Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett

I always get a delicious feeling when I'm reading a Pratchett book. It's similar to the one I had watching some of the earlier Avengers/Marvel films - half an hour in thinking "ooh, great! I've still got another 2 hours of this entertaining silliness to go!" With a Pratchett novel, I find that when you've been introduced to all the interesting characters, the story has kicked off, you think you've figured out the main cultural touchstone (out of the the five or six sub-references he's always making) and you've started to see where you think the plot might be going... you then realise you've still got a delightfully readable 400 pages or so to enjoy! Although they're ostensibly a light read, they're always longer and pack a lot more in than you realise, and you have plenty more of all of the above throughout - and if you're reading all of Discworld like I am, then it's also likely that you'll get a few bonus references to characters or settings from previous books too.

The heroine of Monstrous Regiment is the determined Polly Perks, who sets off to war determined to find her brother. She's got a clear motivation which makes you understand and root for her all the way through, even as she confirms the needling suspicion that's been with her - and the reader - since the beginning that there's more than meets the eye in the cause they're fighting for, in the country - and, of course, among the soldiers...

Monstrous Regiment also does that very Pratchett thing of taking a concept that exists in our world, and is not necessarily always a bad thing - in this case, patriotism - and tweaking and stretching it until you end up with the main setting for the story being Borogravia, a country that is devoted to the increasingly unhinged cult of Nuggan and also to being permanently at war with all its neighbours, with the result that the economy is completely shot and the population is either demoralised or dead. Whether you pick up all of his references to real-world wars or not (I didn't get a lot of the Vietnam allusions that I've seen other reviewers mention, as it's not so much a cultural touchstone for me as it is for older generations in the USA), it still works as the best of Pratchett does - always entertaining you so so that when he gets serious for a second it somehow hits you twice as hard. I'll finish this review with a couple of quotes that demonstrate this particular trick perfectly.

"It's all trickery. They keep you down and when they piss off some other country, you have to fight for them! It's only your country when they want you to get killed!"

"Perhaps that's why men did it. You didn't do it to save duchesses, or countries. You killed the enemy to stop him killing your mates, that they in turn might save you ..."