Monstrous Regiment - Review

I have three main problems with Monstrous Regiment.

1. It is boring. Polly is not an interesting character. She has one underlying motivation – to find her brother – and that is all. She likes her hair I guess? Okay. The rest of the cast is no better, save perhaps Blouse. So she becomes leader of a group just like hers, and takes up a Jackrum-like persona. Um, okay?

2. It is pointless. We are transported to an area of the world we have never heard about even vaguely, and a good deal of effort is expended trying to flesh out this awful location. The watch are completely superfluous here. The country is embroiled in a pointless war, and the little squad doesn’t change anything. The deaths they cause are needless, and if the characters hadn’t even joined up the ending would have been the same.

3. It is preachy. I believe the best stories have a message to share, but Pratchett is unusually heavy-handed here – it’s all message and no story. It squeezes in a lot of awful clichés – the abusive priest, the Victorian-esque workhouse for girls, the evils of blind faith, hypocrisy, censorship and propaganda, women being treated as inferior to men, the terrible things people are driven to in war. All of these issues he has tackled before, and far more eloquently. Angua, the witches and Susan are excellent proponents of feminism, Small Gods is an interesting take on belief and so on. There are too many ideas he's trying to explore in this one book.

I remember it coming out around the time of our actions in Iraq, so there’s also the fact that Ankh Morpork is only intervening because the clacks towers and the mail road are being destroyed, to serve their own interests. I thought it pretty blatant at the time and re-reading it hasn't changed my mind. Still, I did like the end of it when the general grimness was lightened, the obvious "oh they're all girls what a surprise" was out in the open and interesting stuff could actually happen.

It had the bad luck to come out between Night Watch and Going Postal, two excellent Pratchett stories. I guess they can't all be gems.