The Gentrification of Vimes
Including spoilers for Guards! Guards! (1989), Men at Arms (1993) & Feet of Clay (1996)
“Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I am learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative.” Carrot, writing a letter home - Guards! Guards!
While the city of Ankh-Morpork is certainly on the grubby side, it rarely descends into anything approximating noir, except when we are looking through the eyes of Sam Vimes, captain and later Lord Commander of the City Watch.
In the first three City Watch novels, which work as individual police procedural mysteries as well as a fantasy trilogy exploring the idea that monarchy is indistinguishable from villainy,[1] our protagonist appears on the page as the epitome of every crumpled drunk detective who ever brooded his way through a pulp fiction magazine, or the monochrome opening credits of a grimdark TV show.
The difference between Vimes and every other crumpled drunk detective, however, is that the usual noir hero with one foot in the gutter and an endless array of world-weary sarcastic quips is usually immune to narrative change. They brood, they solve crimes, they indulge in their various life-destroying vices, and every time another story is published or another episode rolls around, there they are, making the same mistakes all over again.
Sam Vimes doesn’t get off that lightly.
By means of several agents of change — specifically Carrot, Sybil Ramkin, the Patrician (and by extension, the city of Ankh-Morpork) and finally Vimes himself — the author ruthlessly drags Vimes up by his bootstraps, hurls him into a happy marriage, an improved lifestyle and the literal nobility.
The upward mobility (dare I say gentrification) of Sam Vimes as shown in Guards! Guards! Men at Arms and Feet of Clay is the narrative journey of one man (who was perfectly fine in the gutter, thank you very much) forced to endure wealth, domestic happiness, friendship, and professional respect, practically at knifepoint. And oh, doesn’t he squirm about it.
Vimes is not, of course, the only character experiencing change over the course of the City Watch novels. He is, however, the character most discomfited by it, which explains why we spend so much time in his point of view.
At the beginning of Guards! Guards! the City Watch have fallen victim to the Patrician’s ruthlessly efficient new justice system, with the Guilds (in particular, the Thieves’ Guild) given sole jurisdiction to police their own members. Left with little to do, the Night Watch, represented by the casually criminal Corporal Nobbs and the stolid Sergeant Colon, are at rock bottom, as is their leader, self-identified “drunk” Captain Sam Vimes.[2] They have all grudgingly accepted their reduced role in the tyrannical Patrician’s new, improved Ankh-Morpork. Any rebellious thoughts have long since died out – literally, in the case of the last Watchman who made the mistake of chasing a criminal.
“But we don't do things like that!" said Vimes. "You can't go around arresting the Thieves' Guild. I mean, we'd be at it all day!” - Guards! Guards!
The only way to go is up, and up they rise. Over the course of several novels, we follow the Ankh-Morpork City Watch as they transform themselves into a thriving modern workforce: embracing progress and diversity in a manner that borders on utopian (while remaining if not satirical then at least sharply sardonic).
While the Watch largely thrives upon these positive changes, Captain Vimes (later to become Sir Samuel, Lord Commander Vimes and eventually the Duke of Ankh) fights his own rising star every step of the way.
The only way he can save the city he loves is to become something he hates… and to stop hating himself.
Rise up.
AN OFFICER OF THE LAW
Early Vimes is a pragmatist, not a protestor.[3] He romanticises the squalor of his past and is comforted by the quiet misery of his present.
The first agent of change to shake Vimes out of his complacency is Carrot, a new “dwarf”[4] recruit who arrives in the city with a vintage Watch rulebook and a wide-eyed belief in a justice system that no longer exists.[5] Carrot provides a mirror to Vimes and the other Watchmen, demonstrating how far they have strayed from the mythical concept of what a City Watch should be.
Carrot begins his time in the Watch as a Lance-Corporal and is rapidly promoted until reaching his natural state of Captain. During his early days in the Watch, Carrot struggles because he is trying to follow rules that no one else cares or even knows about. He is simple, but not stupid, and his innocent but consistent rebellion against the status quo eventually empowers Vimes to likewise rebel by doing his job. Not his job under the recently-reinvented definition of an officer of the law, and not even the half-hearted version of the job that existed long before Vimes himself joined the Watch, but a Platonic ideal of police work.
“Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city.” Men at Arms
Carrot is also (it is generally believed) the rightful heir should kings ever be required again in Ankh-Morpork. He is, however, not particularly interested in fulfilling his royal destiny.[6] Instead, he devotes his life to public service in the City Watch, in what might be the world’s longest successful audition for an unwanted position. More importantly, Carrot’s unswerving support for Vimes serves as a powerful endorsement for the other man’s continuing leadership, inspiring him to think in more ambitious terms about what city policing should be, and how it can be improved.
Another agent of change is Lady Sybil Ramkin, dragon expert, whose casual aristocratic power brings new status and resources to the Watch. Specifically, she provides them with a new facility, Pseudopolis Yard, after the destruction of the original Watch House by dragon. These new premises, in a “better” and thus more politically significant location, are a vital step in improving the Watch’s self-respect along with their public reputation.
Even more significant is Sybil’s effect upon Vimes: eventually she will love him, marry him, and raise him to the nobility; at first, however, she enacts change merely by believing that Vimes and his Watch (even Nobby Nobbs!) are capable of being the best version of themselves.
The changes wrought upon Vimes and the Watch in the early books can be viewed as a custody battle between the hopeful, loving optimism of Carrot and Sybil, and the vicious strategy of Lord Vetinari.[7]
The success of the Watch in Guards! Guards! is a tipping point for their relationship with the Patrician, which becomes slightly less adversarial with every book.[8] In a now-classic scene which is echoed throughout the series, at the end of Guards! Guards! the Patrician invites the Watch to publicly request a reward for their heroism. This is a test: the Patrician wants them to prove themselves as greedy and selfish as everyone else in Ankh-Morpork; instead, they prove their humility in true fairy-tale fashion, asking only for a modest wage increase, a replacement kettle, and a dart-board.
Having failed to erase Vimes and the Watch, the Patrician takes his revenge in the most constructive way he can: by extending this accidental experiment of self-improvement to its ultimate conclusion.
The reward for good work is always more work.
If Lord Vetinari learns anything in Guards! Guards! and the City Watch books that follow, it is that he cannot drag either Vimes or Ankh-Morpork separately into the Century of the Fruitbat and beyond; they come as a package deal. The City Watch evolves far beyond the Patrician’s own ability to affect that change. Despite (and sometimes because of) his interference, they shape themselves into a body that is, while not entirely independent, at least unpredictable in how they will be of service. The Patrician eventually pulls back from overt manipulation, choosing instead to set the Watch loose on any city-wide issue that falls into his too-hard basket.
Lord Vetinari is an educated aristocrat who must consider every penny in the city budget, but has never had to wonder whether he could afford breakfast; in many ways, he is the antithesis of Captain Vimes. Vimes loathes many of the Patrician’s policies, and is the first to point out any flaw in his plan.[9] He is therefore the best person for the Patrician to have on his team[10] if genuine city improvement (rather than self-interest and personal power) is actually the desired result.
To change the city, the Patrician must change Vimes, and yet he also needs him to remain as Vimes as possible to provide the advice no one else will deliver to the most powerful man in the city. Thus Vetinari influences Vimes the only way that he can — by slowly and sneakily improving conditions for everyone Vimes cares about.
To the surprise of them both, this turns out to be a wider circle than expected.
ONE DAY FROM RETIREMENT
The Vimes of Men at Arms is even more miserable than he was in Guards! Guards!, not because his life is immeasurably worse than it was, but it is better. The Watch is thriving and expanding, with structural changes brought about by the dual force of Carrot’s idealism and the Patrician’s machinations.
Vimes himself is engaged to be married to Sybil, and has pledged to give up a) the drink and b) the City Watch in order to be a good husband.
This sends him into a full-blown identity crisis. If Vimes believes anything, it is that it is impossible to improve his circumstances and remain true to himself. Giving up alcohol is a struggle, and giving up his job feels like it may destroy him, but the idea that Vimes fixates upon is his horror of joining the aristocracy.
It was going to be a strange wedding, people said. Vimes treated his social superiors with barely concealed distaste, because the women made his head ache and the men made his fists itch. And Sybil Ramkin was the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh. (Men at Arms)
Vimes’ appreciation for Sybil has always been balanced by his observations about how wealthy people (even poor people from families that have been wealthy) interact differently with the world because of the resources available to them, and their presumptions about how the world works. This is solidified in Men at Arms with a passage that may prove to be Pratchett’s ultimate and most quotable legacy: the Boots Theory.
“A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.” (Men at Arms)
Now that Vimes absolutely can buy good quality, expensive boots, he feels lost. If he can’t feel every cobblestone beneath his soles on a foggy night, is he even Sam Vimes?
