The Monks of History live in a Tibetan sort of area known as "enlightenment country." Their job: "to see that tomorrow happens at all." A mysterious Lady wants time-obsessed Jeremy Clockson to build a totally accurate glass clock. It will trap time and stop it, eliminating humanity's irritating unpredictability. This would make the Auditors, who observe the universe and enforce the rules governing it, very happy. It would also put Death out of a job, which the Grim Reaper isn't happy about. Fortunately, the History Monks have encountered this situation before; in fact, Lu Tze, the Sweeper, has personally dealt with it before. Even better, he has a new, gifted apprentice, Lobsang Ludd, the "thief of time." This time, they'll stop trouble before it can start! To add chaos to the mix, there's the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse--the one who quit before they became famous.

If you've not read this book, and don't know the Disc World series, this summary probably makes no sense at all, and sounds actively insane. Which it is, and if I'd read this before reading the book (I skipped all reviews and the book jacket, since I wanted to be totally virginal going in) I'm not sure I would have read it. I probably would have, since the book was a gift and came highly recommended, but I'd have been much more skeptical about it. It still would have won me over, though.

My rating system doesn't apply that well to this sort of novel, but here goes anyway. I have comments on these ratings, and more general comments on the book below.

Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Plot: 7
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/8
Characters: 6
Humor: 5
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7.5

After the first 50 pages I was impressed by the imagination of it all, but didn't think there was a chance in hell the book would ever coalesce into anything resembling a coherent, cohesive plot. It was amusing and full of mind-bending weirdness, but at that point I was afraid the book was going to be very episodic and scattered, and full of a few dozen very cute and clever scenes that didn't knit together at all, and which were frequently undone by their own cuteness. 

Sort of like the cool things in a lot of Anime are undone by how hard they're trying to be cool (must everyone pose dramatically after every single swing of a sword?), I feared that Thief of Time would be shot in the foot by its own overly-ornate gun. Early on the novel jumps around a lot, and every character is in a different world, a different dimension, a different plane or reality, etc. And while it held my interest, I feared the novel would wear me out if it was clever for the sake of being clever and wacky for the sake of being wacky for 250 pages.

Fortunately, it settled down and I got into the swing of things, and I enjoyed it. The novel keeps continues being mind-bendingly weird with time paradoxes, bizarre creatures of myth and fantasy, improbable heroes and villains, and so on, but to my great surprise the novel had an actual plot, characters I got to know and sympathized with, and action that rose towards a climax.  It got rather silly towards the end, but in this case one man's silly is another man's hysterically-funny and inventive plot twist.

I can't judge the whole Disc World series from reading one novel in it, especially the 26th, but from the reader comments I've read about this one it seems to be more or les par for the Disc World course.  It's got a 4.5 score from 87 Amazon.com reader reviews, so the Disc World fans are embracing it, at least. For non-fans such as myself, I think the Disc World series is definitely an acquired taste, but not one that's especially difficult to acquire.  It's very whimsical, a particularly British form of humor. Monty Python movies and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe are the two comparisons that leap immediately to my mind. Hitchhiker is somewhat similar, but this Disc World novel worked much better for me than the one Hitchhiker novel (the first one) I read years ago. That novel just had too much silliness and absurdity through and through, and lacked enough of a plot pull to keep me entertained once the novelty of the wacky characters and events wore off.  I don't dislike humor and weirdness in my fiction, but I need more than that; which is why I like and respect Pratchett's work in Thief of Time. It's wacky and off the wall, but grounded enough with detailed characters, semi-logical plot events, etc, to keep me reading.

I'll now touch on some of my scores in more detail, since I was quite conflicted in awarding them:

Plot: 7 -- This one doesn't really deserve such a high score, since in comparison to a really well-plotted Sci-Fi novel, this one is pretty mediocre. The building action is too scattered, the build up to the climax is too slow, then it rushes right to it, and there's an overly-prolonged action sequence in the middle of it, with the real climax coming towards the end of that, and being enacted entirely offscreen. If that were the climax of a normal, serious Sci-Fi novel, I'd give it a 4.

However, given the ridiculous amount of disparate elements Pratchett had to pull together to make sense of this one (and the 324 page novel does make sense, something I would have bet heavily against as late as page 250), and considering other books in the whimsically-absurd Sci-Fi humor genre, it deserves about an 11. So I compromised.

Concept: 9 -- The strongest aspect of the book, with an amazing amount of clever things happening. My score on this is probably higher than it would be if I were a regular reader of the series, since it was all novel and new to me.

Writing Quality/Flow: 6/8 -- The writing quality wasn't anything special, since I didn't find the humor that funny, and other than that it's very workmanlike Sci-Fi prose. It rates higher in flow since it's extremely difficult to maintain any sort of momentum with this type of episodic, scattered story. I can't give it a 9 or 10 in flow since it didn't flow that well, but again, like the plot score, just for the genre and for the difficulty of making this type of novel flow at all, he deserves an 11.

Characters: 6 -- They're all very inventive and imaginative and unique, (at least to me, new to the series) but we don't really get to know them that well, and they're all one or two dimensional. There were too many characters for a short novel like this one to do much more than it did with them, but still, a character score is a character score. No one held a gun to Pratchett's head and forced him to keep this book to just 324 hardcover pages.

Humor: 5 -- I can imagine some giving this a 10, and others giving it a 1. I laughed, a few times, but mostly at the creativeness and inventiveness, rather than thinking the jokes were really funny.

Fun Factor: 7 -- Enjoyable, for the most part. I can see a fan of the series giving this one a much higher score, since they'd get right into the jokes, rather than wondering where it was going, as I did.

Page Turner: 6 -- It's not really that involving a story, compared to the best Sci-Fi. However, like the plot and writing flow scores, this one deserves a 10 for taking the all over the place elements and events and tying them into anything resembling an exciting plot that kept me reading to find out what was going to happen next.

Re-readability: 6 -- I would probably like it better in a lot of ways on a 2nd read. I wouldn't be worried about it dying on me halfway through, I'd see how the character and plot points were set up early to pay off late, and I might even enjoy the jokes more, since it would all make more sense to me as I went along.  That being said, I don't have any plans to read it again in the immediate future.

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