Reviews for The Lifesavers

The average rating for The Lifesavers based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-04 00:00:00 Adam Wang Eat more cake when you are that hungry. Stupid mob. Usually, I am no friend of the crime and thriller genre without extreme violence and psychological terror, with skim and scanable character focused investigator plotlines in between, but satires of the genre are definitively my thing, because the stereotypical badass attitude of the detectives is something with huge self satirizing potential. Just as the serial killers, always the same motivations, childhood traumas, preferred methods, just the lunatic absentminded perverted unorganized ones or the sociopathic geniuses with neurotic perfectionism and extra charisma to bewitch their victims. But I am asking myself how many hidden innuendos for crime and thriller fans might lurk in the City Watch series, how many investigations, methods, and character archetypes of the troop have backgrounds in these genres. I don´t even know if Pratchett liked and read crime and thriller, so it could easily be that there is no secret, second layer, but because of his tendency to pimp everything, it´s not that improbable. Sam Vimes' character development is one of the most amazing, besides the young witches growing up. His changes in attitude and motivations are drastically and while the wizzards, Ank Morpork standard characters, and fantasy creatures stay quite the same, one should consider reading the City Watch subseries and witch novels with Magrat Garlick and Tiffany Aching in chronological order, because it could get confusing when the protagonists' mentality is suddenly completely different or, if one randomly reads from the last to the first novel, Sam Vimes degenerates backwards towards an even more disillusionized and cynical person. At least I get the historical implications in this one, because the French revolution is something that always stays in mind of important political leaders to avoid catastrophes that follow the same pattern of greed, incompetence, growing social injustice, neofeudalism, etc. I mean, it would be absolutely crazy to not have learned out of all the ancient revolutions, 2 world wars, many financial crises,…oh. Facepalm. There we are again, just as over 200 years ago, just with lasers and smartphones instead of pitchforks and torches. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: This one is added to all Pratchettian reviews: The idea of the dissected motifs rocks, highlighting the main real world inspirational elements of fiction and satire is something usually done with so called higher literature, but a much more interesting field in readable literature, as it offers the joy of reading, subtle criticism, and feeling smart all together.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-01 00:00:00 J B My favourite Pratchett novel, but I'm not really sure why. I think that Sam Vimes' being in it definitely helps: I think my favourite "series" in the Discworld novels are the City Watch series (along with the witches of Lancre and Death). His character arc really comes to a head in this one, even though he still has another level to go to in Thud! I also think that time travel being in it also definitely helps. Though not the quantum, metaphysical, zany fun of Thief of Time (though Lu Tze makes an appearance), this trip through the Trousers of Time is meaningful, poignant, even tragic. Oh. I think this was the first Discworld novel to make me cry. I don't cry a lot when I read: rarely do I even get weepy. Discworld always, always makes me laugh (a lot); it makes me want to write, wonder, think, grin, ponder, mull, and all that... but this book was the first to make me cry. I think this is the first Discworld novel in which I really realized that Pratchett is who I want to be as a writer. Night Watch is funny, yes... it's fantasy, yes... but it's more than that. It's human. It tells a story of being human. Pratchett has some great characters with great arcs (like Moist in Going Postal), and he has some epic, meaty stories (like Thud!) with so much behind them you can hardly breathe... but Sam Vimes, in Night Watch, is about as truly human as Pratchett gets. And that is probably why this is my favourite Discworld novel.