Hope y’all are ready for me to get mad about capitalism a whole bunch, sorry, it’s not my fault…
Summary
There is a group lying in wait in the dark somewhere. Three weeks ago, Adora Belle Dearheart offered up a great deal of money to lease dwarf land for unknown reasons. Moist von Lipwig is already bored of his life and nearly gets caught scaling the Post Office Building (he’s part of a shadowy nighttime climbing fraternity). He’s an upstanding citizen now, with his picture in the paper, and calls to testify against conmen forging stamps. At a meeting with Lord Vetinari, he’s asked if he would like the opportunity to make some real money, but Moist insists that he’s very happy at the Post Office and scurries away. He goes back to work, looking through meeting minutes, signing forms, letting Tiddles the cat in and out of his office, walking through the place. The job isn’t exciting anymore. Gladys the golem informs him that Vetinari’s coach is waiting outside, and Moist keeps him waiting for a long while before breaking down and going to find out what this is all about. Vetinari informs him that he has a new proposition for Moist’s employment: master of the Royal Mint. He wants Moist to take control of the bank of Ankh-Morpork and literally make money for a living.
He’s certain that this will solve Moist’s current problem; his new job will be one of adventure and danger where he will never be bored. Moist asks what happened to the last men to run the Mint, and Vetinari informs him that they both died at old ages in their beds, but he’s sure Moist would do something to upset that balance. He asks after Miss Dearheart and her work with the golems; she’s currently checking on golems that might be mining on dwarf land carrying out their last orders. Vetinari introduces Moist to Mavolio Bent, the head cashier. Mr. Bent doesn’t much like Moist because he’s the creator of the “unsecured one-penny note”—being his stamps. Vetinari leaves the man to show him around, and Mr. Bent begins by fixing a clock on the floor that apparently loses one minute a week. He also shows Moist their gold reserves, explaining that coins are not gold, but a theoretical promise that the coin is worth a set amount of gold. Moist is taken to the Mint where the Bad Penny (an odd large treadmill) sits. Moist meets Mr. Shady, the hereditary foreman of the mint, who tells him how his position came to be and how much it costs to make the various coins, which is the reason the Mint doesn’t make nearly so much money as you might expect. They even employ families off site to make certain coins. (And if they work overtime, they have to work more overtime to pay the overtime.)
Moist and Bent discuss the purpose in using the gold standard, then head to meet the chairman, Mrs. Lavish. Her dog, Mr. Fusspot, takes an immediate liking to Moist, a rarity as far as she’s concerned. She has Mr. Bent take the dog for a walk, and beckons Moist closer so she can have a look at him. She knocks him to the ground and announces that he’s a thief and conman—but she likes him. She says that he can call her Topsy, and that Havelock sent him here to tell her how to run her bank. She tells him what she knows about the business, and then tells Mr. Bent to take Moist to Hubert to learn more. Moist learns that she has 51% of the bank’s shares—fifty to her and one percent left to Mr. Fusspot by her late husband. Mr. Bent shows Moist “his world” within the bank, and then takes him to Hubert. Hubert runs a system called the Glooper, which he calls an “analogy machine” that allows him to experiment with how the city changes and how that will affect the flow of money. He’s Mrs. Lavish’s nephew, and he and Moist get on well, but Mr. Bent warns him that most of the rest of Topsy’s family cannot be trusted—they are used to getting their own way and trying to have her declared insane.
Moist heads back to the Post Office and finds a clacks message from Adora saying that she’s heading back. He resolves not to get caught up in this banking business. He’ll be married to Miss Dearheart sometime soon, and dependable husbands don’t do any of this sort of thing. But he keeps thinking about how the stamps are being used as currency. Gladys brings him a meal and informs him that Lord Vetinari is downstairs. He comes down to find Vetinari helping the Blind Letters department and wondering how he feels about the bank. Moist insists that he is staying where he is, so Vetinari has Drumknott draw up paperwork to that effect and sign it. Mrs. Lavish dies in the night, and Moist gets a letter the next day threatening him though he doesn’t know who sent it. He’s informed that lawyers are downstairs. He briefly thinks of escaping his entire life, but Mr. Slant comes in with Nobby and Angua, and he’s informed that Mrs. Lavish left him Mr. Fusspot in her will. She also left the dog her shares in the bank, making him the chairman, and Moist his owner. If the dog dies, the shares will be distributed amongst the Lavish family. A letter from Topsy informs him that he’ll be paid handsomely for this service, but if he doesn’t do it or Mr. Fusspot dies, the Guild of Assassins will kill him. Moist is trapped. Everyone leaves, and he suits up Mr. Fusspot for his walk to go have words with Vetinari. A black carriage pulls up in front of the office and Moist jumps in, finding out too late that it is Cosmo Lavish’s carriage…
Commentary
Being a smart fellow, Pratchett did note that the subject of this book was fantasy in every direction, as the Discworld is a fantasy realm, and money is a fantasy we all agree to believe in.
