Snuff: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett (MOBI)

Description

“Pratchett . . . has a satirist’s instinct for the absurd and a cartoonist’s eye for the telling detail.” —Daily Telegraph (London) “The purely funniest English writer since Wodehouse.” —Washington Post Book WorldSam Vimes, watch commander of Ankh-Morpork, is at long last taking a much-needed (and well deserved) vacation. But, of course, this is Discworld®, where nothing goes as planned—and before Vimes can even change his cardboard-soled boots for vacationer’s slippers, the gruff watch commander soon finds himself enmeshed in a fresh fiasco fraught with magic, cunning, daring, and (for the reader more than for poor Vimes) endless hilarity. Did he really expect time off? As Vimes himself says in Feet of Clay, “there’s some magical creature called ‘overtime,’ only no one’s even seen its footprints.” Following the New York Times bestselling Unseen Academichals, Terry Pratchett delivers an enthralling new tale from a place of insuperable adventure: Discworld.Discworld® is a registered trademark.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Roger Zelazny is my all-time favorite writer. But Terry Pratchett is knocking at the door, causing a ruckus. And I marvel at the man’s persistence in producing quality stuff even after 38 novels set in the Discworld. After nearly three decades, he’s still tipping over those sacred cows, still pointing a finger at those shifty establishments. Here’s SNUFF now, the 39th one. SNUFF casts as its central character the fabulous Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch (who is also the reluctant Duke of Ankh). Sam Vimes is one of my favorites.After a history of fierce, steadfast service, it’s come to this for Sam Vimes: a two-week bucolic holiday at his wife’s country home. Kicking and screaming and forced to temporarily turn in his badge, Vimes actively dreads his vacation, dreads leaving Ankh-Morpork and its stench and depravity and all-around city-ness. And for what? For the soul-sucking ennui of the countryside… where crime is more scarce than people who don’t use apostrophes at the end of words? But Lady Sybil will have her way. And it’s not as if Lord Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork’s manipulative Patrician, had anything to do with this, oh no…Except that a policeman will dig up wrongdoing anywhere, if only he looked hard enough. As Vimes remarks to Sgt. Littlebottom: “Where there are policemen there’s crime, sergeant, remember that.” (To which the sergeant respectfully replies: “Yes, I do, sir, although I think it sounds better with a little reordering of the words.”) In his wife’s clean-aired, open-skied shire, Sam Vimes stumbles onto grievous malfeasance, at which point you can picture Sam Vimes big grinning.Vimes’ sleuthing nose leads him into prying into the local gentry’s business, and as we’ve witnessed time and again in those cosies, wickedness runs rampant in pastoral environs. Vime’s poking and prodding unearth a smuggling ring and the, if not illegal, at least immoral trafficking of goblins. There’s even a murder or two. There’s even wholesale slaughter or two. Good thing, then, that Commander Vimes sort of accidentally on purpose neglected to turn in his badge.As ever Terry Pratchett launches his salvo of clever metaphors and satiric observations, and the themes in SNUFF are in your face enough that there’s no need to delve into them too much. We note the goblins, smelly and annoying and universally regarded as vermin, and so what if a goblin girl is killed for sport and her fellow goblins are trundled off and shoved on a barge to be stacked like kindling? On Discworld, goblins are not classified as human beings. But we know Pratchett’s about to turn this perception topsy-turvy. It gradually sinks in that there’s more to goblins than just chicken stealing. Goblins observe the practice of “Unggue” which dictates that they collect various bodily excretions and store them in finely crafted pots (which they themselves make). These containers, ironically, are highly coveted by those classified as “human beings.”More a Sam Vimes story, we still get cameo glimpses of the rest of the City Watch, with Wee Mad Arthur, the urban Nac Mac Feegle copper, being showcased delightfully. In Ankh-Morpork Sgt. Fred Colon is stricken with a mysterious malady, and perhaps that exquisite goblin pot he won’t let go has something to do with it. Fred’s plight eventually dovetails into Vimes’ story.The first half of SNUFF is paced deliberately, Pratchett focusing on Vimes’ fish out of water reactions in the country. But when Vimes catches the scent, the pace picks up and rapidly generates momentum. Along the way, Vimes takes the local village constable under his wing, tries not to question his suddenly shady butler, Willikins, too much (and just when did Willikins become street savvy?), and tries to keep up with his son Young Sam’s poo collecting. He also tries to sneak in a bacon sandwich or two.It’s nice that Lady Sybil has a great presence in this story, and Pratchett illustrates why Vimes is so besotted with her. It’s nice to catch up to Young Sam, although I personally could’ve done without all the poo stuff. SNUFF is not Pratchett’s best work. It’s certainly not the best City Watch story I’ve read, and the narrative isn’t as tight. But because this is a master storyteller spinning his yarn, I still couldn’t tear away from the pages. Pratchett’s humor and wisdom and sheer writing talent and the premise of Vimes on a busman’s holiday easily overcome the lack and the lag. What makes his novels work is that he peoples them with rich – in Vimes’ case, reluctantly rich – and utterly compelling characters, which then has the consequence of making his skewering of conventions all the more telling. I love the mad footnotes, the forays into non-sequiturs, the sheer breadth of detail he imposes on the narrative. Listen, I even ate up the series of epilogues that were so seemingly unending, even the LotR: RETURN OF THE KING movie was heard to remark, “Geez, just end it already.”

