It is genuinely disconcerting when a ghost uses too many exclamation points.
Summary
Agnes stays up late and notices André the organ player appearing right after she thought she saw the Ghost. She heads to bed only for Christine to bother her later in the night, frightened because her mirror is talking to her. Agnes goes to Christine’s room and does hear a voice coming from the mirror. Agnes responds with Christine’s voice and the voice from the mirror says it will teach her to sing as well as Perdita. Granny and Nanny learn the secret of Henry Slugg, who pretends to be Enrico Basilica because people are more impressed with things that come from far away. At breakfast, Christine tells Agnes she has an admirer, as she just received a new dress out of nowhere. Mrs. Plinge briefly sees Mr. Pounder the ratcatcher, who dies shortly after. Mr. Bucket is worried about what the Ghost might do next, and he and Salzella both fix on the chandelier—they decide to have someone guard it during the evening performance, but the Ghost wants Christine to play a major role as well, though she cannot sing. They call Agnes in to sing the part for her, to “ghost it,” as it were. Agnes knows that her only other option is to go home, so she agrees. Granny and Nanny arrive in Ankh-Morpork.
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Siren Queen
Nanny and Granny are set to stay at a house of ill-repute, which surprises Nanny very much because Granny knows what sort of place it is and seems unbothered. Agnes goes through the music with the choir master and shocks him by being so good. She has a brief flirtation with André and then runs into Christine again, who has decided that Agnes is her little pixie, the one her father said would help her achieve her great ambition. Agnes goes out to get the ingredients for poison after that (not that she would ever use them on Christine…), spots Nanny and Granny and quickly rushes back to the opera house for fear that they’ll take her home. Undershaft means to tell everyone that they have to let Agnes sing because opera is about voices, not what the singer looks like, but he’s killed by the Ghost. Nanny and Granny go to the publisher to see about Nanny getting royalties and Mr. Goatberger is fully aghast and sends them away. Granny and Nanny make their way to the opera house and Nanny convinces Granny to use their tickets (gifted by Mr. Slugg) to see the evening’s performance.
Granny focuses and can tell there’s something wrong with the building. She and Nanny go looking and come upon Box Eight, but in trying to get in, they run into Mrs. Plinge, who has a panic about upsetting the Ghost and all the goings on in the opera house. They work to calm her down, and send her home with Granny. The curtain comes down for the first act and as the company changes over for the second, they come across Dr. Undershaft’s body. Nanny dresses up in Mrs. Plinge’s clothes and starts moving about to see how everyone handles the murder and everything else going on. She finds Walter Plinge crying next to the dead body, and tells him that his mother’s gone home, which he’s upset by—she’s not supposed to walk home without him. Walter insists that the Ghost wouldn’t have killed Dr. Undershaft because he was a nice fellow. Nanny finds out from a stagehand that Agnes is going by Perdita again, and who Christine is. Mrs. Plinge tells Granny that people poke at her boy and hide his broom sometimes, but that she raised him to never be any trouble; he’ll sleep in the opera house if she doesn’t come for him to walk her home.
Right at Mrs. Plinge’s door, they get stopped by thieves, but a figure in black and red comes to the rescue and stops the men with a sword. Granny suggests that they patch the group up so they don’t bleed to death. Mr. Bucket is worried about the death and resolves to call the watch in tomorrow, but Salzella is more concerned with getting the production back on track for the evening. Nanny comes in and shows Agnes that she’s posing as a tea lady, and it seems as though Agnes might have to go on for Christine when the ingenue “valiantly” rallies. Nanny learns that it’s bad luck to whistle in the opera—in part due to the fact that they use whistle codes to shift scenery. Granny returns and Nanny fills her in on the murder, and how everyone believes it’s the Ghost. Granny doesn’t believe in ghosts that murder, though, and she knows that Mrs. Plinge is terrified of something, though she’s not sure what. Christine tells Agnes that she was singing a little too loud, and asks her to put all the flowers that came for her in water. When she goes downstairs to fetch the water, she hears an incredible tenor voice. She goes out onto the stage and almost trips over Walter, who has overfed Greebo. He tells her that he hears music coming out of the walls all the time.
Commentary
The setup that gets used for Agnes and Christine on stage is familiar to anyone who’s seen Singin’ in the Rain, but it is (as Pratchett knew too well) a method that has been employed often in real life. It got used in film for ages, particularly if an actor couldn’t sing that well, though the practice has fallen out of favor in recent decades. It’s been used in dancing too (think the famous audition in Flashdance.) In this instance, it’s being combined with another aspect of opera that was coming into vogue at the time—the transition to opera stars who were thin and younger, as opposed to selecting for the strongest voices alone.
Having these separate-but-similar issues combine makes the plot a little meatier in terms of the prejudice and upset you’re dealing with; there are many talented opera singers who lost work over the new physical expectations, and it’s as depressing as it is thoughtless on the part of the producers because opera is hard. It’s not just about finding folks who can carry a tune—the level of training and maintenance it takes to sing opera is considerable and ongoing. Moreover, it relies on a maturity of voice that actually does need some age behind it; your vocal range changes over time and expands if you exercise it regularly. You aren’t at any sort of peak as a young opera singer, it’s a skill that broadens with time, even if people do worry about hitting their peak and going downhill.
The joke around Walter is that he’s meant to invoke Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, who was played by Michael Crawford. Pratchett thought it was humorous that a guy known for playing comedy like that on British TV became the Phantom… who is, you know, super hot to a lot of people. It’s a little less bemusing to me because I know Crawford’s other work in musicals (if you’ve ever watched the terrible movie version of Hello, Dolly! he’s their Cornelius), and musical theatre often sees actors playing a wide range of types that are frequently ridiculous and sexy by turns. It does tip his hand a little in regard to the plot, however—if you know Crawford’s work, you can guess at where this might be going. I enjoyed that my first time around, though.
I didn’t really take as much note on my first read about this narrative around Agnes, specifically her being someone who can cope through things. It’s suggested at first that this is due to her size, that people think she can simply soak things up, but it’s suggested later without that tie. Now I’m struggling to remember if that’s a through line for Agnes’s character all the way around because that’s… an important one for women and afab folks. The level to which we’re expected just cope through things, far past our limit is An Experience. Everyone should be better to Agnes, is my point.
As a separate aside, I truly adore the fact that everything unnerving in this story comes with too much punctuation: Both the Ghost and Christine are noted for overusing it and putting others on edge with said use. It just puts me in mind of how often I try to decide how many exclamation points I can put in an email without coming off accidentally terrifying (or how few I can add without seeming furious for no reason?)…
Asides and little thoughts:
- There’s an aside in this book about a woman named Colette with a fascinating pair of earrings, that are based on an eponymous woman and Discworld fan who made her own pair of earrings that she wore once to a book signing. Pratchett asked permission to use her likeness in the book, and she agreed, and the story is just so dang sweet, it really does get you every time. (For the full explanation, head over to L-space…)
- I forgot that the slur for Romani people was used liberally in this one on account of it being part of the opera the company is performing. It’s always interesting to stumble across words that were still in common use, perhaps even more so when the book isn’t that old and you’re looking at a recent change.
- The joke about suggesting that ballerinas stand on tiptoe to avoid wearing out their shoes is excellent.
- …and I keep thinking about how Nanny’s scumble is referred to as “suicider.” How have I never attempted a fall cocktail with that name? I will be sure to remedy that this year (and give y’all the recipe if it turns out any good).
Pratchettisms:
It doesn’t matter what direction you go. Sometimes you just have to go.
Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.
Since his nerves were already strained, he responded by screaming back at her. This seemed to have the effect that usually a wet flannel or a slap was necessary to achieve. She stopped and gave him an affronted look.
“So that’s an opera house, is it?” said Granny. “Looks like someone built a great big box and glued the architecture on afterward.”
Granny snatched at her hat and did a crabwise run along the row, crushing some of the finest footwear in Ankh-Morpork under her thick Lancre soles.
Nanny’s philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.
She’d tried to memorize the plot earlier—although other members of the chorus had done their best to dissuade her, on the basis that you could either sing them or understand, but not both.
Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong.
If music were the food of love, she was game for a sonata and chips at any time.
She could feel the auditorium in front of her, the huge empty space making the sound that velvet would make if it could snore.
