Men At Arms

(Discworld Novel 15)

By: Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Tony Robinson

Brought to you by Penguin.

'What's so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work's already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the stone in the first place.'

Fate is a word that springs to the lips when to call something coincidence seems mealy mouthed. Destiny is another such. But the problem with destiny is, of course, that she is not always careful where she points her finger. One minute you might be minding your own business on a normal if not spectacular career path, the next you might be in the frame for the big job, like saving the world...

Critic reviews

'Funny, wise and mock heroic...The funniest and best crafted book I have read all year'

'Like Jonathan Swift, Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent ... incredibly funny ... compulsively readable'

'His spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction'

'The great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody ... who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences'

(A.S. Byatt)

'Persistently amusing, good-hearted and shrewd'

'This has everything to recommend it...one of his most inventive'

'Pratchett's most intriguing yet'

audio skipping like a lightly scratched record

the story is funny and the story teller is amazing! but the audio skips from time to time like a lightly scratched record.

A pleasant revisit

After three Pratchetts read by Robinson, I took a break and explored other authors, other narrators. Some were brilliant and others not quite so. But coming back with Men at Arms - and picking one to revisit was difficult, trust me - was like coming home to a familiar world with its many and sundry characters. What I love about him is that of the three City Watch novels I've listened to, all the relevant characters have remained consistent - something I've discovered which a lot of other narrators have trouble with, even within the same book.

A listening pleasure

If it wasn't for the way Tony Robinson read Men at Arms, it might not have been so enjoyable. While the abridgement looses a lot of the Prachett wit, and at times makes it difficult to follow the story, Robinson makes up for these shortfalls.

It is almost unbelievable when you listen to this audio book, to think that it is not a dramatised production. Robinson brings every character to life with the changes in his voice. Not once did I feel that his interpretation missed the the essence of Pratchett's characters.

Get the real version, this one's abridged

Not the complete story, Missing really interesting scenes. Waste of a credit, from my perspective.

Not the correct narrator

I love this book and picked it up to help complete my collection for Terry Pratchett's watch books, which I used to have on CD. However, the narrator for this book is not the same as the one I had on CD. This guy is hard to listen to and does not give the characters life or the world depth... IMO