Review: Jingo

Series: Discworld: #21

Series: Discworld - City Watch: #4

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Such is modern life.

A small island pops up out of the ocean between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch, one thing leads to another, and suddenly… war.

The entire book is a discussion of politics / war / and especially racism. So far as it goes, it’s well done and raises a lot of interesting points. In particular:

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

The wisdom of crowds tends to be anything but. Particularly when dealing with Them.

“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

Unfortunately, Jingo is the weakest of the City Watch books thus far and a decent bit down Discworld overall. Nothing in particular is outright bad , it just didn’t grab me. So it goes.