Book 15: Men at Arms

Men At Arms is a novel rich in the symbolism of identity crises and neurological torment, brought together by a disharmonious balance between our own preconceptions of "Good" and "Evil". Though the overlying plot may be, first and foremost, a pastiche of a thousand police procedurals and the apparent message would seem to be concerning the nature of leadership, it is possible, with a little digging, to uncover the conflicted heart at the centre of the novel.

The core of the book is the relationship between Edward D'Eath and Beano the clown, who may, on first perusal, appear to be only minor characters. However, it is clear from repeated readings that Pratchett deliberately implants this false perception in the reader's mind in order to pull off an audacious authorial trick. Implicit in their characters is a duality that is acknowledged by the plurality inherent in the title - essentially, Beano and Edward are the same person.

In a literal sense, Edward assumes Beano's identity in order to steal the gonne, but the threads run deeper than that. When Pratchett makes a play of Boffo not recognising that there was any difference between the two of them when interviewed by the Watch, he is subtly making the point that there was no difference. When their corpses are discovered, they are identical, they are both even found in similar circumstances – in a damp area, by accident, by a member of the Watch. These symbolic clues point to a central theme of darkness overrunning the light.

Beano could, at best, be considered a neutral figure; by design, we never gain anything like an insight into his character, but - owing to the binary system of morality we inherit from thousands of years of a Judaeo-Christian theocracy – the reader tends to bracket him with the forces of "Good", simply because he is paired opposite the "Evil" D'Eath. His ambivalent moral character is no safeguard against the darkness, however, and he is the first of several victims of the gonne who we could describe as "Good by default" – Lettice Knibbs and Bjorn Hammerhock, both "presumed innocent", are others.

The only character killed by the gonne who could be considered "Good" in any positive terms is Cuddy, though his death serves to emphasise the other great symbiotic relationship in the book; that which the dwarf shares with Detritus. Cuddy's death seriously unbalances the troll and sends him into a certain kind of highly focused insanity for the rest of the novel; an insanity foreshadowed by the scene in the Pork Futures warehouse, where Cuddy’s absence gives Detritus time to explore the new level of consciousness opened up to him by the supercooling of his silicon brain. In The Light Fantastic, we are told that deep thought is the troll equivalent of dying of old age (Old Grandad being one such troll who has gone down that road), so both the dwarf and the troll experience a type of "death" during Men at Arms, one literal, the other virtual (and, since Pratchett is associating troll thought processes with computer operation, the idea of a "virtual" death takes on more significance than a simple metaphor). Their deaths mirror those of Edward and Beano: although Edward does indeed die in a physical sense at some indeterminate point in the book, there is also the point at which he first "interfaces" with the Gonne:

Edward picked it up, cradled it for a while, and found that it seemed to fit his arm and shoulder very snugly.

You're mine.

And that, more or less, was the end of Edward D'Eath. Something continued for a while, but what it was, and how it thought, wasn't entirely human.

Here Edward experiences a death of the soul as he is possessed by whatever influence it is that the Gonne has over people (and that is a point for another discussion).

For the purposes of satisfactory narrative, Pratchett extends the novel beyond the symbiotic relationships it pivots on, though the main plot is largely irrelevant to the central message; it can comment no more eloquently on the thematic concerns of duality and symbiosis than the relationships explored here. Without Beano and Edward, there could be no Vimes and Vetinari; without Detritus and Cuddy, there could be no Gaspode and Angua.

Thom Willis

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