Genuinely curious as to how you decide to grace your readers with a protagonist named “Moist” like that’s no big deal. I’m sorry, Moist, I’d change my name too. (I did, in fact, and my name was considerably less embarrassing.)
Summary
The first prologue details flotillas of the dead, sailing the underwater seas in sunken ships. The second discusses a disease clacksmen get, causing them to step off their towers and fall to their deaths. A linesman is checking one tower’s shutters, and his line is suddenly cut, causing a fatal drop. In Ankh-Morpork, conman Moist von Lipwig (who’s given the name of Alfred Spangler to his executioners) is about the be hanged. He believes he will somehow get out of his hanging, and is very displeased when this does not turn out to be the case. He then wakes is Lord Vetinari’s office—the Patrician, of course, knows who he actually is and has a proposition for him: He can either take on the position of the Ankh-Morpork Postmaster General, or he can leave and never hear from Vetinari again. Moist finds that leaving would lead to a steep and deadly drop below, so he signs the agreement… and promptly skips town. He’s caught up by his parole officer, a golem named Mr. Pump, and taken back to Ankh-Morpork. Vetinari explains that Mr. Pump can follow him anywhere and never sleeps, so it’s best not to attempt escape again. Mr. Pump will pretend to be Moist’s bodyguard to explain why he’s always present.
Buy the Book
The Navigating Fox
Moist is taken to the Post Office and meets his team: Junior Postman Tolliver Groat, Apprentice Postman Stanley Howley, and Tiddles the ancient cat. Groat is also ancient (and keen on creating his own natural remedies for everything rather than using doctors and medicine), but has never been promoted because no one was around long enough to do so. He is also the only person who know about the history of the post office and how things used to work. Stanley is an odd fellow who knows everything about pins (he edits a magazine about them). Moist finds that the pigeon guano heaps in the lobby are actually covering up heaps of mail. In fact, the entire building is full of mail (everywhere except the basement, where it’s damp). Groat explains how things spiraled this way, but Moist gets the sense that he’s not offering the whole story. He goes to sleep in his apartment in the Post Office… which is also full of undelivered mail. Groat and Stanley keep up the post office Regulations (namely filling inkwells and reading out the rules), and talk of how there are voices in the walls that were responsible for the death of the last Postmaster General.
Moist wakes up and decides that he needs a haircut and a toothbrush and some clothes, so he heads out. He also goes to a specialty pin store with plans on how he’ll handle Groat and Stanley. Then he delivers a letter (forty years late) that he found in his room the night previous. Groat goes to the roof to collect the rent on the pigeon loft, which he started letting out when the city stopped paying them. The trio who rent it are “pigeon fanciers” of some sort that Groat can’t figure out. Moist heads to the Golem Trust to figure out how to handle Mr. Pump and meets Adora Belle Dearheart, who gives him a great deal of information on golems (and distracts Moist because he finds her incredibly attractive). She asks why he’s at the post office and he tells her that he’s the new Postmaster General, which she finds concerning considering what happened to the last one. Vetinari has a meeting with the men involved in the Grand Trunk company: They have made the clacks into a monopoly, and its service is degrading while prices rise. A clacks operator has just died, as well: Mr. Dearheart. Reacher Gilt tells Vetinari this is none of his business; he, in turn, informs them that he’s reopening the Post Office. Vetinari asks Drumknott to put one of their more obvious clerks on Mr. Horsefry, one of the more nervous in the group, to scare him.
Moist goes off at Groat and Stanley for not telling him what happened to the previous Postmasters, and learns that the last one died in a room that is permanently locked—he won’t have the key for it on his big ring of building keys. He gives Stanley the fancy pin and takes Mr. Pump and Groat out to a storefront that clearly stole the letters for their signage from the Post Office front. Moist has a word with the owner, and they get their letters back, plus money to hire a crew to get them back up on their building. They’re then spotted by the man who Moist delivered the letter to—he went to find the woman he’d proposed to and never heard from forty years back. Both of their spouses are dead and they mean to get married; he wants Moist as a guest of honor at their wedding. Moist gives Groat a probationary promotion and tries to find out what else is going on at the Post Office, but gets no useful response. Mr. Pump tells Moist that his way of life does actually hurt people, and that the golem thinks it’s unfortunate that he won’t put his skills to better use. In the clacks towers (which are largely staffed by kids), a girl named Princess gets a message that’s just John Dearheart’s name with the code to send it on, unendingly. She learns this is a way of keeping the dead man’s name alive.
