All right, pinheads! Wait, it only just now occurred to me that he repurposed a (relatively mild) pejorative. Nice.
Summary
Groat has Stanley run an errand for him. A very drunk Crispin Horsefry shows up at Reacher Gilt’s because he knows Vetinari is having him followed and is worried about the Patrician finding out that they bought the Grand Trunk Company with its own money. He hands over his record book to Gilt for safekeeping, and Gilt has his Igor take Horsefry home and send a message to Mr. Gryle. Moist spots a clacks tower on the Post Office roof and wants to know why they’ve got one and who’s staffed it, so he goes in search of the roof. As he climbs higher, he begins to hallucinate the past, the way the Post Office used to run, and wonders if these sorts of visions aren’t what caused one or two of the previous Postmasters to fall to their deaths. He gets caught in a mail avalanche, finds he can hear the letters, and almost suffocates beneath them. Mr. Pump pulls him out and is unsurprised by what Moist has seen and heard. Stanley shows up to let Moist know that there are men here to see him. Moist gets a bag thrown over his head and is subjected to the Postman Trials, carrying a bag of mail while blindfolded and buffeted by various terrible obstacles.
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By the end, Moist knows he’s about to have his fingers shorn off by a mail slot, so he removes his hood and completes the challenge, but the secret society of Postmen demand a final challenge because Moist is entirely new to their order. Groat slips him a whistle, claiming that he hadn’t expected this. Moist is beset by angry dogs, but in a turn of fate, they happen to be… Lipwigzers. He knows all the commands that they obey and calls the society in to see that he has control of them. The society come back into the room and apologize for putting Moist through the paces, then Mr. Pump enters to let them know that Harry King needs his guard dogs back. (Groat tells Moist that the dogs are definitely not purebreds, to his surprise.) Mr. Pump presents him with the Postman’s Hat, and soon after it’s placed on his head, the letters give Moist a message, telling him to save the Post Office and deliver them. He promises to do so. When Moist wakes the next day he learns that he’s (re)employed the society and Groat to sort the mail, and promised to completely restore the Post Office. He sends them on their rounds, then goes the see the Sorting Engine, which caused the “industrial accident” and cursed the Post Office—it was designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson, of course, and bent space-time. They can’t get rid of it.
Moist talks to Groat about how to change stamps so they can make money off them and won’t be forged so easily. The postmen are coming back grievously injured, so Moist heads to the Golem Trust and asks to hire as many golems as possible to be new postmen. Stanley bring Moist tea and notes that stamps will be money now, giving Moist ideas. Miss Dearheart comes by with a golem named Anghammarad and Moist has him do the postman trials when Groat seems concerned over it, and it turns out that he has been delivering messages for tens of thousands of years—he’s given the rank of Extremely Senior Postman. Miss Dearheart agrees to bring by more and thanks Moist for hiring them. She tells him that she won’t let them work for the Grand Trunk, but she won’t say why. Moist asks her to dinner and she turns him down. He then goes to the engraver to get the stamps made and invents a perforation press on the fly to cut the stamps apart, leaving the patent for it to the engraver (though he does steal from the man and feel bad about it). When he returns, Sacharissa Cripslock is there to ask him about rows breaking out over suddenly delivered mail. Moist tells her about his plans for the Post Office and claims that having his picture taken is against his religion to avoid Otto’s camera.
Sacharissa mentions a wizard named Professor Pelc as someone who knows much about the history of the Post Office, so Moist goes to talk with him. Pelc advises him on the power of words, and how undelivered letters were causing all the problems at the Post Office because they needed to be delivered rather than existing in limbo. Moist asks if he knows what happened to the chandeliers and they consult a dead wizard who tells them that that they went to the Opera House and Assassin’s Guild respectively. Next morning he’s called to Vetinari’s office and learns that his words are headlines in the paper and that there’s a cartoon about stamps and Vetinari’s backside in there too as a result. He expects this is the end, but Vetinari is impressed and pleased—the clacks are down and he can see a queue forming in front of the Post Office. He tells Moist to get on with it, and Drumknott comes in afterward, noting that Mr. Horsefry is dead. Moist comes back to the Post Office and the engraver has his stamps; he tells the line outside that he’ll be delivering express to Sto Lat that morning and asks for a good horse: Mr. Hobson brings him a murderous stallion named Boris, but Moist knows he’s gotta make it look good, so he agrees to ride it. Sacharissa comes to interview him again as he’s about to leave, asking if he’s challenging the Grand Trunk. He insists he’s not and allows them to take a blurry picture of his send off. Before departure, he sees Miss Dearheart in the crowd and asks (shouts) if they can have dinner tonight. She agrees; the camera flashes; Boris is off.