⭐Sir Terry Pratchett has produced the 39th book in his wildly popular Discworld series, and for a great many people around the world that’s all the review that is needed for them to go and buy it. Bye folks, please consider patronizing your local bookstore.For those readers who need a bit more information than that, the Discworld is a fantasy world that’s flat and rests on the backs of four massive elephants that stand on an even more immense turtle flying through space. And this tells you nothing, because a) that’s not much sillier than any other cosmology and b) it has nothing to do with the new book, “Snuff.”What you actually need to know is that although the Discworld books began as a hilarious slapstick parody of fantasy novels, settings and cliches, they have grown and deepened over the decades into elegantly hilarious satires of… just about everything, really. Opera. Movies. Police procedurals. Monarchy. Politics. War. Witches. Pyramids. Vampires. Journalism. Australia. Whatever strikes the author’s fancy, and he’s a fanciful fellow. The technology and social level is essentially England just coming out of the Victorian era (with some notable additions, such as magic, trolls, werewolves, et al), and his cast of recurring characters are ready for any situation. This time it’s Policeman on Holiday.His Grace, His Excellency, the Duke of Ankh, Sir Samuel Vimes, who until fairly recently was Sam Vimes, the run-down, alcoholic commander of the City Watch in Ankh-Morpork, the Discworld’s most virulently exciting city, has risen over the course of several Discworld books from beat cop to respected, if extremely reluctant, member of the aristocracy (although still always, always a beat cop at heart). His wife the Lady Sibyl has strongly suggested that he take a vacation, and so off to her country estates they go, along with their young son, Sam, and Vimes’ irreplaceable butler Willikins. And when a copper takes a vacation, there always seems to be crime about, specifically smuggling and a dead goblin.Unlike the other nonhuman races of the Disc, goblins are universally considered to be vermin. They’re unhygienic, they have questionably nasty practices, they look grotesque. They also have language, art, families, they create amazingly beautiful pots, and when one is murdered simply to get blood onto a crime scene to implicate Vimes, he has his work cut out for him to find justice for something that no one seems to consider a crime. Vimes is out of his element and far out of his jurisdiction.The Discworld books can be broken into categories and I enjoy all the Vimes books. This one seemed to lack as much intensity as the previous ones, possibly because by this point I’m pretty sure Vimes won’t lose and “Snuff” is sadly lacking an exciting villain or a real challenge, but his deeply cynical outlook at just about everything is always worthwhile and it’s great fun to watch such a city-based man thrash about in the countryside.”The world was back to front! He was a copper, and he would die a copper. You never stopped being a copper, on the whole, and as a copper he walked around the city more or less invisible, except to those people who make it their business to spot coppers, and whose livelihood depends upon their spotting coppers before coppers spot them. Mostly you were part of the scenery, until the scream, the tinkle of broken glass and the sound of felonious footsteps brought you into focus.”But here everything was watching him. Things darted away behind a hedge, flew up in panic or just rustled suspiciously in the undergrowth.”There’s also country living, and imperialism, and racism, and class distinctions, and the nature of the Law, and the importance of poo, and how to start and stop a bar fight, and the many and varied smells of nature, and a thrilling riverboat battle, and much, much more. This is Sir Terry’s 50th book, and he seems to still be going strong.

