A man of the city

 I finished some makeup-related YouTube playlists, which I'd be using as my background noise at work, so I decided to do something better for my brain and get back into Mark Reads Discworld, which I am several years behind on now. Looking through my Goodreads reviews to find out where I'd lost track, I discovered it was around Men at Arms, which Mark had read back in 2015. Whoops. 

 

Men at Arms is the second Watch book, taking place in the days before Captain Sam Vimes' marriage to Lady Sibyl. Vimes is having an existential crisis about having to retire from the Night Watch to be a respectable society man. During his last days as a Night's Watchman, a clown is killed and the Assassin's Guild museum is broken into, and then a dwarf is killed, and then other clown is killed -- or, perhaps, the same clown is killed again. Vimes is very sternly ordered not to investigate, causing him to have a nervous breakdown of sorts. Meanwhile, the Watch is recruiting lots of new men, or rather, dwarfs and trolls, and also a woman, although the woman might also be a werewolf. Everyone starts off being kind of speciesist at each other but eventually learn to bond as a team and to go out and press-gang increasing numbers of dwarfs and trolls into the Watch. 

 

At the heart of all the murders is a semi-mystical piece of technology called a gonne, which is sort of like a crossbow but it shoots tiny metal pellets. In typical Discworld fashion, the gonne is semi-sentient, to better be a vehicle for Pratchett's musings on the psychological seductiveness of deadly power. The basic argument here is that guns are bad -- in this case, much more literally than even most gun-control supporters believe, in that the gun in question is literally a malevolent entity that makes a number of deadly decisions apparently of its own power -- but in typical Pratchett fashion there's enough other stuff going on that it's still entertaining. It does bear special highlighting that the scene in which Vimes, a police officer, picks up the gonne, makes it very clear that Pratchett thinks that guns are bad but that police with guns are extra bad. (Kings are bad, too, but that's a repeating theme in the Discworld series.)

 

This is also the book in which the very famous Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Unfairness is explicated, which is one of the most memorable and correct discussions of economics in the history of pop culture. This book gets five stars from me just for being the book with the Boots Theory in.