Commentary
If you love a conman, it’s hard not to love Moist straight from jump. It’s also hard not to love Vetinari for so expertly pinning Moist down between the rock and hard place of this job and watching how quickly Moist takes to the gig, even when he’s foundering under the weight of everything he doesn’t know.
What he does know is my favorite rule of the confidence game, being that you can fool folks more easily by acting like you belong somewhere. Behave as though no one should stop you and they likely won’t; make people comfortable and you’re in even better shape. However, it does help that many of the people we’re watching Moist manipulate are some shade of unhinged—you’re less likely to be bothered over him leveraging Stanley’s pin obsession or Groat’s hunger for promotion because they’re both such odd ducks, who are so over-the-top that what Moist is doing to them feels like small beans by comparison to what they’re doing to themselves. Where it might bug the reader, say for folks like Mr. Pump, is immediately dispersed because the golem has his number and isn’t fooled.
Of course, there’s also the Reacher Gilt of it all to consider.
It’s… look, Pratchett died a year before the 2016 presidential election in the States, and that’s still heartbreaking for dozens of reasons. One of the more selfish ones for my part is that we were never able to ask his thoughts about Donald Trump actually managing what Gilt is attempting against Vetinari in this book. Because it’s… freaking real-world wizardry. He could string the pieces together, he sensed the arc that was coming.
Of course, we know it won’t work in his version. Because in so many ways, the Discworld is a more tender version of the world we’ve got. Sure, it’s full up of the same horrible acts, ignorances, inconveniences, and traumas. But while Havelock Vetinari is a tyrant, he’s not an amoral megalomaniac bent on power for nothing but the sake of power. The City Watch is capable of going too far, but most days, Sam Vimes reins it in. Granny Weatherwax won’t let anyone mess you about (unless it’s her doing it, and saving the lives of you and your family in the process). And when you shuffle off the coil, Death might be there to greet you, and he’ll talk to you about cats or make a terrible dad joke.
Because the vantage point we have on this world is a little safer, a little kinder, Reacher Gilt isn’t going to win. Business for the sake of nothing but greed will not triumph. And a conman who is doing small damages—but damages nevertheless—toward the general population will learn that there are better ways of spending his time. But only because we’re here. In the real world, we got something far worse.
This book is going to be tough in places this time around, is what I’m saying.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Oh damn, I didn’t read these in order the first time, I didn’t realize Pratchett turned right around from the child’s balloon metaphor in A Hat Full of Sky and then used it about Moist when he’s about to be hanged, sir, you bastard.
- “Mr. Pump was buying his freedom by seriously limiting the freedom of Moist. A man could get quite upset about that. Surely that wasn’t how freedom was supposed to work?” Ha. Haha. Ahhahaahhaha, it’s fine, it’s all FINE, it’s not exactly how it works at ALL.
- Of course, there’s a footnote in this one seemingly designed to address how Pratchett often uses obesity to denote moral decay, but the examples used in the footnote—being other snap judgments you might make about someone who appears to be a burglar or a judge—don’t really stack in this argument. Namely because the appearances of these people as he’s described them are actually designed to denote what they’re doing. Being fat is not a costume or a uniform. Come on.
- While I hate it, it is clever (and awful, ugh) watching Gilt use the exact same argument for their business model as Vetinari uses on Moist. (Being that you always have a choice, even when the choice is basically nothing at all.) Perils of being a small-t tyrant, I suppose.
- Groat is the type who believes that “natural” things are automatically better for the body, and the narrative is quick to point out that this is not, in fact, how things work. While I’m not remotely advocating for folks to medicate thoughtlessly, it’s so on-point that one of Groat’s poultices is straight-up arsenic, and he thinks nothing of it. Natural stuff can be plenty harmful—you can OD on vitamins, for pete’s sake, it’s not even that hard to do depending on the type.
Pratchettisms:
The man going to be hanged had been named Moist von Lipwig by doting if unwise parents, but he was not going to embarrass the name, insofar as that was still possible, by being hung under it.
Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.
Moist saw that it had a beard of the short, bristled type, which suggested that its owner had been interrupted halfway through eating a hedgehog.
His right side stood considerably more to attention than his left side, and, as a result of this, he was standing like a banana.
What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.
A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault.
Moist’s mouth had dropped open. It shut. It opened again. It shut again. You can never find repartee when you need it.
Next week we’ll read Chapters 5-7!
