Sir Terry Pratchett is my favourite author, the Discworld my favourite series, and the City Watch books my favourite subset of those novels. Snuff, therefore, had a high bar to reach.
So, did it?
Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not really’. There’s just something that feels fundamentally…off about this book. It’s like an imitation Discworld novel; all the elements are there, but they’re made of cheaper material, less well put together.
And there’s a great tragedy in that, because what’s possibly happened here is that Sir Terry’s early onset Alzheimer’s was beginning to affect his writing and storytelling.
For example, the wry social commentary is still there, but in this book it’s largely delivered in the form of one character lecturing another. There’s a whole scene where Vimes berates a group of wealthy young women who are just sitting around waiting for a husband. There seems to be no reason for it, beyond the most minor of payoffs (more a punchline) at the end.
It also relies too heavily on the same few comic themes to keep it going: Willikins, the butler, is an ex street ruffian and so incredibly dangerous; husbands are henpecked; the children’s author writes lots of books about poo.
And then there’s the Summoning Dark, which Vimes ‘acquired’ in the previous book, Thud!, and here plays a rather Deus Ex Machina role of magically providing solutions where they’re needed. It’s hard not to see it as little more than a narrative shortcut.
It also takes a while for anything to actually happen. In fact, looking back on it, it seems that the opening of the book was added later in attempt to at least vaguely frame what was coming up so the reader had some sense that things were going to happen. By the time stuff has started to happen, we’re so late in the book that it doesn’t really have time to unfold properly and feels under-developed. We get a crime with a loose motive, a villain who isn’t really the main villain and isn’t present for most of the book, an early climax and some overly-neat tying up of loose ends.
In fact, I felt like everything went Sam Vimes’s way too easily. He won fights effortlessly, had clues pretty much handed to him, was always the one doing the outsmarting.
In the interest of balance I should point out that Snuff is very highly rated on places like Goodreads. In fact, Googling it to check which number it was in the Discworld series brought up a Reddit thread of people saying how it was their favourite Discworld book. Each to their own, and all that.
For me, Snuff is the weakest of the City Watch books – a fact made all the more tragic given that it’s the last of the City Watch books.
We all know that Sir Terry was taken from us too early, and in doing so Alzheimer’s robbed us of who knows how many fantastic Discworld books. But reading Snuff makes it clear that, actually, ‘the embuggerance’ started taking Discworld from us long before Sir Terry passed away.
