The time travel element is handled sensitively and believably and gives an insight into old Ankh-Morpork which fits in perfectly with the previously sketchy details of how bad things were in the old days.

Both the hero (Vimes) and the main villain (Carcer) make great character studies and are treated like real people influencing events rather than plot-driving juggernauts. Pratchett's understanding of human nature and capability for more serious storytelling shines through here. Listening to it now I'm very glad I chose it. Sheep just ran they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.I don't remember being blown away by this book when I first read it, but that was close to a decade ago and I wasn't really old enough to appreciate this story, which is deep and complex even by Pratchett's standards. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep.

It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. 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.Īs soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. “There were plotters, there was no doubt about it.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett