This week, we are all subject to the whims of Mr. Fusspot, and why would we have it any differently.
Summary
A week previous, a man named Heretofore is nearly blackmailed by a master craftsman who has made him a duplicate of Lord Vetinari’s signet ring, and has the craftsman killed (though he doesn’t want to do it). Presently, Cosmo Lavish offers to buy Mr. Fusspot, which Moist refuses. He heads to the palace to find out if Lord Vetinari somehow made this happen, which the Patrician resents. Vetinari explains that Topsy did Moist a favor and that he needs to start his new job and make the city money. Moist heads to the bank and finds Sacharissa Crisplock waiting to interview him. He tells her that he plans to get rid of the gold and spruce the place up. Then he meets the canine chefs for Mr. Fusspot, Aimsbury and Peggy. Aimsbury can’t hear the word “garlic” without throwing a knife and speaking Quirmian before he comes back to himself. Then Moist is taken to his new apartments, a large and lovely space, and given his “master of the Royal Mint” hat, which is a sad, worn black top hat. Moist thinks about how to fix the bank and realizes that value is in the city itself. He starts making plans. The person who wanted Vetinari’s ring forged turns out to be Cosmo Lavish, who is trying to become Vetinari. Heretofore has been employed to get old items belonging to Vetinari, while Cranberry kills anyone who might give away the plot.
Adora Belle’s mining operation appears to have been successful in retrieving many more golems, puzzling the dwarfs. The Lavishes attend Topsy’s funeral, and Cosmo is given a hard time for “his side” of the family losing the bank. He realizes that Lipwig’s lack of history is the key to solving this problem, and so is Mr. Bent, provided he can get the man on his side. Moist takes the first dollar note to Tenth Egg Street to try it out on the merchants there and see if they’ll buy into the concept. They seem to like it, but still have difficulty with the idea of a bank not backed by gold, so Moist knows he still has more work to do. He gets into a cab in Losing Street containing Cosmo’s sister, Pucci, trying to catch him in a “honey trap”-looking situation. He jumps out the window, with Colon and Nobby on the street watching. Nobby tells Fred that no one will bet against Moist in his usual book for the Watch—they all think he’s going to win. Back at the bank, Gladys almost kills Moist by trying to give him a back rub, and the Times believes Moist is just the man to run the mint. A few people want to close their accounts after seeing the article… but hundreds more want to open them. Pucci Lavish tries to disrupt the scene, deriding Moist’s new bank notes; this ignites a bidding war to buy the one she has.
Mr. Bent doesn’t like what Moist is doing and doesn’t understand what’s needed of him in this new world. They interview people for loans; Moist lends a small about to Dibbler and a very large amount to Harry King, who is looking to consolidate his businesses. Mr. Bent is besides himself at how Moist is running things, but Moist points out that they’ve taken in a lot of money today, mostly from people he’d consider too poor to do business at the bank. He goes to Temper and Spools to ask if they can start making bills, but Mr. Spools doesn’t think they can manage it without major issues in forging and the like… not without the artist who Moist testified against for forging stamps, who’s about to be hanged. Cosmo goes to visit Mr. Bent at Mrs. Cake’s boarding house where the clerk lives and asks him to do something about Moist. At night, Moist steals a Watch uniform and takes paperwork forms he’s stolen from Spools’ office to get the forger out of prison. The man, by the name of Owlswick Jenkins, kicks him in the groin and runs off. Moist thinks on it and figures that the man’s a bit off and has probably gone back home. He find Jenkins in his old place, painting again. When Jenkins threatens to kill himself with poisonous paint rather than go back to jail, Moist talks to him of angels.
Entering through a secret door that only Igor knows about, Moist asks Igor to give Jenkins a shave and haircut to change his appearance. They change his name to Exorbit Clamp, and Moist asks the forger to design the first note, telling him all the various bits he’ll need to render (because the man can’t come up with it on his own). Moist heads to bed and is summoned to see Vetinari in the morning; the Patrician insists that Jenkins was hanged and Moist wonders if he didn’t accidentally steal the forger Vetinari had intended to keep for himself. Vetinari shows Moist his signet ring and notes all the strange deaths occurring around him lately, but Moist can’t figure out why any of it should be happening. The Patrician also asks Moist to lend the city a half million dollars. Igor helps the new Mr. Clamp store his old bad memories and Clamp has already designed the new note. On the floor of the bank, Moist runs into a figure from his past by the name of Cribbins. He gives the men in the Mint their new deal, where they look after the new printing press fellows from Temper and Spools and get nice new uniforms. They agree to the deal, to Bent’s dismay. Adora Belle arrives and takes Moist to the Unseen University to look inside the Cabinet of Curiosity, a thing that wizards wish she didn’t know they had. Bigger on the inside and full of about eleven dimensions, the cabinet once showed Adora Belle an ancient golem foot that matches the markings on the ones she just found…
Commentary
Not saying that it’s surprising, but it’s definitely bemusing how many of the Ankh-Morpork-centered stories have several arms branching from the main action, one of which is inevitably: Someone is enacting a poorly-conceived plot against Lord Vetinari that he may or may not know everything about, and while said plot should be about taking control of the city, there’s frequently some unhinged aspect to it that involves people wanting to somehow sap/rob/absorb his innate powers through increasingly desperate and hilarious means.
You know, we started out normal, with him getting shot. And then the slightly more involved poisoning plot. And then he basically deposes himself for a bit to stop a war from happening while Old Money guys grouse about it. And then a bunch of one-percenters find a guy who can easily pass for him by daylight and try to frame him for murder and embezzlement using the imposter. And now another one of those one-percenters has decided that he can somehow commune with the man through his belongings and then assume his power and abilities and position? Gotta love the escalation; it makes my heart so happy. And it’s the perfect sort of distraction against all the more serious workings of Moist figuring out how to make money… happen.
It’s second nature in the art of the con, but there’s such an ease and preternatural likability to Moist when he’s working that feels almost superhuman? We start the book and he’s more than a little bit pathetic, all the shine rubbed off him, and the instant that his brain starts turning over, the charisma reasserts itself at brute force. I can’t really think of another character who elicits that sort of reaction from me: I like him better when he’s working, when his back is up against the wall.
We get the rudimentary economics conversation when Moist goes on about potatoes being worth more than gold, which is a good place to start, and then a slightly more involved economics lesson as he starts to piece together the city’s value and the need to move away from gold. But again, money is being made fun in this context because it’s part of his con. Even Moist is aware of how he’s manipulating the system and people to his advantage, and as readers, we want to see him succeed because we already know him. You had to do the stories in this order—if Vetinari had started Moist out at the bank before the post office, it wouldn’t be as enjoyable of a ride.
With the newly minted Mr. Clamp, Moist basically gets his own Leonard de Quirm—someone he can rely on to create the complicated mechanisms to make his plans work. (Igor is helping, of course, because Igors always do. They are one of the greatest gifts Pratchett gave himself, an easy solution to any number of narrative problems because there’s very little they can’t figure out.) But we’re currently in the thick of it, and there are key tenets to how Moist operates that are true in cons, in business, and in life in general: Making something look good is half the battle to getting people invested; if change happens quickly enough, it doesn’t seem like change at all; being a bit “real” with people will always help them to trust you.
Moist pointedly gives his first two loans to the sort of people that make the city run, but on very different scales: Dibbler and Harry King. The bank wouldn’t have let either of them set foot inside before he took over, and the bank was wrong. But changing the system doesn’t mean it’s better now in this particular instance—it only means that it can take advantage of more people. Where that leads us will come clear as we continue…
Asides and little thoughts
- Yet again, the fatphobia in this book gets pretty egregious between the descriptions of Cosmo and Pucci. It feels repetitive to keep noting it, but it’s one of the few things Pratchett does that I can’t help but find disappointing. There’s comedy enough in the fact that Cosmo is forcing a ring that’s too small for him onto his hand! But there’s always this extra layer to the avarice with fatness that gets used, and they’re plain cheap shots (that are obvious to boot), particularly with how often it comes up.
- I think this is the first time it’s confirmed that Quirmians speak French? So Quirm is France, for all intents and purposes. Which is somehow weirder to me than all the other not-other-country parallels on the Disc.
- As a person with ADHD, it’s fairly obvious that Pucci Lavish has it. The way she bounces between topics is, uh, reminiscent, shall we say, of talking to my mother.
- Again, it’s so enjoyable to get character’s opinions on characters from other books, and Moist noting that William de Worde is likely the same age as him but writes editorials “that suggested his bum was stuffed with tweed” is a beautiful thing.
- In the annals of Vetinari’s carefully curated preferences toward nothingness, eating the egg white off your hard boiled egg while leaving the yolk is a new level of blandness, I salute him. (And also agree that the grain gravel Drumknott eats is worse.)
- I couldn’t find any evidence that the phrase “drop-dead gorgeous” actually came from people painting their faces with arsenic to look paler, as Moist suggests to Owlswick Jenkins. People did paint their faces that way, I just couldn’t find a correlation to the term drop-dead gorgeous. I’m assuming this was done on purpose, as a sort of anachronistic malaphor, for lack of a better way of putting it?
Pratchettisms
He probably had a note from his mother saying he was excused from stabbing.
He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.
It would have worked for Vetinari, who could raise his eyebrow like a visual rim shot.
Is it some kind of duplex magical power I have, he wondered, that lets old ladies see right through me but like what they see?
He made razzamatazz sound like some esoteric perversion.
Mr. Bent liked counting. You could trust numbers, except perhaps for pi, but he was working on that in his spare time and it was bound to give in sooner or later.
“You’re putting his brain into a… parsnip?”
Next week we’ll read Chapters 7-9!
Thoughts
Unlike the Post Office hat which reminds one of speed, the Bank hat reminds one of nothing so much as the Monopoly tycoon’s hat and, given the state of the Bank, it’s appropriately threadbare. Lipwig uses his gold hat and suit for both.
Stibbens refers to the Cabinet as a standard Bag of Holding which is a shout out to a traditional Dungeons and Dragons magic item.
Pratchettisms
On Cosmo the elegant facial topiary floated unhappily on blue jowls glistening with little tiny beads of sweat, and gave the effect of a pubic chin.
His first thought, curtesy of the old Moist, was: How dare he try and bribe me so small?
“The city bleeds, Mr. Lipwig, and you are the clot I need.” (Vetinari)
He just had to listen to himself long enough to find out what he was talking about. (Lipwig)
Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms, in the dark and based on bullsh¡t.
He made the front page. He usually did. It was his athletic mouth. It ran away with him whenever he saw a notebook.
The inverted commas shuddered, like a well-bred girl picking up a dead vole.
I wonder . . . am I really a bastard or am I just really good at thinking like one? (Lipwig)
Minor Notes
In my book, the parsnip is called a turnip. I assume it’s a UK/US decision based on the countries’ familiarity with root vegetables.
In answer to the question last week on the picture at the beginning of chapter one, it is part of the design on the front of the dollar bill.
Nah, that’s specified at least as far back as Hogfather (“Is it my fault even Quirmians can’t understand restaurant Quirmian?”)
FWIW, the OED only traces “drop-dead gorgeous” back to 1962.
Gordon is right and, not being a Brit, I was wrong. Republica’s song “Drop Dead Gorgeous” was released on their first album in 1996 and as a single in 1997 where it hit the top 10.
Actually, the OED is only tracing “drop dead” back to 1962. The full phrase is probably from the movie of the same name in 1999.
I was thinking that can’t be right, partly as it’s the title of a song from 1997 which fits with me thinking it’s a well-known British phrase of the 1980s/90s. A quick search gives the first recorded use of DDG being about Cher in 1972
Fascinating — today I am among the 10,000.
Moist thinks he is inventing the concept of fiat money here, but it seems to me that he is conflating this concept with coins vs paper bills. Aren’t the coins already fiat? Based on gold or not, they’re still accepted as legal tender because the authorities deem them to be.
If this is the case, the jump from coins to bills is not a big deal. It’s just getting people to accept non-metal as money.
Moist surprised Harry King by spitting on his hand before shaking. Was this practice more common among blue-collar workers?
Latterday coins have become fiat, but they originated as a convenient way of having that value of metal in an easy to use format, it was the total weight of metal that mattered not any nominal face value of a coin, so until relatively recently (i the history of coin use…) who issued a coin only mattered for it’s percieved purity. Hence political turmoil about adulterating currency etc. when monarchs re-issued coins with reduced silver content. Pterry’s gradual slide from a psudo medaeival society to a pseudo Victorian one confuses this on Discworld of course.
Hence the term “clip joint”, which Brewer’s says comes from the crooked trick of taking a bit off a coin before passing it on; since the coin’s metal originally matched its value, a clipper could gradually accumulate metal that could be traded (possibly at a less-than-honest metal shop — cf modern shops that don’t ask the provenance of catalytic converters cashed in for the rare metals in them). Hence the invention of “milling”, putting ridges on the edges of coins so that someone offered a coin would know whether it had been reduced. (Wikipedia credits this to Isaac Newton in one of his later-life roles.)
As far as spitting on the hand, it dates back to Pliny the Elder who said “It was believed that if a man assaulted another with a fist or projectile and then spit in the palm of the offending hand, the victim would forgive him.”
Some speculate that this became a trade custom implying that you’re making the agreement regardless of whatever came before.
Others say it has nothing to do with Pliny and it is a less messy version of a blood oath.
Pratchett seems to be using the first definition.
Life lessons imparted by Making Money:
#1. If someone says they’re allergic to the word “garlic,” don’t test them on it. (In general, don’t test peoples’ allergies.)
#2. Don’t let a golem give you a backrub.
Garlic is on lists of things unsafe for dogs to eat, but there also are contrary and even positive claims. Regardless, I’m on the side of no.
#3 Size your rings.
That comes after the consequences mount.
Mods: I’m trying to submit a longer comment, but it just remains in the typing box when I click Post Comment. Does this new website have a character limit for comments? The previous website did, but I don’t see one indicated here.
@0 Like Aerona’s my comments can run long enough that I’ve exceeded the Tor.com limit in the past. If Reactormag.com has a similar limit please let us know. I’m willing to edit or split comments but I need the word limit to do this.
I would also appreciate knowing what the limit is; a long list of Pratchettisms made the wavy-bubbles sign that I interpreted as “We’re thinking it over!” but the post never appeared and AFAICT isn’t retrievable for editing. Maybe I should write posts offline and copy/paste them to have a record….
Returning to the topic: in the period these stories parallel, ISTM that fat was an ostentation of the rich rather than a comment on moral fitness. I could be crusty about the comments on Drumknott’s diet, which sounds like the one that’s kept me from dying/debilitating early as two relatives did.
But I do like the steadily-rising plots against Vetinari; you know he’ll survive them, but the fun part is how Pratchett will make it happen.
First, let me agree that Pratchett doesn’t use fat as body shaming but, as you say, as shorthand for the idle rich.
As far as Vetinari, besides loving him as a character and a plot device, I’m fascinated by the seeming omniscience of his intelligence network.
As far as Pratchettisms, I gather them as I read in Google Keep (I’ve got next week’s waiting) and then add things to respond to Emmet’s commentary. When it’s finished I copy it to here.
Hello! For those asking about a word limit (@AeronaGreenjoy and davep1), I don’t *believe* that there is one; I was just able to post a test comment that was over 6000 words, BUT was not as successful in posting a long comment with lots of links, so I wonder if that’s the issue? With a link-heavy comment, I ran into the issue where the comment just wouldn’t post, even after deleting some/most of the text….
We’ll continue to test things out and thanks for your feedback–we’re still figuring out some of the new site’s eccentricities along with everybody else :)
My original comment was much shorter than 6000 words, but posting it in small pieces seems to be the only thing that sometimes works.
I’m personally not sure what Cosmo wants more — to be Patrician, or to be *Havelock Vetinari.* He’s despicable for committing and commanding murders in the advancement of his obsession. But I also pity him, and have no grounds to scorn him, as I’ve bitterly desired to be certain idolized people and sometimes emulated them in absurd ways. And Vetinari is worthy of idolization.
Hey Mr. No-Longer-Albert-Spangler, you kind of…*spangled* your hat.
Oops. Cosmo, with his promissory note, accidentally gave Moist the idea for paper money.
There’s way too much realness in “make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”
Contrary to what Emmet said, Adora Belle’s digging operation does *not* “appear to have retrieved many more golems, puzzling the dwarfs.” She has many golems work on the digging, they emerge as a group when it’s time to leave, and the dwarfs don’t bother to count the departing golems (a mistake, we’re told) and are puzzled that she apparently had all this digging done for a mess of mostly worthless old nautical artifacts and bones. Later she tells Moist that she found four new golems.
Pratchettisms:
‘The city is the magician, the alchemist in reverse. It turns worthless gold into, well, everything.’
‘And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up.’
‘Tell someone you were going to rob them, and all that happened was that you got a reputation for being a truthful man.’
“Has the bottom dropped out of the dog muck business, or vice versa?” – Moist
“I might be about muck, but I don’t muck about.” – Harry
“You’re more full of bullshit than a frightened herd on fresh pasture, Mr. Lipwig” – Harry
“Good morning, master. The street outside is full of people. And might I take this opportunity to congratulate you for disproving a theory currently much in vogue at Unseen University. There are, some risible people like to suggest, an infinite number of universes, in order to allow everything that may happen a place to happen in. […] Now, however, I can disprove the theory, because in such an infinity of worlds, there would have to be one where I would applaud your recent actions, and let me assure you, sir, infinity is not that big.” Mr. Bent may have no sense of humor, but he’s excellent at sarcasm.
Much as your reply to my ring size comment, “Mr. Bent may have no sense of humor, but he’s excellent at sarcasm.” is also foreshadowing.
Looking ahead:
We get three warnings, and a demonstration, of the way stygium superheats in bright sunlight.
Cosmo remembers his father telling him something horrifying about Mr. Bent, something “you should know in case he starts acting funny.” Harry says there’s “something funny” about Bent. Then there are hints at his past involving very bad times.
The Cabinet of Curiosities will be used again.
“Mr. Lipwig, you are turning this bank into a…a circus!” Them’s loaded words.
We learn from Cosmo that Wuffles has died.