Men at Arms also introduces one of the Patrician’s greatest achievements: a diversity program designed either to empower or to sabotage the City Watch. Vimes, naturally, suspects the latter, and yet it is the active inclusion of dwarves, trolls, the undead and other non-humans (even women!) that will transform the Watch into a remarkably modern and functional organisation, reflecting the changes that the Patrician anticipates for the city itself. Effectively, the Patrician uses the Watch as a pilot program for a more integrated Ankh-Morpork.[11] Vimes begins as the voice of resistance (or at least the voice of sarcasm), as his first impulse with any Patrician-led idea is to bat it away with a truncheon.
His first sign that he may be on the Patrician’s side on this issue comes when Vimes has dinner with Sybil’s aristocratic friends, and is so perturbed by the snobbery and xenophobia that he hears from them, he begins to overcome his own bias against dwarves and trolls out of sheer spite.
Ultimately, Vimes will learn to respect the value of inclusivity and the dangers of treating people of any category like they are “things” across several books addressing this theme. Along with other members of the Watch, he regularly confronts his own narrow beliefs and learns to adapt them to a changing world.
It is worth speculating whether, if Vimes and the Watch had not successfully integrated trolls, dwarves and werewolves from the start, the city would have developed as it did.
At the end of Men at Arms, Sybil and the Patrician[12] present a solution to Vimes’ work-related identity crisis by leaning into his class warfare identity crisis. As the newly-promoted Sir Samuel Vimes, Lord Commander of the City Watch, he will hold the social status his new wife wants for him, without abandoning his work.
Accepting the title (and thereby becoming his worst fear, “one of the nobs”) is the necessary evil that allows Vimes to finally indulge in a little of the idealism that has been lurking inside him this whole time; he is, of course, under the impression that this will not change him as a person.
A MAN WHO SHAVES HIMSELF
In Feet of Clay, Vimes is finally beginning to thrive, though he still has not entirely embraced the role of Sir Samuel. The Watch continues to expand in scope as well as personnel, with its diversity program a roaring success.
We see Vimes contributing his own ideas to the Watch, having finally gained the confidence to ask for things he wants. He hires dwarf Cheery Littlebottom to set up a new Forensics Division, despite barely being able to articulate her job description, to develop modern crime solving methods.
At home, he agonises over the power dynamic of Being a Person Who Has Servants, drawing the line at being shaved by another person. His love and respect for Sybil means that he indulges in quiet rebellions against the expectations for his position rather than outright refusing: he accepts there must be a litter hired to take him everywhere, but insists on carrying a leg himself.
As Commander of the Watch, Vimes is supposed to focus on the big picture, but he cannot relinquish the idea of being a basic beat copper. He insists on taking ordinary shifts to keep his hand in, and even swaps his quality leather boots with those of an underling in order to properly feel the streets beneath his paper-thin soles.[13]
When Vimes (reluctantly, at Sybil’s urging) visits the Guild of Heralds to find out about arranging a coat of arms, he is mortified to discover that he is not allowed one because of the past actions of his ancestor, Old Stoneface, who famously executed the last King of Ankh.
He is even more mortified to realise that he minds being excluded from this outrageously elitist practice, and not only because it will hurt the feelings of his wife.
THE SAMUEL VIMES (PATENT PENDING) WAR ON ARISTOCRACY
The plot of Guards! Guards is about a small cult who summoned a dragon to the city in order to create a scenario where a likely lad could be declared the rightful king of Ankh so as to bring back the monarchy.
The plot of Men at Arms is about a plot to discredit the Patrician and expose Carrot as the true heir of Ankh, so as to bring back the monarchy.
Feet of Clay follows in this tradition, featuring a conspiracy to poison the Patrician so as to bring back the monarchy, this time with surprise candidate Nobby Nobbs as king.[14]
The concept of kings as a negative force is reinforced here not only with the historical context for why the last king needed to be killed,[15] but also the creation of a Golem King who is either a wildly dangerous murder weapon or, if you believe in the essential personhood of golems, a violent serial killer.
Added to this the power behind the conspiracy, Dragon “King” of Arms, a vampire who has taken his heraldic title a little too literally, and that’s a whole lot of monarchy for Vimes and his people to overthrow.