There’s a reason they tend not to teach much by way of economics in public schools as you grow up, and it’s that, one has to assume—the knowledge that global economies are a shared societal hallucination built on deliberately byzantine systems intended to discourage any person not well-versed in finance from involving themselves. Of course, now we’re going to get the creation of a more robust economy from Mr. Lipwig, and the conman angle is meant to make that easier to stomach. It’s a smart twist, I’ll give Pratchett that, because it’s otherwise pretty hard to sell me on any story that is about people making that system chug along.
And it works because Vetinari rightly senses that you have to keep Moist busy or he’s liable to do something ridiculous to get that thrill he needs to keep existing. The dramatics the Patrician goes to on this one are so good because you can see him upping the stakes purely for the purpose of interesting the conman. He’s being deliberately more obtuse, more sneaky, more blunt, because he knows it’ll make the man uneasy and get the wheels turning. It doesn’t take much, after all. A few mentions of the stamps being currency here, a meeting with an extremely sharp old woman there…
Terrible as she and her whole family seem to be, I have an unyielding respect for women like Topsy Lavish. And there’s something special about being the sort of person Moist von Lipwig can relax around too. In the previous book, the only person who truly saw him was Reacher Gilt, a man you could by no means chill out around. But Topsy Lavish can take him by the arm and ask him what he’s really about, how he concocts his little schemes, and laugh the whole time. Too bad he didn’t get the chance to spend a little more time with a person like that. I think it’s probably good for him.
Extremely rolling my eyes at Moist trying to pretend he should stay on the straight and narrow path for Adora, though, when Mrs. Lavish figures out what she’s after two sentences into a description of the woman: “A contrast, I trust.” Miss Dearheart doesn’t like you for your staid, sensible choices, guy. But then, he’s looking for any excuse at that point, any reason not to do the thing Lord Vetinari wants him to do.
The setup to this story moves along with an enviable ease, and you can see the trap well before it snaps shut. Even if you don’t suspect precisely how Mrs. Lavish will get Moist wrapped up in the bank, you know it’s bound to happen. And you know that Vetinari is happily watching for the places where Drumknott’s pencils ought to be, almost like a parent checking in on their depressed child.
Asides and little thoughts:
- I don’t suppose we could introduce Miss Maccalariat to the concept of the “invisible default,” right? Because that’s the whole reason the golems are presumed male despite having none of the functioning aspects of maleness. It’s not as though Gladys is likely to mind (since the golems don’t really have gender), but it is exceedingly silly.
- Why are banks built to looks like temples, Moist wonders. Oh, buddy. In this case, the building genuinely was a temple, albeit one without an assigned deity, but the reasoning here isn’t hard to parse. What is money but the cleverest form of faith—i.e. the sort that gets to pretend it’s utterly rational and in no way powered by anything so wooly as belief.
- To my recollection, the expense of creating coins has been a real problem throughout history. In the U.S. it costs nearly three times the value of a penny to make a penny at the moment? So the bank’s problems are all too real, unfortunately.
- Topsy’s husband “always said that the only way to make money out of poor people is by keeping them poor.” A thing to keep in mind at all times. Especially whenever anyone tries to blame the plight of the poor on poor people.
- Moist makes a lot of logic leaps in his potential escape plan before deciding that he’ll probably create the persona that could go live at Mrs. Arcanum’s, which is making me wonder how well that house is known to your average single gentleman around the city.
Pratchettisms:
The pigeon was nervous. For pigeons, it’s the default state of being.
But I never thought that being an upstanding citizen was going to be this bad.
“Hurry up, Mr. Lipwig, I am not going to eat you. I have just had an acceptable cheese sandwich.”
He wasn’t ugly, he wasn’t handsome, he was just so forgettable he sometimes surprised himself while shaving.
She gave him a wink which would have got a younger woman jailed.
He turned to the men, who smiled nervously and backed away, leaving the smiles hanging awkwardly in the air, as protection.
Next week we’ll read Chapters 4-6!
Thoughts
Mr. Shady’s explanation of the cost of coins is a clear dig at the arcane British system of coinage which was only replaced in 1971.
