After finishing Pratchett's Snuff, I decided to read Night Watch again. I had the feeling that his writing was seriously degrading. I wanted an element of comparison.
Night Watch mitigated my view. There are indeed signs that Pratchett's writing is changing for what I consider the worse. The sentences are getting longer without gaining complexity: Pratchett now makes much more use of coordination, an unusual evolution for a writer. More importantly, the story is a lot more focused on the central character. In Snuff Pratchett makes scarce use of the narrator's ubiquity power, resulting in a narrative trapped within Vimes's mind. The secondary characters are far less developed and sometimes border on caricature.
However, as I was re-reading Night Watch, I realised that these tendencies were already present. Focus on the central character seems to define the Sam Vimes novel. The use of coordination helps setting up the narrative into a state of mental confusion caused by irrational events: they are seen by Vimes as a series of facts with no obvious connection. This in turn creates part of the plot's dynamic, which shows a hero forced to take action against a chain of events which outcome is known to him, but which functioning and logic he does not understand. This is not so much the technique of writing which is wrong with Snuff as the content
Night Watch mitigated my view. There are indeed signs that Pratchett's writing is changing for what I consider the worse. The sentences are getting longer without gaining complexity: Pratchett now makes much more use of coordination, an unusual evolution for a writer. More importantly, the story is a lot more focused on the central character. In Snuff Pratchett makes scarce use of the narrator's ubiquity power, resulting in a narrative trapped within Vimes's mind. The secondary characters are far less developed and sometimes border on caricature.
However, as I was re-reading Night Watch, I realised that these tendencies were already present. Focus on the central character seems to define the Sam Vimes novel. The use of coordination helps setting up the narrative into a state of mental confusion caused by irrational events: they are seen by Vimes as a series of facts with no obvious connection. This in turn creates part of the plot's dynamic, which shows a hero forced to take action against a chain of events which outcome is known to him, but which functioning and logic he does not understand. This is not so much the technique of writing which is wrong with Snuff as the content