One of the more selfish ones for my part is that we were never able to ask his thoughts about Donald Trump actually managing what Gilt is attempting against Vetinari in this book.
Wait, do you think that Gilt was actually attempting to become Patrician? I have to say that’s not how I read it at all.
There are definitely Trump elements to Gilt, though. I think that later on we get a character musing about how Gilt manages to get the support of so many people, despite being very obviously a crook, which seems apposite.
And what’s interesting is that Gilt even manages to play the Patrician off against himself; he tells the Patrician no, you don’t get to tell me what to do, because we’re a private enterprise and we don’t answer to you. How we run things is none of your business as long as we stay within the law. And the Patrician, who prides himself on being a very hands-off sort of tyrant, actually accepts that argument. He doesn’t tell Gilt “no, improve your service or I will fling you into the scorpion pit with the street theatre artists”.
What he does know is my favorite rule of the confidence game, being that you can fool folks more easily by acting like you belong somewhere.
Linguistic slippage alert! A confidence trick has nothing to do with what we think of as confidence, ie walking around thinking and looking like you know what you’re doing. That is self-confidence.
It’s confidence in the sense of having faith in someone (faith which the trickster then abuses).
He gives Stanley the fancy pin and takes Mr. Pump and Groat out to a storefront that clearly stole the letters for their signage from the Post Office front.
This is a joke that has been waiting for a punchline for a very long time. In Guards! Guards! Vimes and Carrot notice that the motto outside the old post office says “Glom of Nit” – and we’re left to assume that the missing letters have just fallen off because the whole building is in disrepair, or possibly that the whole motto has been put up by someone with a typical Morporkian disregard for spelling. That was fifteen years before Going Postal.
In the clacks towers (which are largely staffed by kids)
Young men, I think. Princess is an actual child, but the rest of the staff aren’t.
Twelve & a half percent may still be my favorite joke in the entire series.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
I feel “… depending on who you stole it from” ought to be added: burglarising a live dragon or picking the pocket of a hardened mobster isn’t morally equivalent to raiding the pension account of your own employees or mugging some random passerby for pocket change.
One also feels that this little Pratchett-ism rather ignores quite a few Villains real & fictional to boot.
This book was made into a lauded live-action SKY1 film. At some point, the cast apparently passed some spare time creating a video of Moist, Groat, Stanley, and Mr. Pump goofing and dancing to “Return to Sender.” This is the hilarious result: https://youtu.be/3Vffl7NWmso?si=fwrBl3tUl-Nfq2la
If you don’t want to get earwormed, it’s even a delight when watched with the sound off.
Ah, but Ankh Morpork doesn’t have pension funds. And this isn’t just a pointless quibble – this whole book is about how the modern Discworld is developing ways to steal (Gilt) and kill (Moist) without getting your hands dirty or even feel like you’re doing something wrong. Like robbing pension funds or, in the next book, embezzling from banks.
Before that it was literally true that stealing thousands of dollars ment you were a government stealing someone else’s country, or Cohen the Barbarian raiding a temple.
Thoughts
“Moist realized he was looking at himself from a distance, as if part of himself was floating outside his body like a child’s balloon, ready, as it were, for him to let go of the string.” Pratchett was definitely borrowing some of the best images from the last book. Not just the child’s balloon but Tiffany’s See Me.
In addition to Moist acting like he belongs somewhere, we’ve seen this many times with Granny Weatherwax. It’s often combined, in fantasy and the real world with carrying something, like DeWorde’s notebook. Although it’s not really a conman trick.
The conman trick I appreciate is that you can’t fool a honest man but a dishonest man is ripe for the picking (and there are a lot more dishonest men).
While the footnote on fat people is disingenuous, in Discworld people who are fat are those with a ready supply of rich foods (not genetics or fast food or food deserts). Fat people in Ankh-Morpork are gluttons and fund their gluttony by exploiting the poor.
I wonder about the GNU message, John Dearheart. Princess says the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk which seems to imply other names should have GNU messages. Are the others in code and, if so, what’s the significance of John Dearheart’s name in Plain?
Note, after seeing the video that Aerona linked to, I watched the video of Pratchett’s comments on Going Postal. Nothing Disc-shattering but apparently the Post Office in Victorian London did deliver multiple times each day and people used it for conversation.
Pratchettisms
The common comma had looked at Stanley’s expression and decided not to disturb him.
There was a definite feel about Adora Belle Dearheart that a lid was only barely holding down an entire womanful of anger.
