Thief of Time — Discworld, Book 26

Thief of Time Review

Thief of Time is the Discworld novel about time, and it is also, unexpectedly, the Discworld novel about chocolate — a combination that tells you something about how Pratchett’s imagination worked. It is part of the Death sub-series by virtue of Susan Sto Helit’s involvement, but its real centre of gravity is the History Monks: a secret order that maintains the flow of time by, among other things, stealing it from places where people aren’t paying attention and redistributing it where it’s needed.

The premise is characteristically ambitious. The Auditors of Reality — the novel’s recurring antagonists, impersonal forces that resent the messiness of conscious life — commission the brilliant but naive clockmaker Jeremy Clockson to build a perfect clock. A perfect clock, by Pratchett’s physics, would stop time altogether. The History Monk Lu-Tze, who presents himself as a humble sweeper and is in fact something considerably more formidable, is dispatched to prevent this with his new apprentice Lobsang Ludd.

Lu-Tze is one of Pratchett’s great late-period creations. His power depends entirely on everyone underestimating a small, elderly man who smells of soap and sweeps corridors. The comedy of watching experts repeatedly fail to register that he is the most dangerous person in any room he enters never becomes stale because Pratchett keeps finding new ways to construct the gag.

The novel’s philosophical argument — that a perfect world, a world without the friction of imperfection and surprise, would be a dead one — is made through the Auditors themselves: entities so committed to order that they cannot experience the present moment without being overwhelmed by it.

Discworld Reading Order

Thief of Time works as a standalone but rewards familiarity with the Death sub-series. Mort, Reaper Man, and Hogfather provide the best context for Susan’s character.

Lu-Tze and the Art of Being Underestimated

Lu-Tze is the Discworld character who most thoroughly demonstrates Pratchett’s understanding of how power actually works versus how it is perceived to work. He is a small, elderly man who sweeps corridors and smells of soap. He follows the Rule of Wen — specifically, the part about not being in too much of a hurry. He is, consistently, in every scene, the most dangerous person in any room he enters, and consistently, in every scene, everyone else in the room fails to register this fact until it is too late.

The comedy of Lu-Tze depends on a very specific kind of reader competence: you have to understand what is happening before the characters do, and the gap between your knowledge and theirs is where the joke lives. Pratchett constructs this gap with care. He gives you enough information, early enough, to understand what Lu-Tze is before most of the characters in his vicinity do, and then he places Lu-Tze in situation after situation where that knowledge generates sustained comedy as one expert after another fails to recognise what is directly in front of them.

What makes this more than a running gag is the philosophical substance underneath it. Lu-Tze’s power depends entirely on being underestimated, which means his power depends on other people’s vanity. The Auditors cannot perceive him as a threat because their model of threat requires formal markers of danger — size, aggression, visible capability. Lu-Tze carries none of these markers, which means the Auditors’ model is useless, which means the Auditors are defeated by their own inability to imagine a kind of competence they have no category for.

The Auditors as Antagonists

The Auditors of Reality appear across several Discworld novels — Reaper Man, Hogfather, and here — as perhaps the purest expression of Pratchett’s most consistent philosophical opponent: the force that prefers order to life, predictability to surprise, correct procedure to outcome. They audit reality because they are fundamentally hostile to everything that makes reality worth having: the messiness, the noise, the contradiction, the interruption, the capacity of living things to do the unexpected thing.

In Thief of Time, they take their most ambitious step: commissioning a perfect clock that would, by stopping time’s imperfection, stop everything that depends on imperfection to exist. The Discworld’s physics make this explicit — a perfect clock cannot coexist with the kind of time that living things inhabit — and the novel’s argument is that this is not a technical problem but a metaphysical one. You cannot have both perfect order and life. Choose.

Chocolate, History, and the Present Moment

The novel’s subplot involving chocolate is not incidental. The History Monks’ discovery that chocolate allows even the Auditors — who have temporarily taken human form to better understand what they are trying to eliminate — to experience the sensory immediacy of the present moment is Pratchett’s most direct statement of the novel’s theme. To be alive is to be in now. The Auditors hate now. Chocolate is now.

Lobsang Ludd’s identity — revealed gradually as the novel progresses and signalled fairly clearly for attentive readers — connects the History Monks’ timeline to the larger Death sub-series continuity and provides a satisfying structural link between Thief of Time and its predecessors.

Discworld’s Late Period

Thief of Time appeared in 2001, Pratchett’s eighteenth year of Discworld publication. The series was by this point the bestselling fantasy series in the United Kingdom, and Pratchett was approaching the creative peak that would produce Night Watch in 2002 — widely considered his masterwork. Thief of Time is in many ways the last of the purely comedic-philosophical Discworld novels; Night Watch marks a shift toward more directly serious emotional and political territory.

It was also the last of the Death sub-series novels, which had run from Mort (1987) through Reaper Man (1991), Soul Music (1994), Hogfather (1996), and now Thief of Time. Susan Sto Helit’s role across the final three novels of the sub-series traces her own negotiation with the legacy of her unusual family — working out what it means to be Death’s granddaughter without being Death, and finding a life that is fully human while retaining the advantages of that heritage.