Next week we’ll read up to “It’s made of apples. Well… mainly apples…”
It should also be noted that “Walter Plinge” is the pseudonym used on the program in British theatre when the actor’s name is unavailable (hasn’t been cast at press time) or needs to be hidden, for some reason. So Walter is either vacant, or a surprise.
American theater uses “George Spelvin” for the same purpose.
First let me say that I have never seen an opera in whole or in part on stage or on film and I have no desire to. I also have never read or seen The Phantom of the Opera. So I don’t get many of the references. I like words, not music – give me Hamlet over Hamilton.
Given that, I love Nanny’s description of operas and her attempts to explain what’s going on to Granny.
Besides jokes, this part of the book seems to focus on filling out (and removing) characters rather than on advancing the plot. Granny shows restraint with the engraver and reveals more of her ‘soft’ side at Mrs Palm’s. But she reminds us that she’s still Granny by insisting the criminals wounds be sewed up with a rusty nail. Nanny elaborates her various philosophies. Agnes allows her anger to come out a bit more.
We stopped reading at a key point. If it were a TV show the outro to the commercial break would be “Coming up: Agnes acts, Granny decides, and the Watch takes over.”
Pratchettisms
“Dear me, Gytha Ogg. I always thought you were unshockable.” “Shockable, no,” said Nanny. “Easily surprised, yes.”
“Are there going to be . . . choirs and things?” WOULD YOU LIKE SOME?
The fact that she was a free agent and her own mistress and quite at liberty to go off to Ankh-Morpork had nothing to do with it. They’d interfere. They always did.
“You’ve been exploited,” said Granny. “No i ain’t.” “Yes you have. You’re a downtrodden mass.”
Nanny Ogg could fit in faster than a dead chicken in a maggot factory.
Ah, missed a use! When an actor plays two roles, the second one is Waltered.
@1: today I am among the 10,000 — even if I’ll never get a chance to use that datum. I don’t remember ever seeing “George Spelvin” in a program in the US, but I’ve seen about 1 preview in the last few decades; will have to remember to look if I get to another.
I love the line about the empty space of the theater. I spent a few years heavily involved in high school and college theater, almost always as a techie rather than a performer, and remember well what it’s like to be the first person in or the last out — especially in theaters that don’t leave the ~customary solitary standing lamp in the middle of the stage. A side note: anyone jonesing for genre involving theater should read John M. Ford’s “The Illusionist”; only appearance was in his Liavek collection Casting Fortune, but Tor is reprinting everything they can get the rights to so it should be findable sometime soon.
ISTM that this book is meatier earlier than much of Pratchett; the last several have spent the second quarter setting up the pieces and throwing gags, where in this one we keep getting more bits of story. (And hangovers from other stories; Lspace reminds me that Weatherwax met Palm in Equal Rites, but ISTM that’s ~retconned here as the original Granny wouldn’t have been so acute.)
Another Pratchettism: After you’d known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way. I think Christine doesn’t have a mean bone in her body — but she has plenty of privileged bones, and maybe never had to think because other people were doing that for her.
Good point, Chip. Christine would never be deliberately unkind but she’s too dumb to comprehend how what she sees as plain statements of fact could be hurtful. And nobody’s ever bothered to explain it to her. Maybe they just assumed it would be useless. Maybe they were right.
@@.-@ @5 I actually think we see this a lot in this and other books, generally with clueless nobs (and Nobbs for a different reason). They don’t think of themselves as unkind but make plenty of unkind statements about and to the ‘lesser’ people.
Contrary to his claim, the mystery teacher could *not* have taught Christine to sing like Agnes. Both women lack experience and vocal maturity, but Agnes has the right build for opera singing and Christine doesn’t. Even if Christine wasn’t especially bad at singing, her narrow torso doesn’t allow for the vast lung capacity and powerful diaphragm control to produce the volume, duration, and quality of sound that are required of a solo opera singer. (Credit to Mark Reads commenters who pointed this out.)
