’s the one doing the knocking, and that everyone uses that as the reason, so it’s a bad one. There’s a lot of that in the book—an awareness that everyone knows they’re imperfect, but most folks are doing their best, and that perspective is all over the Discworld of course… but it lays heavier here due to the subject matter. Sometimes doing your best feels like the opposite of enough.
Now the glorious revolution is underway.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Sorry, the fact that they knocked Vimes unconscious and he started to snore, so they let him sleep.
- Do love the detail that Madam Meserole opens her champagne properly, because it’s not just that you lose bubbles when you break the thing open, it’s also a safety hazard. (If you ever try the saber technique in front of me, I will straight up take the bottle from you.)
- Okay, but Vimes doesn’t like horsemen because “Something in him resented being addressed by anyone eight feet above the ground,” and yeah, exactly. I have a hard time with tall people, and you want me to work even harder? Big short king energy on that.
Pratchettisms:
He’d fight the man next to him simply as a substitute for kneeing the whole universe in the groin.
A spent match sailed past, rolling from stone to stone like a scrap of food passed from ant to ant.
They looked again at the turning, shifting garden, and felt the fingers of history spreading out and into the world.
But Rust’s lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts.
But Rust was always a man to interrupt an answer with a demand for the answer he was in fact interrupting.
Dark sarcasm ought to be taught in schools, he thought.
Vimes saw the captain’s expression. It had a lot to say about idiots.
Vimes dragged his breeches up, fastening his belt and limped out into the road and also into an argument.
It’s a real solders’ song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
Next week we’ll finish the book!