The summary leaves out Stanley almost bashing in von Lipwig’s for asking questions; I’m reading only the stated sections and last read the whole book too long ago to remember whether this is significant — but Pratchett was quite familiar with Chekov’s gun. (And this matches how the last postmaster died.)
Trump is a clumsy amateur compared to people in our history; the comments about people having no choice despite prices going up and service worsening are right out of the 19th century, when monopolies flourished — often with the active support of the US Supreme Court (and its UK equivalent) quoting the same sort of swill as the “businessmen” present here. (It’s also worth noting that they ultimately lost; it just took a lot longer than it will take in this book.) Pratchett also has the golem smash von Lipwig’s smugness about being non-violent by calculating the number of deaths vL is responsible for.
Horsefly isn’t any more decayed than the other “businessmen”; what he is, is stupid. (Associating that with fat is no less offensive, but I suspect the precise roles of the various “businessmen” will be significant.)
wrt “natural” remedies: IIRC, this came out not long after Diana Wynne Jones was made seriously unwell by a homeopath who said ~”You’re not used to this, so we’ll give you just a small dose.” (Sometime when I wasn’t looking, homeopathy went beyond the doctrine of signatures to the idea that medicines increased in potency when they were radically diluted; that’s probably the reason cases like Jones’s are uncommon.) Pratchett would probably have heard of this, as it was in the fannish news. (I thought it was mentioned in Ansible but I don’t find it there.)
re reactions to sizes of thefts: “The law doth punish man or woman/That steals the goose from off the common,/But lets the greater felon loose,/That steals the common from the goose.” (Quoted by Sturgeon in the 1950’s, ascribed to “18th century”.)
Have we previously seen Hobson’s Livery Stable? Cute reference, that.
IIRC this is the first instance we’ve seen of distracting someone about to be dangerous by triggering their fixation, but it shows up again in another MvL book.
A few Pratchettisms:
What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter. Talk about foreseeing Trump….
The common comma had looked at Stanley’s expression and decided not to disturb him.
People looking at you as though you were less than the dust beneath their feet was one thing, but it was strangely unpleasant when even the dust did that too. Also educational….
@1: ISTM the Patrician doesn’t accept any of the bull from the “businessmen”, except temporarily; we’ve seen often that he knows judo is far more effective than raw force — and even saying anything might give them a hint about what’s going to happen to them.
@1 also: Pratchett says explicitly (p102/409 in the Harper pb) that a lot of towers are “often” manned by kids, as they don’t require payment. (There are several bits in this book that speak to the kind of person fascinated with mechanisms.)
@@.-@: MvL is thinking appearances here, not morality.
@5: kudos to the costume designer for a rig the golem can make those moves in! I wonder whether Netflix (US distributor, says Google) still has that available.
“The conman trick I appreciate is that you can’t fool a honest man”
This is a thing that people say to help them blame the victims of fraud for being victims, but that’s all it is. You absolutely can fool honest men. There is a class of fraud that relies on the mark being dishonest – think Nigerian banker emails or indeed Moist’s gold ring trick – but there are lots of other types that work perfectly well on honest men.
“Fat people in Ankh-Morpork are gluttons and fund their gluttony by exploiting the poor.”
You can’t be really poor and fat in A-M – we repeatedly get told about poor people being actually underweight – but I think this claim goes too far the other way. Sham Harga is fat. Fred Colon is fat. All Jolson is fat. They are not really gluttonous exploiters.
@8: I suspect Pratchett’s reasoning for the name being unencrypted was that most of the traffic is information intended to be private (even from the clacks operators?); the point of putting the name on the clacks was to keep it known, which would be defeated by encrypting it.
@8 also: multiple mail deliveries lasted well after Victorian times; ISTR them being a plot point in stories set in New York City less than a century ago. Some of the deliveries even handled inter-city mail; I’ve seen an exhibit about mail cars on the NYC-DC rail line in which workers sorted mail down to the route level as the train was moving, so that letters could go directly to individual offices or even carriers when the train stopped in major cities.
@9: s/Chekov’s/Chekhov’s/. (The text window flags the typo; I must have been close to asleep last night to miss it.)
@10: there are certainly cons that can fool honest people out of money they don’t expect to get back; the grandchild scam is getting popular enough that banks in this state are considering whether to slow down large withdrawals by the elderly. Can you point to an outright con (i.e., not just a gamble like buying stock on margin) that leads honest people to expect profits?
