I Read Books: Thief Of Time
Thief Of Time
The auditors are back and have a plan to make the universe ordered. They’ll stop time.
This being the Discworld Time is an anthropomorphic personification; a woman who lives in a glass castle who destroys and creates the universe every instant. Or not-instant; there’s a finite time, a universal tick. You can measure that tick if you have a clock that exists both within and without the universe. But who would do that? And if it’s within and without the universe then it might interact - it can stop time.
But this has happened before and time shattered and the monks of history had to piece it back together. (This incidentally over-explains why, for example, the Elizabethan style theatres co-exist with the great nineteenth century Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, or indeed how various 20th century fads arrive and then vanish in the stories). We learn a great deal of comic-serious (or serious-comedy) about how the monks operate, with the abbot recently reincarnated as a baby, with Lao-Tzu the greatest operative being a sweeper rather than a monk, the spinning prayer wheels that are actually procrastinators, moving time from place to place etc.
They have a new apprentice monk, one who is highly skilled.
A foundling recruited from the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork. He’s a chosen one
of some sort. And in Ankh-Morpork there’s a highly skilled obsessive
clock-maker, also a foundling. Also a chosen one, perhaps.
Death, another anthropomorphic personification, has to follow the rules. He can’t stop the auditors. Not directly. If this is the apocalypse he has to ride out with the other horsemen, however many of them there are. But (and this is a central point of the novel) you can’t wander around human-shaped without picking up bits and pieces of being human. And humans find their way around the rules.
After all, Death having a granddaughter isn’t in the rules but she exists anyway.
Read This: I find this an easy smart and fun read, it’s
quite long for a Discworld novel but slips by almost too quickly for me
Don’t Read This: Too deep into the backstage of the
Discworld explains things that don’t need explaining
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