Mr. Bent’s explanation of Gold brings to mind Ridcully’s explanation of magic – the wizards promise to do magic for Ankh-Morpork for free and Ankh-Morpork promises never to ask them to do it.
Pratchettisms
It would be nice, he reflected as he ran up the steps, if his lordship would entertain the idea that an appointment was made by more than one person. But he was a tyrant, after all. They had to have some fun.
There were meetings. There were always meetings. And they were dull, which is part of the reason they were meetings. Dull likes company.
Mr. Bent had the air about him of one who stands quietly in a cupboard when not in use.
“Events are eventuating” (Mr. Bent)
The place looked like the after-death destination for people who had committed small and rather dull sins.
“I know if you want to sell the sausage you have to know how to sell the sizzle.” (Lipwig)
The itinerary of evasion wound across his inner eye at the speed of flight. (Lipwig)
With these chapters you can feel the pieces being moved into place, but in a very satisfying way.
It’s like the Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle, but with a sense of pace.
There’s a lot of Bank of England / Royal Mint history mixed into this, and the Glooper is based on the Phillips machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
The cost of making a penny might be a problem if (a) they were single-use items and (b) all our currency were pennies.
I’m always amazed at the gold-standard people. Gold has its value pretty much only because we agree on it. Yes, it’s pretty. But you can’t make plumbing out of it. It’s an excellent electrical conductor, but its price is out of proportion to its utility. Thus, gold is no different from fiat money.
As noted, this part does spend quite a bit of time in setup; the first death threat doesn’t come until page 80 of 404 (1st US pb). One could become bored (or worse) with Vetinari’s manipulation of other people, if he didn’t do it (a) so well and (b) to such good purpose: the fact that at least two of the people trying to seize the bank are outright thugs (just to start with) does not escape the reader. But I don’t recall Death previously being a punster.
The bit about banks looking like temples is … limited; in a certain period the imitation of a classic temple was used for any building intended to say “Worship me!” OTOH, there is an argument that the prevalent style of the last several decades is “I’m crazy, and rich enough to get away with it, so don’t mess with me.” (There’s this building on the way out to Dulles Airport that I swear looks like a cubist’s idea of a toilet….)
More Pratchettisms (for some reason he has lots of small bits in this section, rather than long setups):
The only thing he hadn’t done was hornswoggle, and that was only because he hadn’t found out how to.
“This may well have been a case where chilly logic could have been replaced by the common sense of, perhaps, the average chicken.” How many logical ideas can you think of for which this is true?
…when a golem drops a curtsy you can hear it.
What harm can it do to find out? It’s a question that left bruises down the centuries, even more than “It can’t hurt if I only take one” and “It’s all right if you only do it standing up.” (Miss Maccalariat sniffs audibly.)
…in what might have been the uniform of a general in one of the more unstable kinds of armies… There’s a Sid Caesar sketch Pratchett might have been thinking of….
…he adjusted his cuffs and set his face in the warm, benevolent smile of someone who is about to take some money off of you.
Mr. Bent shrugged, an impressive maneuver on that gaunt frame. It was like watching an ironing board threatening to unfold.
…there were, in fact, enough skeletons in his closet to fill a big crypt, with enough left over to fill a fun-fair house of horrors and maybe also make a macabre but mildly amusing ashtray.
Annotation: the “Calculating Bones” which Mr. Bent forbade were probably something like Napier’s bones.
While the explanations by others that Pratchett was commenting on British banking history is correct, you’re not wrong about the cost of a modern American penny. Of course, in a more rational world, we would have phased out the penny coin a *long* time ago.
Way back in 1857, we got rid of the half-penny coin. At the time, the rationale for dropping it was that it was worth too little to continue production. Adjusted for inflation, a half penny in 1857 was worth about 18¢ today. By that logic, at this point we should have dropped the penny, the nickel and the dime and round cash transactions to the nearest quarter.
As the continued rarity of dollar coins in circulation suggests, logic has little to do with the choices made regarding coin usage in modern America.
So, does anyone know what the little picture at the beginning of chapter one is supposed to be? The chapter two picture is obviously Morporkia, the personification of Ankh-Morpork we saw in the political cartoon in Monstrous Regiment. The chapter three picture is the Great Seal of Ankh-Morpork. But what is the chapter one picture?
It references something that occurs later on in the book. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to hide spoilers but you might be able to guess.
