Did I mention? This novel is magnificent.
On my reread I discovered that the story of William de Worde and The Ankh-Morpork Times is very much a story about gender issues, though William himself is unaware of it. The Truth is about the patriarchy, and how it hurts men every bit as much it hurts women. If I was writing a book about Pratchett’s Men (and really, someone should, I would read the hell out of that book) I would discuss how traditional masculinity and other paternal themes are continually addressed and undercut in this story, which is very much about the Men Who Shape The World and the Legacy They Leave Behind. This continues the Discworld tradition of subverting narratives of masculinity—he’s been doing this from page 1, book 1, with characters like Rincewind and Twoflower, Vetinari, Ridcully, Vimes, Moist Von Lipwig, Cohen the Barbarian and even some of the one-off ‘heroes’ like Pteppic, Buddy and Victor.
But this is not that book. So I’m going to talk about Sacharissa Cripslock.
Sacharissa is the only full-blooded female character in a sea of mostly invisible women (including the upwardly mobile wife and daughter of Harry King, William’s sister, the dwarves who might not be male after all, a few absent mothers and so on). Mrs Arcanum the landlady and her Opinions represent an important ongoing subplot, though rather more attention in those scenes is given to Mr Windling and his Opinions—Mrs Arcanum is saved mostly for comic relief. Sgt Angua makes an important cameo appearance, though she looms larger in the books behind the scenes than actually on the page. There is a running joke based on William’s belief that Nobby Nobbs is the rumoured werewolf in the City Watch, and the reader’s presumed knowledge that in fact it is Angua. Sadly, as in the City Watch books, most of the interesting things Angua gets to do happen offpage.
But Sacharissa is pretty awesome. Apart from the running gag about her boobs (they are mighty and marvellous to behold, by all accounts) and the oft-quoted line about her face being ‘eclectically attractive’, she is very much part of the story because of her personality. Pratchett is at his most comfortable when writing intensely pragmatic women, and Sacharissa is very much in this vein. Her primary personality quirk at the beginning of the story is an obsession with historically ladylike behaviour, and what is ‘seemly’ for a lady to do, wear and say (which pretty much puts her on par with Mrs Arcanum). While William thinks such beliefs are frivolous and unnecessary, for Sacharissa they must be essential survival skills in a world that veers from medieval attitudes to Victoriana to modern and back again without even a moment’s notice. After all, she lives in a city that still thinks calling prostitutes ‘seamstresses’ is highly amusing.
I highly enjoyed watching Sacharissa steal the novel from under William’s feet. Their romance, if you can call it that, is one of those vague baffled courtships that Pratchett writes so well, in which both parties spend the whole time loudly thinking about everything except their attraction to each other, and dancing around the subject so subtly that you’re not always sure that he meant you think it was a romance at all. But for the most part, Sacharissa isn’t bothered about impressing William—instead, they both fall deeply and equally in love with the newspaper business.
This romance is a threeway.
While most scenes are written from William’s point of view, and Sacharissa is largely presented to the reader through his eyes, we still see how her love affair with The Ankh-Morpork Times unfolds differently to his. She’s the one who embraces many of the practical day-to-day details of the business, like why you report on meetings with lots of names in them, how to cover the ordinary parts of city life, and especially how to craft headlines. While William is figuring out from the ground up how to manage concepts like Freedom of the Press, and how to report on big, ‘weighty’ political issues, Sacharissa is working behind the scenes to figure out everything else you need to put in a newspaper so that it is more than a front page. He’d be lost without her, and it’s nice that by the end he has acknowledged that fact.
She’s not doing the grunt work for no recognition, either. While William struggles against some of the realities of the printing and news trade, Sacharissa is several steps ahead of him. Her competence is shown clearly, and while William resents Sacharissa using her attractiveness to gain news tidbits from eager young men, there is more to her methods. She starts out with the contacts and experience in the printing industry that William lacks—in fact she only joins the Times in the first place after coming over to complain about her father the printer being put out of business.
Now that I come to think of it I’m not entirely convinced that the novel needed William in it.
Sacharissa’s character arc in The Truth comes to a climax with the resolution of another running gag, that of the hardboiled thug Mr Tulip and his method of swearing (mostly saying ‘-ing’ a lot without bothering to fill in the verb). William sends Sacharissa into a socially awkward situation, giving her the key to his family’s townhouse and permission to raid his sister’s wardrobe for a suitable dress to wear for a ball. This goes against Sacharissa’s instincts about feminine respectability, and she is so busy trying to deal with the fact that she’s burgling a house (it never occurred to him to go with her to make her ‘borrowing’ legitimate) that she ends up in a far more dangerous situation, taken hostage by two assassins.
It’s here that the Lois Lane analogy, which has been strongly implied in her Girl Reporter role so far, looms larger. Being kidnapped by bad guys was an everyday occurrence for the sassy reporter of the Daily Planet, but Sacharissa doesn’t have a pet superhero to rescue her—and so she throws caution and her last vestiges of ‘respectability’ to the wind in order to rescue herself, along with a healthy bout of yelling and swearing, which she finds rather cathartic.
