No laughs for Monstrous Regiment

It's not easy being a girl in the land of Borogravia. You can't wear pants, can't join the army, and certainly can't run away from home on a madcap quest to find your dearly departed brother and save the family inn -- at least, not unless you blatantly ignore public opinion and continue on your journey amidst the uproar.

So begins Monstrous Regiment, as it sets out to satirize the military, the media, women and minorities who serve in the armed forces. The title represents the latest effort in British satirist Terry Pratchett's popular Discworld series, a set of semi-sequential novels that occur on an imaginary planet which is being towed through space on the back of a gigantic flying tortoise. Yes, that's right -- a gigantic flying tortoise.

Though all the novels take place on the same planet, Discworld (which Pratchett often uses as a stand-in to satirize our own society), the books tend to rotate through various casts of characters from volume to volume, allowing the author to play with a variety of character archetypes and settings within the same world. Characters from one novel often pop up in another, and the author's most popular creations occasionally get featured tales of their own in the form of later books.

Monstrous Regiment is unique among Pratchett's Discworld books because it features a cast and an environment created solely for this novel. It is set in the country of Borogravia, where the national pastime of waving to one's sons as they leave for war has only declined in popularity because of the drop in the number of qualified males available to fight. It is a place where the great god Nuggan has declared everything from women-owned businesses to onion farming to be an Abomination and therefore outlawed.

The story begins when the protagonist, a young girl named Polly Perks, takes off in typical Mulan fashion and runs away from home, disguising herself as a boy so she can join the Borogravian army on a mission to find her long-lost brother.

The story starts off in a promising enough fashion as the audience is introduced to Polly's fellow soldiers and the inanity of army life, but the humor gets old quick. It's easy to laugh at the appearance of the badly-disguised vampire, the Igor-like zombie, and the troll (the Borogravian army has a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to recruiting the undead), but the jokes wear thin even before the reader discovers the secrets of the remaining recruits. At its heart, Monstrous Regiment is truly a one-gag book, and this becomes evident so early on that one can easily predict the eventual conflict and resolution by the end of the fourth or fifth chapter.

Pratchett's strength as a writer has always been in his ability to both humanize and satirize, but the lack of characterization in this novel and his failure to develop even his protagonist make his attempts to poke fun at the military's shortcomings fall far short of their goal. One-dimensional characters can't carry a story, and while stupid protagonists might be endearing given the right set of circumstances, plot constructions that rely on the audience being as unintelligent as the hero just make a pointless novel even more frustrating to read.

At many points during the course of the story, it seems almost as if the subject matter itself is at fault. While the military lends itself to being easily satirized, there are only so many crazy 'Nam jokes one can make before the hallucinating vampire and the aging sergeant become wearisome. Pratchett is more than capable of poking fun at society's shortcomings, but in several instances the jokes in this novel are so infantile that they drag amidst his obvious talent.

It doesn't help that the plot is so convoluted that it would be difficult to follow it even if the novel were clever enough to warrant the reader's full attention. There is no insightful commentary on society here, no intriguing characters, not even a gripping mystery to slip its tendrils around the audience. Rather, the book is a fairly simple parable that could have easily been told in 35 pages instead of 350, had Pratchett simply chosen to exclude a few of the more extraneous and confusing details.

At its core, Monstrous Regiment lacks in the warmth and development that gives so many others Pratchett novels their soul. Clearly it is not the author's talent that is lacking here, but rather the convoluted story and poor choice of subject matter that make the novel seem so stale. Pratchett's fans can start praying now to the great god Nuggan that the popular author manages to bounce back in his next endeavor.