For what it’s worth, you can hide spoilers by highlighting spoiler text and hitting the [+] button in the comment editor. It will ask you for a spoiler title that will remain visible, but other readers will have to click to read the hidden text…
The Glooper is a real thing. Called the Moniac or Phillips machine, it was invented in 1949 by Bill Phillips, the originator of the economic ‘Phillips Curve.’ (Which correlates unemployment with inflation.)
As Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know that. (I’m gonna go look it up now.)
A Pratchettism, a throwback to Going Postal:
“Head of stamps at the Post Office, sir,” Stanley added, in case pin-point identification was required.
This book imparts six helpful life lessons, which I’ll enumerate as we go.
‘You couldn’t bluff a wall, he thought.’ Too bad he wasn’t rock climbing; then he could perhaps have thought that you couldn’t bluff a bluff.* ^_^
The chapter sub-heading ‘Golem with a blue dress on,‘ referring to Gladys, probably riffs the song “Devil with a Blue Dress On”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAClxmXqX0M
The Post Office is plagued by mongooses introduced to control snakes introduced to control toads introduced to control snails. Shorter chains of biological pest control gone awry are common in our world, including all or most of those above. Mongooses released in Hawaii to control introduced rats instead joined the rats in devastating endemic birds. Cane toads native to Central and South America were released in many Caribbean and Pacific nations, most famously Australia, to control rats or agricultural pest insects with varying success, where they’ve ravaged a variety of small native animals through predation and disease-spreading. Rosy wolfsnails native to North and Central America were released in Hawaii and other Pacific islands to control invasive African land snails, and instead wiped out many endemic snail species. I don’t know any examples of harmfully invasive snakes that had been intended to control other species, but they may exist; snakes are used for biological control, and there are many invasive species, from brown tree snakes in Guam to giant pythons and boas in Florida.
The stuff about banks and temples brings to mind the city of Ketterdam in the Grishaverse, with its Church of Barter, god of commerce, and *explicit* valuing of profit above all else.
“Without the anchor of gold, all would be chaos.” Eh, gold is not a good chaos preventative, as we saw when Twoflower visited Ankh-Morpork with a large amount of it.
“Gold is the one un-tarnishable metal.” Unless Nobby Nobbs is wearing it.
I love Mr. Fusspot.
“Ah. And she sees your inner self. Or perhaps the carefully constructed inner self you keep around for people to find. People like you — people like us — always keep at least one inner self for inquisitive visitors, don’t we?” Ow. As one who fantasizes about seeing peoples’ inner selves, I feel called out.
Cosmo Lavish and his twin sister Pucci were allegedly born with their hands around each other’s necks. I imagine they were facing each other, with the firstborn a breech birth, but don’t know if such mutual strangulation is physically possible in our world.
Pratchettisms:
‘There are times when “It does not get any better than this” does not spring to mind.’
‘Moist knew he was squirming, but squarm anyway.’
‘Words streamed past him like sleet, but like sleet, some stuck.’
‘The venom of a snake ice cream couldn’t have been chillier.’
Looking back:
“I gather [the Low King of the Dwarfs] needs the money because of all this Koom Valley business.”
As Emmet noted, Moist’s standard escape plan currently involves Mrs. Arcanum’s boarding house, where William De Worde resided in The Truth.
Looking ahead:
Emmet’s summary omits out a scene — in the town of Big Cabbage, an itinerant con man with oddly self-willed teeth picks up a stray newspaper.
Moist notices someone in the newspaper photo (‘Someone from the bank, right?’) with a fat face and a bad copy of Vetinari’s beard — Cosmo Lavish, though there won’t be an explicit callback of this — and thinks the man looks ‘hypnotized,‘ which I expect is due to Vetinari’s presence.
At their first appointment of the book, Moist sees Vetinari take a black signet ring from a box of wax sticks in a desk drawer and stamp a “V” into the sealing wax on a letter. Chekhov’s Signet Ring…
Mr. Bent has unusually large feet, an odd way of walking (non-explicitly like someone in exceeding outsized shoes), and allegedly a biological absence of a sense of humor. Such traits in Discworld characters are often relatively-inconsequential quirks. Here, they’re early clues to the growing mystery of Mr. Bent.
I love, love, LOVE Making Money and its predecessor, Going Postal. Moist von Lipwig has to occupy anybody’s top 10 list of scoundrels and rogues.
The audiobooks read by Stephen Briggs are gems; I have never had so much pleasure out of someone reading a character’s name. “Ah, yes, Mister Lip-vig,” he says, and you can see Charles Dance (or maybe a middle-aged Basil Rathbone) delivering that line with so much cool you could store a side of beef in it (to paraphrase Douglas Adams, another master of the quip).