‘The door of Mrs. Palm’s discrete establishment opened at Granny’s knock. The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille.’ I *hate* that statement. “Person whose breasts are easy to see and would be easy to detect by touch if you fondled the person” is not the same as “obviously a woman.” For me, the grossness of this statement is not negated by it being “a product of its time” or by its use here in referring to a sex worker whose body is deliberately on display. It annoys me as a cis woman whose massive breasts are a regular source of social/emotional discomfort as well as constant physical pain, it annoyed a trans man who condemned it in the comments on Mark Reads, and I expect it annoys plenty of other trans people (though apparently not Emmet), as well as some cis women who lack prominent “womanly” curves.
Other than that bit, I enjoy the scene at Mrs. Palm’s, a rare occasion where Nanny gets discombobulated and scandalized. Granny might not personally have sex, but she can be friendly with people who do, such as Nanny. And Nanny has no more right than anyone else to tell her where she does and doesn’t belong.
The Departure Aria where Iodine “tells Peccadillo how hard it is to leave him” translates from Brindisian to Morporkian (and from Italian to English) as a long complaint about a stuck door…which *would* make it hard for someone to leave.
I noted that the Isle of the Gods, `the place for all the things which might go off bang in unexpected ways,’ doesn’t host the Alchemists’ Guild…where things regularly go off bang in very expected ways.
“Says here that Dame Timpani, who plays the role of Quizella,* is a diva. So I reckon this is like a part-time job, then. Probably quite a good idea, on account of you having to be able to hold your breath. Good training for the singing.” Ha, Nanny thinks a diva is a *diver.* As a diver myself, I especially enjoy that joke, though I prefer SCUBA diving (wherein one should *never* hold one’s breath) to freediving.
Pratchettisms:
‘Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.’
“Can you identify yourself?”
“Certainly. I’d know me anywhere.”
“Let me through, I’m a nosy person.”
Looking back:
According to this timeline, Maskerade is set about 21 years after (presumably the main part of) Equal Rites wherein Granny first met Mrs. Palm, time that Lancre largely spent in a magic timeslip but Ankh-Morpork didn’t. Why is Granny on first-name terms with the young people who currently work at that brothel? Readers have speculated that she somehow visited again in the intervening years without Nanny knowing about it, or these young adults were brothel-born children at the time of her first visit, or The History Monks Did It.
Looking ahead:
There’s another reference to the wizard-inflicted ban on movable type in Ankh-Morpork, which causes the city to be ‘denied the benefit of newspapers, leaving the population to fool themselves as best they could.’
*I don’t know how that name is spelled.
@6: the other instances that I’m remembering — e.g., the ones that drive Vimes out of the room (and sometimes to the nearest drink) tend to be from people who are more vicious and/or aware, and not caring about being unkind; I think Christine would care if she had any idea how she was hurting people. (OTOH, she might not — we’re shown that she’s very self-centered, e.g. using a polite/social question as a way to let her talk about herself.) But I find the more obvious instances more memorable, thanks to some combination of their blatancy (cf also the various bigotries shown in Men at Arms) and others’ reactions; I’m rereading interlaced with a lot of other books, so I am probably not remembering many of the more subtle cases from previous books.
@7: her narrow torso doesn’t allow for the vast lung capacity and powerful diaphragm control to produce the volume, duration, and quality of sound that are required of a solo opera singer. This is not necesssarily so. Diaphragm control certainly doesn’t require a wide torso — it’s a matter of developing muscles proportional to build — and projection need not; a long time ago I chorused behind a woman who was definitely on the lean side of average but had no trouble filling Boston Symphony Hall (and with an astoundingly rich sound for a soprano, not just volume). I wonder how many broad torsos are pushed into solo voice work for no more reason than tall people are pushed into basketball.
The setup that gets used for Agnes and Christine on stage is familiar to anyone who’s seen Singin’ in the Rain, but it is (as Pratchett knew too well) a method that has been employed often in real life. It got used in film for ages
Not only in film. Remember Milli Vanilli?
Well! @1, I now understood why the actress Shelley Bob Graham chose “Georgina Spelvin” as her film name.
If you don’t know her work, be aware before you Google it that it was X-rated.
Having others voice a character happens for other reasons as well; I seem to recall that in Queen of the Damned, the voice work was done after the filming, and due to the death of the star Aaliyah, the voice was substituted.