@9 – Hobson’s Livery Stable turns up in many of the books. They offer horses for sale or rental and offer stables for people who don’t have a place to ‘park’ their horse. One of the most notable occurrences is that DeWorde meets Deep Bone there.
@11 – True. Sham Harga and All Jolson are chefs and eat as much as they can stomach. I assume other chefs may be fat. Fred eats for free at restaurants (hearkening back to the police getting fat on doughnuts). You could argue that he’s a low grade gluttonous exploiter.
@11 – Senor Enrico Basilica was well-known for his rotundity (as well as his voice) but was born into humble circumstances, as Henry Slugg, in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, we don’t know how much he weighed before he left to pursue his career – however, he didn’t seem to be a gluttonous exploiter. Just kind of gluttonous. I guess that we have to make allowances for the artistic temperament, though.
“Can you point to an outright con (i.e., not just a gamble like buying stock on margin) that leads honest people to expect profits?”
If you’re a broker (or similar) and you steal your customer’s funds instead of investing them as ordered.
If you’re a fraudulent stock promoter. Think Theranos – basically a salted mine.
All sorts of con tricks promise non-financial benefits – religious scams, fake medical scams, etc.
This book has some great economic lines – when banks fail, it’s not bankers who starve.
Are there real life examples of governments combating monopoly by setting up a state funded competitor? Usually they seem to break them up or nationalize them.
Most von Lipwig is a born manipulator with extraordinary people skills, an adaptable and lightning-fast innovator, and an adrenaline junkie who lives to take risks. Vetinari knows a figurative jewel when it falls into his grasp. But even Vetinari doesn’t yet know how much Moist is going to transform Ankh-Morpork and the Discworld. He’s not one of my favorite characters, but he’s darned impressive.
I’m always happy when a Discworld book involves old or middle-aged people getting married.
‘[Moist] was the world champion at leaving town in a hurry.’ Rincewind would contest that claim.
Pratchettisms:
“Good morning, Mr. Spangler. It’s me, sir, Daniel ‘One-Drop’ Trooper. I am your executioner for today, sir. Don’t you worry, sir, I’ve hanged dozens of people. We’ll soon have you out of here.”
Looking back:
Judging by their sign, postal workers are very deterred by Mrs. Cake, who appeared in three earlier books and didn’t seem tremendously fearsome except to employees of any church.
Looking ahead:
Moist will make an ongoing prank of stealing Drumknott’s pencils.
I believe this is our introduction to the game of Thud, which will be very important in the next book.
“They Say The Leopard Does Not Change His Shorts.” This controversial subject will be a running gag in late-series Discworld books.
@16 – Completely apropos of this book; because of bank failures during the Panic of 1907, Congress established the United States Postal Savings System which accepted deposits from the general public. FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority is the most famous national example and community cable and WiFi systems would be local examples.
Are there real life examples of governments combating monopoly by setting up a state funded competitor? Usually they seem to break them up or nationalize them.
I was going to say the Post Office Savings Bank as well (we had one in the UK from 1861, along the same lines as the US one) but that wasn’t really combatting a monopoly – there were lots of other banks around, it’s just they were all a bit risky.
Interesting question, though. There are lots of examples of break-ups and nationalisations, as you say, and a fair few examples of a government operation in a market that wasn’t functioning well, but I am finding it very hard to think of a situation where you had a monopoly held by a single private-sector player, and then a government-backed player entered that market in order to provide an alternative. I don’t know much about the TVA so maybe, but from a skim of the history it seems to have been more of a development authority – I’m not sure if it was competing against anyone in the Tennessee electricity market, still less if it was competing against a monopoly provider.
At a local level there may well be some examples – hypothetically if there’s only one doctor in a remote town, she has a monopoly and could therefore raise her fees, and a government-funded clinic might be set up to provide a cheap or free alternative? Something like that?
Or maybe the Reformation in some parts of Europe might count?
Since we’ve had several economic shocks since I feel the need to point out the context of the book’s writing.
We’d just had the dot com bubble burst, Enron accounting scandal was ongoing, Bain’s perfectly legal debt tricks were getting attention, and the Bank of London manipulations in Asia. You can see the influences with the clacks for telecoms and early dot coms, Crispin Horsefry standing in for Enron, and the buy the Trunk then sell and rebuy plan is very Bain.
I’m not sure if the Trump to Gilt comparison is very one-to-one. Britain had and has plenty of there own financial swashbucklers. Honestly Gilt gives off an nineties and oughts nightmare version of Richard Branson vibe in my mind, but your mileage may vary.
