Night Watch

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Night Watch has a number of influences from the book and musical Les Miserables, but these are a lot less obvious than e.g. the usage of The Phantom of the Opera in Maskerade (sometimes they are mirror inversions of themes rather than straight references).

Some of the parallels include the fact that in Les Miserables the plot concerns Jean Valjean, who is being pursued by an officer of the law many years before the start of the book/musical, which mirrors what happens to Carcer in Night Watch.

In LM, Jean Valjean is essentially a good man whose crime is the theft of a loaf of bread. Carcer is a murdererous murderous psychopath (who later claims that his original crime was stealing a loaf of bread).

Javert, the policeman in LM, is concerned only with justice, which he defines as the punishment of the guilty. Vimes, the policeman in NW, is equally obsessed by justice, but he defines it as the protection of the innocent.

In LM, Javert attempts to join the revolutionaries on the barricades as a means to betray and defeat them. Vimes organises the building of the barricades as a means of protecting the people.

Valjean tries to save a prostitute, Fantine, and when she dies he promises to take care of her daughter. Vimes is saved by a prostitute, Rosie Palm (who will later become famous for having “daughters”).

In both LM and NW, a street urchin plays a role in the rebellion. LM’s Gavroche dies, while Nobby survives.

Both rebellions (certainly in the musical version of LM) are “led” by impassioned revolutionaries in frilly shirts who take a long time to die.

Having said all that, it is of course eminently possible that Terry never intended any of these specific references — his sources of inspiration can just as easily have been other revolutionary settings, from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities to the actual Paris Commune of 1871, and everything in between.

The working title for this book was The Nature of the Beast, but this was discarded when Frances Fyfield published a book with exactly that title in the UK in late 2001.

Paul Kidby’s cover parodies the famous Rembrandt painting commonly known as The Night Watch.