The true monster here is the aristocracy itself. Vimes has resisted being part of this community for a reason, viewing Sybil as an outlier of an otherwise power-mad cabal with raging entitlement issues. Once again, he is put in the ironic position of preserving a tyranny by saving the Patrician’s life, though Vimes insists on treating the attempted murder of Vetinari as a minor detail of the crime once he learns of the deaths of an old lady and baby from Cockbill Street, the poverty-ridden area where he grew up.
To the murderer, their deaths were a barely-noticed side effect of the plot against the Patrician, the target who mattered; to Vimes, while the mystery of how the Patrician is being poisoned gnaws at him, it is the deaths of these two vulnerable people and the grief of their families that fuels his drive to close the case.
We are eventually told that this effect on Vimes was intended by the Patrician, who had solved his own attempted homicide early on but wanted the rest of the aristocracy to understand what exactly he had placed among them in raising Vimes to his position of power and status: a weapon that might, at any time, be called upon to start chopping off heads.
These first three City Watch books form a trilogy thanks to some shared, if difficult themes: firstly, that tyranny is better than monarchy,[16] and secondly, that policing can be a positive force in the development of an integrated community.[17] They form a solid first act in the overall development of Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch. His upward mobility will continue in Jingo, where the Patrician finally nails him with a dukedom (to Vimes’ dismay, condemning him to marriage with a duchess). Vimes will always struggle with the conflicts of his multiple identities: as a servant of the city, an officer of the law, a person with integrity, a husband, a father, the boy born in Cockbill Street, the Commander of Pseudopolis Yard, and a man who just wants to shave himself.
By the end of Feet of Clay, Vimes has accepted, however reluctantly, many of the improvements to his life, his city, and his Watch. He is even ready to make positive changes to his own life of his own volition. But he can never stop being that copper who walks the streets at night in ten dollar boots with paper-thin soles.
No matter how high he rises.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Doctor of Classics, a Doctor Who podcaster, and an author of many science fiction and fantasy books, as well as the essay collection Pratchett’s Women. You can find her at tansyrr.com.
Notes
[1] The prime antagonists of all three novels are motivated by a desire to return Ankh-Morpork to the rule of kings, and/or to topple the Patrician from his tyrannical rule.
[2] He considers himself too poor and/or low status to claim the title “alcoholic”.
[3] Unless you count muttered asides.
[4] A human adopted by dwarves who has absorbed the pragmatic and often literal-minded world-view of the people who raised him.
[5] And to some extent, may never have existed.
[6] While Vimes supports the Patrician’s rule reluctantly as the least worst option, Carrot’s support appear to be far more authentically enthusiastic. Indeed, Carrot’s belief that Lord Vetinari is genuinely good (deep down) is either his one true character flaw, or a genius ongoing prank played on both Vimes and the Patrician over a number of years.
[7] As is the case with many custody battles, the use of effective compromise leads to remarkably positive results.
[8] Both Vetinari and Vimes would deny this.
[9] Often bringing to the table his deep understanding of the perspective of the poorest and most vulnerable people of the city, along with his personal cynicism about the worst that the city has to offer.
[10] Vimes considers allowing the Patrician to be killed in the final climax of Guards! Guards! and does not entirely understand why he chooses to save him.
[11] The social and “industrial” development of the Discworld as a whole, and Ankh-Morpork in particular, is one of the great aspects of reading the Discworld novels in their entirety and the books which deeply explore this idea such as The Truth and Going Postal are considered among Pratchett’s masterworks. It certainly is a unique aspect of the Discworld as a fantasy series, given that most fictional fantasy societies depict change as something that happens through war, conquest and dramatic upheaval, not slow and steady government policy.
[12] An unholy alliance formed to challenge Vimes’ lack of self-worth.
[13] he Boots Theory does not allow for a man who is now wealthy enough to buy all the boot shops, but feels guilty for having dry feet.
[14] Carrot’s lack of interest in the role along with his general honesty and virtue has ruled him out as an ideal candidate for this particular conspiracy of local nobles; his domestic partnership with a werewolf has also raised concerns about the potential “contamination” of the bloodlines. Nothing says villain like a tendency towards Eugenics!
[15] It is a comedy, so the king’s horrific crimes are only hinted at, but he had a long line of victims including children.
[16] The main difference between the two, presumably, being that your entire family line would not be vilified for overthrowing a tyrant unless he was also a king; and of course, there is a built-in end point for a tyranny based on the lifetime of the tyrant.
[17] Here in the mid 2020s it feels like that latter idea is more of a stretch.