After that, it’s up to Sacharissa and William to save their mutual true love, the newspaper itself, from disaster…
I find Sacharissa a likeable, complicated and useful character in an excellent novel. But I’m not entirely sure what her character is supposed to represent. Is she a satire on a certain old fashioned kind of young lady who needs to loosen her corsets a bit? Is her character journey about worrying less about what people think of her? Is she a feminist character, or an example of why the women of the Discworld need organised feminism? Mostly I think she’s far too busy doing her goddamned job to worry about such things.
When she turns up again in Going Postal, it is noted that she wears a wedding ring, but continues to call herself ‘Miss Cripslock’. So there’s one piece of evidence that she is embracing modernism.
If nothing else, Sacharissa is a great example of a practical woman in a fantasy novel who dresses sensibly and is excellent at her job. Which now I come to think about it, makes her a spectacularly important role model. While there hasn’t yet been a movie or other media adaptation made of The Truth (which is a shame because it would be brilliant), Sacharissa’s passing role in Going Postal means that she has been portrayed on the small screen by the comic actress Tamsin Greig. This makes her about 20 years older than she is portrayed in the books, but considering how briefly she appears that’s hardly important. The essence of the character as a caller-of-bullshit in modest attire is definitely there.
Amazingly, on the original book cover, Josh Kirby managed to draw Sacharissa with at least as many clothes on as she is described as wearing in the book. I consider that a triumph of sorts, compared to his earlier work.
10
Socks, Lies, and the Monstrous Regiment
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay was written in 2014 for the first edition of this collection, and I’m keeping it mostly the same, but I think it’s worth noting that this is a novel that digs deeply into gender essentialism and how gender and sex are not necessarily the same thing… without actually using a lot of the language choices that we would generally use today to discuss issues to do with, for example, trans and non-binary people.
Even in re-reading this essay for republication in 2018 I found myself fighting pronouns. We can’t deci
de for ourselves as readers which characters are actually male despite the biological reveal that they are “female” in the story… except as fannish head-canons, of course, where the Disc is your shellfish of choice.
I feel it’s incredibly valuable that we get to see how many of the characters in the book are still working through their personal thoughts about gender presentation, performance and identity right up to the end of the story. Gender is, for many, a process and a spectrum rather than an obvious choice or identity.
I will be fascinated to see how ‘gender disguise’ fiction tropes will change into the future as trans and non-binary identities become more commonly understood. Hopefully we’ll get even more wonderful, crunchy popular fiction that explores this…
Despite its often extremely binary approach to gender, this is a book based on the premise that the world would be better in many ways if we stopped defining and limiting other people by gender preconceptions. Sadly, in 2018, this is even more necessary a message than it was when first published, fifteen years earlier.
Monstrous Regiment (2003).
Besides, she thought as she watched Wazzer drink, you only thought the world would be better if it was run by women if you didn’t actually know many women.
All Discworld books are worth reading. Some are good, many are splendid, and a few are so close to the perfect novel that it’s hard to justify calling them anything else.
I’ve been rereading a lot of these books over the few years, and Monstrous Regiment is hands down the best of them, including my other previous favourites such as Night Watch and Lords and Ladies.
This is a gorgeous, layered, crunchy, deeply emotional novel. I’m very impressed with it. This time around.
My big confession is: I didn’t like Monstrous Regiment the first time I read it, when it was released back in 2003. So the rereading experience this time around involved a lot of prodding at my inner self to look at what went wrong then, and why I am so much more in love with the book now.
I don’t have the excuse (as with my young adoration of Ginger and Ptraci) that it was my teenage self that took against this astoundingly feminist book. I was in my mid-twenties and (I thought) pretty clued in about the importance of women in fantasy.
I’ve pinned this down to two factors that turned 2003 me off Monstrous Regiment:
The novel’s trick of repeatedly pulling the rug out from under the reader (which is in fact the best thing about the novel and an essential aspect of its structure) by making gender reveal after gender reveal. This annoyed the hell out of me the first time around.
I really wanted Maladict to stay a male character, and was unbelievably cross that he turned out to be a girl. Possibly this is because I was shipping him with Polly.
A disappointing lack of male allies.
Having established in my previous Pratchett’s Women essays that my teenage self was extremely shallow (not to mention heteronormative!), it’s confronting to realise that my 25 year old self was almost as bad. Oh dear, me.
Monstrous Regiment almost does not need to be a Discworld novel. The first clue to this is in the creation of Borogravia, a country completely removed from the rest of the Discworld society and history, in order to create the conditions necessary for the novel to work. Yes, we have a touch of Vimes, but his role and that of his City Watch off-siders is little more than an extended cameo.
This is a war novel, and a very specific one, because it is a war novel about women who dress up as boys to go to the front line. The main character, Polly, makes this choice for herself and then goes to elaborate lengths to change her identity and sign up, only to slowly discover that the majority of the new volunteers in her platoon (with varying degrees of authenticity) have done the same thing.