@10 @11 – Roundworld has moved far beyond Discworld in performance lies. Many ‘live’ performances are lip-synced. Recordings and performances are auto-tuned, and now with CGI, green screen, and an old ‘holographic’ illusion, dead performers have been digitally resurrected.
With our technology Mr. Bucket could get rid of the cast and orchestra and really make a profit.
@7: If it helps any (and I don’t know if it does), I took the “There was no possible way she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille” bit as referring to Colette’s “work uniform” strongly emphasizing her shape, and covering very little. So not so much “tee hee big boobs touch em” as “professional seamstress deliberately puts the wares on display”.
@7 I noticed that bit about how wizards don’t allow movable type in Ankh-Morpork. In this book, it specifically says “They had never explained why.”
You quote something saying that it’s because they don’t want Morporkians to have newspapers. Where is this from? I don’t recall it being in Maskerade thus far.
Why would this be the case? My initial speculation was that they want to maintain a monopoly on education, but if it’s about newspapers, I don’t know why that would be.
@7 and 13, personally I think “There was no possible way she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille” is funny. All it means is the working girl is dressed to showcase her secondary sexual characteristics in order to catch the eye of potential customers. She need not be particularly chesty, just wearing a well engineered outfit will work wonders whatever your endowment.
@14, I think the wizards are worried that the easy spread of the printed word could endanger the fragile reality of the Disk. This is a world where libraries are places of concentrated magic power after all. If people start building personal libraries anything could happen!
@7 @13 – Terry Pratchett wrote humorous fantasy set in an alternate universe and did it very well.
Mrs. Palm set up her bordello to appeal to the majority of men in Ankh-Morpork who were looking for, essentially, Playboy Playmates. There is no indication that other seamstresses didn’t cater to other tastes or that Terry, through Granny, would condemn them.
Besides, give it time, Granny meets Trans in the next act part.
@14 @15 – without giving too much away, the wizards worry that the type would retain the magic of a book and transfer it to the next book it was used to print.
@14: This book mentions the ban on movable type (with a note on the resulting lack of newspapers) as it relates to the engravers’ lucrative monopoly on publishing in Ankh-Morpork.
For me, as I said, the problem with “obvious breasts = obvious woman” is not negated by its use in reference to a sex worker. And while it may have made sense in the minds of Pratchett (at the time) as the author and Granny as the POV, I — and people more harmed by this ongoing societal belief than I am — can point out to readers that it’s not accurate.
@davep1
Yes, there’s also Mr Harris and his Blue Cat Club, encouraged to a chair on the Seamstress’s Guild Council by Mrs Palm “on the grounds that unnatural acts are only natural”. The Seamstresses are very much an equal opportunities employer.
@12: it’s hardly surprising that Roundworld has passed Discworld in a technology; several of the books deal with the appearance of 19th- or early 20th-century tech. (This was a well-worn tool by the time Pratchett used it; see, e.g., Ford’s Liavek stories about early trains, including the question of finding a god for this new thing (“Riding the Hammer”).) Lip-syncing live performances goes back a lot further than Milli Vanilli; a local historian of pop music has been doing a series on post-WW2 male vocalists; in the clips of 1950’s TV shows, allegedly live, several of the performers are obviously not performing (and I suspect a number of the others are just better at lip-syncing). The Wikipedia entry for Gary Lewis & the Playboys says that Ed Sullivan didn’t allow this normally, but had to when the Playboys appeared because Lewis’s voice had been so heavily processed on recordings — long before autotuning.
wrt “Braille”: suitable garb for Mrs. Palm’s workers could also make primary sexual characteristics apparent, not just secondary.
@17: I wonder whether Pratchett knew of Fredric Brown’s stories on these lines? See, e.g., “Etaoin Shrdlu”; I don’t find biographic details, but this is one of a number of his stories that make it clear he knew his way around a Linotype. ISTM that the wizards are being excessively cautious; why would type used only for mundane works pick up magical properties? (I can see them being vain enough to think that magic permeates everything….)
@20 The wizards’ view was originally expressed in The Truth by the Bursar during one of his sane periods: “Supposing the metal remembers the words it has printed?”
In later books other things happen.