2007 Reading List - Jingo
Book Nine
Jingo by Terry Pratchett
A strange foreign country across the sea, a moneyed aristocracy eager to send young men off to war, political operatives using a flimsy pretext to incite nationalist and racist fervor to encourage said war....
Sounds unpleasantly familiar, which is probably why I was drawn to reading this book.
This is one of the Watch books in the Discworld series, and like so many of those books deals with the intersection between law and politics. In this case, a mysterious island surfaces halfway between the great city-state of Ankh-Morpork and the desert empire of Klatch. Naturally, both nations claim the island as their own, and tempers flare. Next thing you know, there's armies being built, speeches being made and there's war in the air. And Sir Samuel Vimes, the commander of the Watch, is certain that someone is up to something, that there's a crime being committed. It might be a crime on the scale of nations, but it is a crime nonetheless.
It's a great book, and timely, like so many of the more recent Discworld books. Pratchett has a deft pen and a great eye for the way the world truly works. And when seen through the jaded and cynical lens that is Sam Vimes, the hypocrisy and double-dealing become all that clearer. One line popped out at me:
"It had all sounded straightforward in Ankh-Morpork, he thought. We were going to sail into Klatch and be in al-Khali by teatime, drinking sherbet with pliant young women in the Rhoxie. The Klatchians would take one look at our weapons and run away...."
This was published back in 1997, by the way, well before we launched our own poorly thought-out, baseless invasion of a land and a people we didn't understand. Go Terry.
Jingo by Terry Pratchett
A strange foreign country across the sea, a moneyed aristocracy eager to send young men off to war, political operatives using a flimsy pretext to incite nationalist and racist fervor to encourage said war....
Sounds unpleasantly familiar, which is probably why I was drawn to reading this book.
This is one of the Watch books in the Discworld series, and like so many of those books deals with the intersection between law and politics. In this case, a mysterious island surfaces halfway between the great city-state of Ankh-Morpork and the desert empire of Klatch. Naturally, both nations claim the island as their own, and tempers flare. Next thing you know, there's armies being built, speeches being made and there's war in the air. And Sir Samuel Vimes, the commander of the Watch, is certain that someone is up to something, that there's a crime being committed. It might be a crime on the scale of nations, but it is a crime nonetheless.
It's a great book, and timely, like so many of the more recent Discworld books. Pratchett has a deft pen and a great eye for the way the world truly works. And when seen through the jaded and cynical lens that is Sam Vimes, the hypocrisy and double-dealing become all that clearer. One line popped out at me:
"It had all sounded straightforward in Ankh-Morpork, he thought. We were going to sail into Klatch and be in al-Khali by teatime, drinking sherbet with pliant young women in the Rhoxie. The Klatchians would take one look at our weapons and run away...."
This was published back in 1997, by the way, well before we launched our own poorly thought-out, baseless invasion of a land and a people we didn't understand. Go Terry.