Can I borrow some of that goblin sleep potion? I would also like to talk to my knees.
Summary
The Wesley brothers try their hands at a steam boiler in the Effing Forest and blow themselves up, and Harry wakes Moist in the middle of the night in a panic over it. Moist tells him and Dick Simnel to meet him in the forest. He meets the local publican, finds out what happened to the young men, keeps the press away from their mother, and holds a little press conference. Simnel tells the group that he is sorry for what happened to the brothers and promises to share information about steam engines at his own school to prevent these accidents from happening again. Simnel creates a t’turning table to turn the engine around, and Harry panics over the other people learning to build steam engines and finding out what their patents will and won’t protect them from. (Thunderbolt tells them not to worry about it.) Vetinari tells Moist that the new priority is getting a nonstop line to Uberwald, and that he wants it done as quickly as possible, no excuses, which horrifies Moist, who was hoping to slow down for a bit and also doesn’t think it can be done. Harry makes certain to take care of the Wesley brothers’ mother and sells a few shares in the railway to get money for the steel needed to build the line to Uberwald. The Quirm stop opens to much celebration and pomp.
Constable Feeny Upshot notices the goblins doing work underground and learns that they’re planning to make a railway there for goblins to get around faster. Moist meets Georgina Bradshaw, a widow who has been using the train to see the world in her later years. He has the idea to have her write up travel tips and guides for people using the railway and advises Harry to let her travel for free to that end. The railway is growing and the artificers are making toy train sets, and Moist is getting so little sleep that Of the Twilight the Darkness gives him a goblin potion, which makes him very high and then knocks him right out for excellent sleep. King Rhys makes the choice to go to an important summit in Quirm, as the grags have been quiet of late. Moist is working along the railway constantly now and gets a clacks from Adora Belle, telling him Vetinari needs to see him immediately. He heads back to the city to find the Patrician again insisting that the line to Uberwald must be completed even faster, and that the future may depend on it. Moist names his golem horse Flash, and tells Harry they have to speed up building again. The first train crash occurs, not on their line but a private one, when the entrepreneurs in question mess with the system Simnel helped them develop.
A troll named Crackle and a dwarf named Dopey Docson meet in a coffee shop along the railway, discover they’re both librarians, and though they’re both married, begin to fall in love and leave together. A coup occurs while King Rhys is in Quirm, though Albrecht tries to put a stop to it. Moist is woken in the middle of the night again and summoned to the palace, then informed by Vetinari that the unfinished railway to Uberwald must transport the Low King, his retinue, and an armed Watch escort back home to end said coup. Vimes advises Moist to find Bashfull Bashfullson in all those for aid. Simnel insists that they use the Iron Girder for the job, certain that she’s the best in an emergency. Moist meets with King Rhys and insists on keeping the plan to get him home a secret until most of his court have left the room, knowing that there could be a spy among them. The Low King goes to Harry and Effie’s for dinner and when he questions Moist’s plan, Moist promises that the railway will be ready to get them to Uberwald on time despite the lack of laid track at present. Vetinari notes that he’s made this promise in a room full of people with excellent memories.
As they’re eating, Vimes informs the group that the Low King has departed for Uberwald by fast coach; this is a ruse, and Cheery and a group of his officers are the ones inside. King Rhys and Moist are disguised and everyone board the Iron Girder and sets off. Delver groups begin attacking the decoy coaches and don’t fare well. They travel a while and stay with Dick Simnel’s mother—there’s something wrong, but she won’t tell Moist what it is. Moist and the king change disguises the next morning and head for the train, with Moist dressed as an engineer this time. He notes a suspicious dwarf (and a partner elsewhere) pretending to be a train spotter and questions him; when the dwarf is visibly nervous and unprepared, Moist pulls the cord to stop the train. Vimes questions the pair and gets all the information he needs, with his first set of coveted names. He sends them to the Patrician once they hit the next stop, promising to keep their families safe, provided they aren’t lying. Moist is impressed and Vimes is pleased; they continue their journey onward. Moist is beset by an uneasy feeling that everything is going too well at the moment…
Commentary
The commentary about the goblins changing as they assimilate is particularly wrenching at this point, namely in the segment where we revisit Feeney Upshot and find the goblins in his district hammering away at an underground train. He sees how they’ve changed their ways in order to become a part of this new world, and it upsets him to realize that Goblins are becoming “men” in a way—Feeney realizes that this is a kind of theft from the world. This can work to the opposite effect too, of course; sometimes diaspora groups will cleave more closely to the ways of their homeland to avoid losing touch, and become more rigid than they would be at home, as a result. But if you choose to join with another culture, as many of the goblins are doing now, you’re going to lose your own, bit by bit.
It’s properly nerve-racking as the story continues precisely because we’ve had the last two to back it up: Now the fun becomes the knowledge that Moist von Lipwig has a penchant for pulling miracles out of thin air, and everyone knows it. He has to do it again. Everyone expects him to. Everyone is relying on the brilliance that always explodes under pressure. And it’s true that Moist enjoys that part of things, but also that this undertaking is far less under his control than the others.
And that’s a particularly clever way of increasing the stakes for a conman who is very good at managing others—there are simply too many moving parts to the railway for him to have an eye on everything. The plan to get the Low King to safety has him in a panic because he’s far too aware of the fact that so many pieces of this journey are completely outside of his control. Close quarters delegation is very different from trusting thing from afar.
