Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett is a Discworld triumph, a gem among shiny, albeit prickly, pointed [*ouch] diamonds.
Being the third novel in the “Night Watch” line of Discworld books, the holy number th-ree conjures up quite a bit of Monty Python-like shenanigans and humor, while unabashedly containing the unique and unmatched twisted magic that only Sir Terry Pratchett wrought.
The plot at the heart of Feet of Clay is a murder – more specifically and scandalously – and a murder that is unsanctioned by the Assassin’s Guild.
This sends a whirlwind that rattles the very top of Ankh-Morpork’s ruling elite.
And we as readers are gifted with a true treasure: seeing Commander Sam Vimes and the Watch painfully unravel . . . a murder mystery!
And in case you were wondering, the heartfelt love of and simultaneous bloody critique and parody of Sherlock Holmes and his ‘methods’ ensue in the most riveting and hilarious fashion.
“Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay via Goodreads]
There are myriad quotes, you could take one per page and digest it for a lifetime, but Vimes is the best anti-Holmes character to carry along an enamoration of ‘the Game’ such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have admired.
“It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger’s nerve’d crack and he’d give himself up.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay via Goodreads]
What makes a Discworld series story great – well, there are too many things to count, really – for me are the characters.
From the orangutan Librarian (largely absent in this book, but active in many others) to the wily autocrat in the Patrician, even minor characters are rich in personality, desires, bad habits and the like.
The more major players like Colonel Carrot, Knobby Knobs, and in this clay-littered caper, a golem with a shining sense of self-worth, are loud in the sense that you can hear them talking. Were you to side-step from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth into the fantastically spinning flat world – the Disc of Discworld – and you passed by the outside of any filthy, dank, troll-stench of a pub, you would recognize a number of the outspoken and meek, growling (there is a werewolf in the Watch, after all) and out-of-tune singing voices.
Read Feet of Clay and you will know them all by name, just by stalking away with the echoes of their conversation in your ear.
This book was particularly critical of the ruling class, the class system, autocracies, the slave class, the working class, and the abused factory class, and it also brought into focus an examination of what it means to be alive.
The golems are alive . . . wait, are they alive?
You can get metaphysical, philosophical, and skeptical of religion, of AI (artificial intelligence, even though it is not explicitly mentioned by Pratchett), of imposed (whether subliminally or declared outright) caste systems and apartheid, and of murder-mystery-fiction and procedurals too.
The large and vivacious cast of characters in the Night Watch novels know no bounds (unless they do, at which point there is a lot of fear and confusion, as befalls all of us, but you have to read it to see what I mean)!
Enjoy more quotes (they are so damn good) from Feet of Clay here:
“There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]
“Is It Frightening To Be Free?”
“You said it.”
“You Say To People ‘Throw Off Your Chains’ And They Make New Chains For Themselves?”
“Seems to be a major human activity, yes.”
[Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]
“If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.” [Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay]
The Forgotten Fiction Grade: YEA (read it! buy it here)
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“Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Is A Discworld Triumph” was written by R.J. Huneke
