Feet of Clay

Audiobook

English language

Published May 25, 2023 by Transworld.

ISBN:: 978-1-4735-8863-9

'Sorry?' said Carrot. If it's just a thing, how can it commit murder? A sword is a thing' - he drew his own sword; it made an almost silken sound - 'and of course you can't blame a sword if someone thrust it at you, sir.' For Commander Vimes, Head of Ankh-Morpork City Watch, life consists of troubling times, linked together by...well, more troubling times. Right now, it's the latter. There's a werewolf with pre-lunar tension in the city, and a dwarf with attitude and a golem who's begun to think for itself, but that's just ordinary trouble. The real problem is more puzzling - people are being murdered, but there's no trace of anything alive having been at the crime scene. So Vimes not only has to find out whodunit, but howdunit too. He's not even sure what they dun. But soon as he knows what the questions are, …

'Sorry?' said Carrot. If it's just a thing, how can it commit murder? A sword is a thing' - he drew his own sword; it made an almost silken sound - 'and of course you can't blame a sword if someone thrust it at you, sir.' For Commander Vimes, Head of Ankh-Morpork City Watch, life consists of troubling times, linked together by...well, more troubling times. Right now, it's the latter. There's a werewolf with pre-lunar tension in the city, and a dwarf with attitude and a golem who's begun to think for itself, but that's just ordinary trouble. The real problem is more puzzling - people are being murdered, but there's no trace of anything alive having been at the crime scene. So Vimes not only has to find out whodunit, but howdunit too. He's not even sure what they dun. But soon as he knows what the questions are, he's going to want some answers.

21 editions

jonn reviewed Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (Discworld, #19)

NO MASTER

5 stars

As a Jewish person, I don’t know how to feel about the ending.

But then again, Pratchett was notorious for overgeneralizations and ethnic stereotypes in his books (take the whole inverse asians, who travel to Ankh-Morpork to study at the feet of a regular Morporkian housewife or Time Monks from the same book, some examples from forthcoming Jingo). However these overgeneralizations for me hitting just the right left-centrist note to not sound ethnicitist.

That said, if I would had to formulate an outtake of this book in one phrase, I would say “you can’t spell nobility without knob… even if you do”.