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Prequel Problems: Terry Pratchett’s “Night Watch”

> Come on to the forum and comment if you want an article series titled something like “Thande Gushes About Discworld for 5000 words” instead…

Yes please ;)

I have to admit I have very rarely cared about continuity in Discworld, possibly because every* book is a standalone, and possibly because none of the inconsistences really matter to the characters (or indeed plots).

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I find the first 4 or 5 books fairly forgettable (except Equal Rights), and the last 3 or 4 (Unseen Academicals, Rising Steam, Snuff) a sad decline in enjoyability. There were a few in the middle which I remember thinking when I read them for the first time "this wasn't as good as the last one", but then there was the run including The Truth and Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal etc. which were, I think, pretty much peak Discworld.

*- for certain low values of "every"
 
Tolkien's message, such as it is, is indeed easy to miss what with all the Wagneresque pomp and the manichean worldview that often allows readers to figure out where characters stand on the moral scale by how far they stray from Englishness.
Part of that is Tolkien's Weltanschauung, such as it is, evokes, for better or worse, not just a rebellion against the 20th century, but also the 19th. It's a pretty common current among many Anglophone Catholic writers of the late 19th and early 20th century - a romanticization of Merry Old England, and England before the Dissolution of the Monasteries and so on. Though there were some exceptions - Belloc, for example, held an uncharacteristic support for the French Revolution.
 
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