20: sorry, this is slightly off topic but I am curious: what was the Bank of London and what was it up to in Asia in the early 2000s? I was in that industry back then and don’t remember it at all. There is a Bank of London right now, but that seems to have been founded in 2021; similarly a Bank of London and South America (closed in 1971) and a Bank of London and the Middle East (founded 2006).
Back on topic, Gilt is very definitely a private-equity type; it’s made explicit that his plan to make money from the Trunk depends on cutting back maintenance to well below minimum safe levels, thus boosting margins in the short term at the cost of the Trunk’s long-term viability and the safety of its employees, which is a story told many times in the last couple of decades. The great thing about this policy is that there is a great deal of ruin in a company, as in a nation, and if you do something short-sighted and stupid it won’t bite you immediately and you’ll have a couple of years to get rich before it collapses.
Gilt has an air of Maxwell about him, and Pratchett, as a former journalist of that generation, would have had him in mind.
@21
You’re right it was not Bank of London. I was thinking of Nick Leeson and the Barings Bank collapse. That’s on me.
Not at all – thanks for the explanation!
@17: I’d say Rincewind is incompetent at everything, including skedaddling; ISTR that what he mostly does is run, where MvL gets a horse that, however bad it is, lets him cover more ground than a running man (especially a running wizard — we’ve seen how unfit they are) and has plans for several upgrades.
@21: if you do something short-sighted and stupid it won’t bite you immediately and you’ll have a couple of years to get rich before it collapses. Not stupid if getting rich and getting out is your aim. This is hardly a new technique; many raised gardens around Washington DC owe their foundations to the surplus of railroad ties created when the owner of the private tram-and-bus system sucked all the juice out of it over 60 years ago, and I remember some classmates “winning” a simulation in a 1970 economics class by a method that would have left the next city administration deeply indebted. And then there’s the play Other People’s Money, which shows the human cost of managers like “Chainsaw Al“, who was successful enough as a fraud that it took much more than a couple of years for people to realize his “turnarounds” were phony.
“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”
Ow. That one stings a bit more these days.
Just a note on the Annotations for this book: the Annotated Pratchett File doesn’t contain any annotations for Going Postal, but lspace.org also has an annotations wiki which does annotate this book.
@25: Ouch indeed. That line was funny when Pratchett wrote it, but today, it’s a bit too telling to be amusing.
@26 as is Bloody Stupid Johnson. That one’s a double whammy
@5
Moist Von Lipwig (Richard Coyle) [probably better known for ‘Coupling’, ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ and ‘The Collection]. IMHO (and in Sir PTerry’s opinion), Richard was born to play Moist.
Groat (Andrew Sachs) (RIP) [‘Fawlty Towers’, of course]
Stanley (Ian Bonar) and Mr Pump (Marnix Van Den Broeke) in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Going Postal’.
(Also Charles Dace as Vetinari)
@2 – I didn’t get the joke until I read the annotations referenced by @26. For the rest of us, here’s the explanation.
“Twelve and a half percent! Twelve and a half percent!” – As Moist almost explains later in the book, this is a financial joke. Long John Silver’s parrot always repeated “Pieces of eight!” Pieces of eight were one-eighth pieces of a gold dollar coin. A dollar is one hundred cents, and one hundred percent make a whole. Twelve and a half percent, then, is exactly one-eighth of a dollar–a piece of eight.
The plot of Going Postal is partly a homage to David Brin’s The Postman: ne’er-do-well drifter accidentally causes the renaissance of a civilized institution.
Some of Pratchett’s inspirations are based on the history of the Royal Mail in the 19th century, and some on the US Mail: “Glom of Nit” — the Herodotus quote about the Persian empire’s couriers — is based on the inscription on the New York General Post Office building. For some reason British post offices never thought to use it.
@30: Do you have a cite for that connection? Brin’s postman is more ambitious (post-crash restoring everything through one key thing) but IMO a pompous failure, where Ankh-Morpork seems to be getting along fine without its post. Pratchett had interesting connections — I was stunned that he collaborated with Baxter — but ISTM that much of Brin is just the sort of hippy-dippy stuff that Pratchett occasionally mocks.
@30. Del: That storied quote of the US Mail has never seen much use over here for the simple reason that it assumes rain, snow and pseudo-nocturnal gloom are exceptional, rather than the rule, where local climate is concerned.
32: I was about to say. “We even do our jobs when it’s raining!” is not a terribly impressive boast in countries like the UK.