A thought on reading Monstrous Regiment

There's a truly enormous amount that could be said about Terry Pratchett and his work. One day I may try and do that. For the moment, may I just observe that his recent Discworld novels (the adult ones, that is) have been amassing a degree of emotional honesty and realism that is beginning to make even the humour look out of place, let alone the comedy trolls and vampires?

Night Watch was extremely good, possibly the best thing Pratchett has ever written, short on laughs though it was. As a study of the absurdity of conflict -- of footsoldiers dying from decisions made by those of a social stratum completely alien to them -- it's very fine. Not quite Les Miserables, perhaps, but within spitting distance of Catch-22.

Monstrous Regiment is more of the same, although now with added comedy vampires. Perhaps Pratchett feels (or his readers have told him) that Night Watch was overly bleak, but to my mind that was what made it magnificent. If I were Pratchett (please God), I'd continue to skim off the whimsical zaniness into his Discworld books for younger readers (which are also pretty good, and not without their own deadly-earnest aspects), and take the adult novels further along the route Night Watch is heading in.

With his wacky early oeuvre -- not to mention his chosen genre, although as I've suggested that's becoming less and less relevant with the progression of his career -- Pratchett is unlikely to be treated by the contemporary literary establishment with the seriousness he deserves. (All credit, though, to AS Byatt for bucking that consensus.) In a couple of generations' time, however, he's going to have been one of our major, and most significant, novelists. He owes it to the readers of that era to leave them the best work he's able to.