⭐Snuff rounds off the Watch series beautifully. There have been some reviews moaning that it’s too wordy. I don’t agree. It does feel as though Pratchett surreptitiously collected all the bits his editor told him to cut from his other Watch series books, because they interrupted the action, and put them in his own Unggue pot ready for this book. The gift is that we get to explore inside Vimes’ mind, and get to know Vimes the man, husband and father, while he goes on holiday – away from paperwork, managerial tasks and street crime (although crime finds him, of course). His mind is at more leisure to explore what it means to be a policeman, and how abiding by the law saves him from exacting vengeful justice which would make him no better than a criminal. In this book we see the repercussions of ‘privilege’ for the unprivileged, and Pratchett highlights the usual parallels with our world on Discworld, this time tackling slavery, holocaust, collusion through ignorance, racial prejudice and what makes a sentient being – strong snuff indeed. He doesn’t hold back from depictions of brutality, either. Even Fred Colon has enlightenment forced on him… There are fewer belly laughs than usual (who can forget the wizard-assisted frantic coach journey to Koom Valley in ‘Thud!’ for example?) although there’s plenty of action, some wry humour, and tension aplenty throughout with a murderer on the loose and Young Sam in the picture. One to read at the end of the Watch series (best to read them order, anyway) otherwise many of the references in this book won’t make sense. I couldn’t put it down.

⭐No, this isn’t one of Sir Terry’s classics, but bearing in mind that he was by this point trying to cope with a terrible disease that was slowly robbing him of his skill as a wordsmith maestro, he still managed to produce a novel that is entertaining and at times packs a real punch. Yes, there are sections that are over long and over laboured, there is a lack of sparkle in some of the dialogue and narrative, but now and then the Pratchett brilliance flares in a sentence, a paragraph or a page. Don’t let the negative reviews put you off…..still read it. I am gradually working my way through the books chronologically having read them previously out of order. It’s been a great journey and I am saddened that there are not many more discworld novels to go. Having experienced the sheer brilliance of Pratchetts writing in his earlier novels, it is sad to note the deterioration in quality, but even at this lesser standard he still produced a book that was a darn sight better than many authors could ever hope for.

⭐I bought the kindle edition on a daily deal and feel that was still a waste of money. The book is rambling, full of inconsistencies and, at times, just plain silly.I had some doubts about Unseen Academicals starting to feel “not quite right” but this is another level down.If you’re a keen Discworld fan then please try to avoid this one as it may upset you as much as it upset me.

⭐I had thought I had read all of the Discworld novels. I am pleased to say I was wrong. It us good to know that somewhere in a parallel universe in a world laid on the backs of four elephants themselves standing on the shell of the great turtle, Sam Vimes and his comrades still fight the good fight

⭐Terry Pratchett new release “Snuff” is about Samual Vimes and his family while on a holiday in the countryside. Vimes is struggling to come to terms with the countryside, but soon finds his element as he encounters a murder scene. The poor Goblins want Just…Ice and there is only one police man that can deliver it! He soon finds himself on a roller coaster ride of trying to balance his family holiday and Poop collecting son with trying to solve a murder against creatures (goblins) that are treated as vermin, but that does not stop Sam Vimes. The entire book is crammed with wonderful and funny moments given that hes investigating a murder. Yet, it has other moments where the reader can feel empathy and sorrow for the fate of the poor misunderstood Goblin race.It took me two weeks to finish this book as I kept re-reading the funny bits and making highlights (sooo many!) For any reader this is a book to be put on your top ten read list this year, you will NOT be disappointed! Worth every penny! Its just a shame that Mr Pratchett does not get the attention he so much deserves, his writing is above and well exceeds the par.

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