Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett: Monks, Auditors, and Discworld at Its Most Precise

Review Body

Coming after The Truth by Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time feels like Pratchett swivelling the camera away from institutions and civic chaos, then pointing it at the machinery of reality itself. That sounds grand and abstract; in practice it is one of the sharpest, funniest, and most unexpectedly nimble Discworld novels in the whole run.

The premise is pure Pratchett. Someone is building a perfectly accurate glass clock, which is exactly the sort of thing that sounds admirable until you remember this is Discworld and precision tends to attract metaphysical trouble. From there the book folds in the History Monks, Lu-Tze with his mop and his endless calm, Lobsang with all his awkward energy, Susan Sto Helit doing that wonderful combination of competence and simmering irritation, and the Auditors being their usual creepy answer to the question what if bureaucracy developed a hatred of life.

What I love about it, especially having read the whole Death strand up to this point, is how confidently it brings those themes together. Mort gave Death a foothold as more than a joke. Reaper Man made him strangely moving. Soul Music let Susan take on real shape. Hogfather turned belief itself into the battleground. Thief of Time takes all of that groundwork and turns it into something bigger, stranger, and somehow cleaner. It is a book about time, personhood, duty, and the peculiar miracle of being human, but it never stops being entertaining while it does it.

Lu-Tze is a huge part of why the novel works so well. Pratchett is very good at writing powerful characters who look ridiculous to anyone not paying attention, and Lu-Tze might be one of the best examples. He wanders through the book armed with proverbs, common sense, and devastating competence, which makes him funny on the surface and quietly formidable underneath. Susan, meanwhile, continues to be one of the great later Discworld characters, partly because she has inherited Death’s sense of order without losing her very human capacity for exasperation.

This is also one of the most elegantly structured Discworld novels. Earlier books I love just as much can be gloriously baggy, happily chasing a joke down an alley if it looks interesting. Thief of Time feels tighter. The ideas are still huge, the jokes still come thick and fast, but there is a precision to the way the pieces interlock that suits the subject perfectly. It reminds me a little of Small Gods in that sense, or of the best stretches of Night Watch, where Pratchett seems completely in command of every moving part.

If I have any reservation, it is only that this is not quite as emotionally bruising as Night Watch or as all-round crowd-pleasing as Going Postal. It is a little more concept-heavy than those books, and now and then you can feel Pratchett taking obvious delight in the philosophical toys he has built. For me that is mostly a strength, but it does mean some readers will warm more to the book’s ideas than to its heart. Even then, the heart is absolutely there, especially in the way the novel keeps circling back to the value of flawed, limited, gloriously irrational people.

If you like Discworld when it goes cosmic without losing its sense of humour, this is top-tier stuff. If Hogfather is Pratchett using fantasy to talk about belief, Thief of Time is him using fantasy to talk about time, choice, and why humanity is worth the inconvenience. Having read well beyond this point in Discworld, I still think this one holds up brilliantly. It is smart, weird, warm, and far more precise than a novel this playful has any right to be.

Rating: 5/5

The Audible UK edition is narrated by Sian Clifford, Peter Serafinowicz, and Bill Nighy and runs to 11 hours and 21 minutes.