Commentary
The reason con stories are great is because they’re all about a show, but one thing you don’t typically get is a window into their heads. Movies don’t really allow for it, neither does TV, so you miss out on the really fun part: Finding out how much of the con is just making the grandest choice possible on the fly, even when that’s a bad idea. Because conmen are one of the professions that fall under “adrenaline junkies who need constant hits to survive.” There are several other jobs that tend to qualify in fiction and outside of it, but I always think that’s where the meat of it dwells. Moist is bored when he’s not flying by the seat of his pants. (Literally, in the case of Boris.)
There’s an aspect of almost divine interference keeping Moist safe through all this. For example, the Lipwigzers responding to his commands, or the fact that he doesn’t get killed in the mail avalanche. You could say it’s the spirit of the letters, perhaps, but they didn’t protect the other postmasters who came before him. In some ways, the lack of clarity around that feels right because executing confidence games must make a person feel like they’re invincible, or being looked after in some way.
You can’t help but notice that Moist essentially turns himself into the god of the post office in a fit of space-time inspiration from undelivered words. Magic tends to exert itself in wonderfully nonsensical ways in the Discworld, but always with an eye toward what would make a better story. (As Pratchett’s own god of story—Narrativia—intended, I’m sure.) And Moist von Lipwig running around in a golden suit with wings all over it is guaranteed to stick in the public imagination.
Damn, Vetinari is good. This is all his fault, and it’s playing out probably better than he hoped. I figure he views most people like pieces on a chess board, but he has to weigh them to see whether they turn out to be pawns or knights or rooks, etc.
Also, the idea of Moist being scared over that political cartoon when the whole city thought the Patrician was a murder-embezzler a year or so ago, like… kid, he’s fine. It is particularly sweet that this is the only time we’ve ever seen Drumknott (or any of the clerks) offer solace and assurance that Vetinari’s not likely to kill them, though. He must’ve been real worried that Moist would leg it out a high window. But then, Moist is genuinely terrified of Vetinari because he’s one of the few people that the con doesn’t work on. Moist’s ability to fool people is his default state; if you function like that, it must be genuinely terrifying to be around someone who will only allow for the truth. The really true truth.
Where you can find the truth is a very important piece of this book, even outside of Moist’s purview: The mention of the wedding ring on Sacharissa’s finger is the only way you know that things have moved along between her and William, after all… or have they? It’s pointed that it is carefully never confirmed outright anywhere in the Discworld series, but that the suggestion presents itself first in this book. (I’d argue that it’s definitely true just by virtue of the careful omission. Meta-narrative doing what it does best in this case: They don’t go on record, after all. They get other people to do that.)
The romance between Moist and Adora is fun, too, because it’s not Pratchett’s usual given his comically stilted pairings of the past. In this story, the characters aren’t at all unclear about their emotions, or overly concerned about what they mean. Moist’s reaction to Adora Belle Dearheart is basically “oh no, she’s hot,” and he’s right, and her reaction to him is basically “oh no, he’s an adorable idiot” and she’s not entirely wrong, so you know they’ll probably be fine in this particular thing. There’s a wonderful lack of stress around it, is my point.
Asides and little thoughts:
- “It’s just a mailstorm again.” Grumpity grump good puns muttermuttergrumble…
- Sorry, just, Moist says “El Dorado or what?” while looking at his golden suit, and… what’s El Dorado on the Disc? It’s not round world El Dorado, ostensibly, so I demand to know.
- Adora Belle Dearheart hears that Vetinari dyes his hair and I can’t decide what’s funnier—the idea that he doesn’t and folks around him are so mad about it that they contrived the rumor because they can’t stand it, or Havelock Vetinari having a bi-monthly hair dyeing appointment (presumably by the same person who cuts his hair). And if it’s the latter, I also can’t decide what’s funnier—that Vetinari believes that looking younger might aid him in some manner, or that he dyes his hair simply because the grays are throwing off his aesthetic. I lied, the latter is funnier there and absolutely what I believe.
- Another hair color note: Because there’s a His Girl Friday influence to The Truth, I initially imaged Sacharissa to look a lot like Rosalind Russell, meaning that the description here giving her blond hair knocked me right out of the story. Imagined appearances are weird that way.
Pratchettisms:
Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.
The worst part is seeing someone’s head walk through yours. The view is mostly gray, with traces of red and hollow hints of sinus. You would not wish to know about the eyeballs.
Moist tried to scream, but envelopes filled his mouth.
And the golem had even found a mirror. It wasn’t very big, but it was big enough to show Moist that if he was dressed any sharper he’d cut himself as he walked.
They all wore uniforms, although since no two uniforms were exactly alike, they were not, in fact, uniform, and therefore not technically uniforms.
There was no sign of the pickles, the tongs, or the mouse, but in their place was a bucket of clockwork pastry lobsters and a boxed set of novelty glass eyes.
On the inside of the door was a hook, on which the wizard hung his beard.
He’d be believed because it would feel right… because people wanted to believe things, because it’d make a good tale, because if you made it glitter sufficiently glass could appear more like a diamond than a diamond did.
Next week we read Chapters 7A-11!