It sounds like a gimmick, and to some extent it is, and yet it is a glorious gimmick because it allows Pratchett to take a story that has been written so many times before (Monstrous Regiment is an amalgam of every ‘young man goes to war’ story ever told) and tell it about women.
This is important because women are often left out of the narrative of war stories, except as the girl/wife/sister/daughter who keeps the home fires burning. Monstrous Regiment takes as its basic premise the idea that sending girls off to fight a war is no more abhorrent than doing so to teenage, untried boys (one of our more romanticised cultural myths), and that going into the grim realities of a battlefield is not necessarily the most dangerous fate for young women in a misogynist society.
Not content with subverting one extremely gendered narrative trope, Pratchett also takes the popular ‘girl dresses as a boy in order to achieve a life goal in a sexist society’ narrative tradition and subverts that too, especially the part where the girl protagonist in such books rarely spends any time building connections with other women.
If Polly had been the only one disguised as a boy in this story, there would have been no point in telling it.
Like our own modern culture, the Discworld has its share of sexism and gender essentialism, but not to such a heightened degree as was necessary for this story to work. Borogravia, then, is designed to be such an appalling place for women to live, that it makes Lancre look like a feminist Disneyland.
Polly’s choice to go into the army is about survival rather than heroism. The only way to save her family tavern (and to keep running it as she always intended to) is to have a living brother to inherit it from their father — but, unfortunately, her brother has marched off to the sound of the army’s drum, living status unknown. ‘The Duchess’ is a symbol of the life she knows, the name of the tavern she is fighting to protect as well as the name of Borogravia’s supposed head of state, a quasi-deity who has not been seen in many years and is rumoured to be dead. To join the army, you kiss the Duchess (a coin with her head on it) as a form of oath, and Polly sideswipes her own inauthenticity by believing really hard in her own ‘Duchess’.
Forget you were ever Polly. Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and with self-satisfaction at a job well done, move like a puppet that'd had a couple of random strings cut, never hug anyone and, if you meet a friend, punch them.
Some of the most entertaining sequences in the first half of the book are about Polly’s mimicry of the young male of the species, based on observations from her life as a barmaid. She’s remarkably good at it, to the point that the first time she ‘disguises herself as a girl’ by taking off her armour in a village under attack by the enemy, she feels a great sense of embarrassment and shame at being caught in a petticoat. This, of course, is foreshadowing.
The other girls she discovers in her platoon have different reasons for being there. Shufti is trying to find her ‘husband’ before her pregnancy becomes too obvious. Tonker and Lofty are escaping the dour and grim life of the Girls’ Working School where ‘bad girls’ are sent. And Wazzer, who hears the voice of the (probably dead) Duchess in her head, is almost certainly Joan of Arc.
The story about the hapless team of new recruits, and their gradual discovery that the others are all girls, takes on a farcical element when even the troll and the ‘Igor’ are revealed to be female. Why should it matter that a large animate pile of rocks is male or female, or that a living jigsaw of borrowed limbs is an Igorina? It doesn’t…except of course that it matters in how those characters are perceived, and whether they are taken seriously. Even a race with almost no physical differences between genders feels differently about men than it does about women.
The message of Monstrous Regiment is that gender is often thought to be important under circumstances where it should be irrelevant. Polly is a more capable person to run a tavern than her brother, but is held back because of her gender. Igorina has to hide her gender simply to be allowed to use her medical expertise in the field.
Carborundum/Jade chooses to grow lichen on her head to mask her gender, but this means overcoming her cultural association of baldness with feminine modesty. Polly cuts her hair off for the same reason, but can’t quite bear to
leave her ringlets behind and ends up in danger of discovery when a ‘political’ (spy within the army) steals the hair. Igorina goes a step further than any of them, sewing false stitches into her face to appear male as well as faking a lisp.
Thanks to her serious attention to detail in mimicking the body language of young men, Polly is one of the last of the group to be recognised as female by the others, and has to actually own up to it. The narrative goes into great detail about how she walks, speaks, pees standing up and so on, as well as the many ways she corrects and observes along the way.
Of course, Polly has been spotted right from the start, by the only person in the outfit who is a better observer than she is, and anonymously passes on the tip about the extra pair of socks she needs to stuff down the front of her trousers. What follows is possibly one of the most overworked and yet cleverly expressed metaphors of the history of the Discworld. ‘Socks’ to Polly becomes a metaphor for more than just a fake bulge, but also for masculinity and male behaviour as a whole.
‘There is a difference,’ said Shufti. ‘I think it’s the socks. It’s like they pull you forward all the time. It’s like the whole world spins around your socks.’
Finally, the disguise has to be laid aside in the name of strategy—Polly and the other girls take off their uniforms to ‘pretend’ to be women and infiltrate the enemy base as potential servants and laundresses. They are caught instantly as obvious soldiers in disguise, and only pass muster once one of them shows the physical evidence that she is female and pregnant.
Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on Female Characters of the Discworld Page 7