I have to appreciate that the plot creates perfect terms to tie the railway with the progress that is making the grags angry, and then conceives of a reason why the end of the book has to take place on the train in order to stop them. It’s very neatly done, is my point. And then we get the enjoyment of watching many of our favorite players throughout the Ankh-Morpork situated books come together in service of that plot.
Which leads to one of Vimes’ best interrogation scenes. The acknowledgement that when Sam Vimes does his job correctly, he’s no different than a con artist is such a pointed way to show him from the outside. Vimes himself also notes that what he does is really no different from the grags (with the threatening in order to get what they what), just that he believes he’s nicer about it and “on the right side.” Which… yeesh. A good reminder, as always. It’s fun to find those lines where you you love someone as a character, but would not feel the same way if you met them in real life.
Asides and little thoughts
- This bit about the Wesley brothers: His brother watched in admiration and a certain amount of trepidation, or it would have been trepidation had he known the word existed. This is an actual feature of language—you can’t experience things you don’t have words for. Language shapes our reality in a very literal sense because of this. (You can’t see colors that you don’t have names for, a thing that broke my brain a little when I learned it.)
- The meeting between Crackle and Dopey is basically Pratchett’s very own coffee shop AU, and I would like more of it, please.
- I did giggle at Vimes “no ticket”ing the dwarfs when Moist stops the train to catch them.
- Vimes: “I wonder what his lordship will say about my lovely list of names? I reckon he’ll go right past acerbic en route to ironic and end up slap bang in sardonic without even taking a breath.” Buddy, you are in public right now?? Keep it in your pants?
Pratchettisms
There is something vaguely worrying about the word ‘reckon’ that leaves the ear, for many hard to understand reasons, wishing it was something else a little more certain and a little less frightening.
Thunder rolled around the mountains, like the marbles of the gods.
He put it down as a place to avoid unless you like bad cooking and banjos.
“You majesty, pressure is where I start,” said Moist.
Moist forced his face to go so deadpan that it might have actually been dead.
The outside air was permeating the carriages now with the scent of the Sto Plains, which consisted of one scent and that was cabbage or cabbage-like and it was a sad smell, it drooped helplessness. Melancholy. Mind you, the cabbages themselves were excellent, especially the new varieties.
Too much traveling on the railway could turn you into a philosopher, although, he conceded, not a very good one.
Next week we’ll finish the book!
Thus the Bradshaw’s Guides will exist on the Disc as well as Roundworld, although the great majority of those merely use George Bradshaw’s name and were not written by him.
Thanks for this. I’d never heard of Bradshaw’s Guides in Roundworld.
There’s several series of BBC travel documentaries based around the Bradshaw guides that are presented by former Cabinet minister Michael Portillo.
They are not for the faint of heart owing to the range of eye-punishing blazer and trouser combos that Mr Portillo’s wardrobe contains.
Thoughts
Everyone is buying into the railway – Harry is selling shares and even Dibbler is selling railway pills.
Vetinari makes it clear why Pratchett never explored the industrial age: “I can’t imagine what the world would be like if everyone had their own locomotive. Abominable.”
Aeron is described as Rhys’s Drumknott. He is also Rhys’s lover. Drumknott and Vetinari? Just saying.
Pratchettisms
The trouble with madness is that the mad didn’t know they were mad. (re: Grags)
Mr. Simnel, with his greasy hat and grubby shirt, … wiped his grinning face with a rag, leaving a greasy smear on the grease.
“Mr. Lipwig, is there something in the word tyrant you do not understand?” (Vetinari)
While it’s easy to deal with stupid, bloody stupid is horribly difficult to erase. (Simnel via Lipwig)
Slake was one of those places, Moist thought, that you put on the map because it was embarrassing to have a map with holes in it.
That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way around. (Moist)
“When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.” (Vimes)
Shoutback
First Vimes and now Moist. Did Pratchett have a problem with crates of chickens?
Shout Forward
I didn’t get it at the time but the Lake’s action is significant.
A car chase bursting through a chicken coop in a cloud of straw and feathers used to be a stock cinematic gag.
I’d think so, given this is utterly false (and brought to you by the same “Inuits have thousands of word for snow” bad research and urban myth sources, I’d wager).
Look up HTML color codes. I found a page with color bars and names. If I covered up the names, I could still see the difference in colors: nothing absolutely proves that “beetle green” is the objective name of a shade, anyway.
Had a discussion on this today. The English Language has a large number of words for sweet fruit desert pastry such as cobbler, crumble, pandowdy, grunt, pie, crisp, buckle, and betty. All of which describe how the pastry is made, such as crisp has no bottom pastry and oatmeal/nuts on top while a crumble has a no bottom pastry and a suger flour mix on tip, and a pie has a pastry layer on the bottom and top.
Swedish by contrast has no linguistic distinction between them, its all “Paj” or Pie. This led to a long discussion where the Swedish Native Speakers were calling what we were eating a Pie and all the English speakers were calling it a Crumble.
However, it was one the Swedish speakers that made the Paj/crumble so the lack of linguistic word didn’t bother them in the slightest.
Long Story Short, I’m not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Thought we did have a lot of jokes on how important pie is to English Speakers as there are dozens of words to describe exactly what sort of pie you are having but no words to describe a pain in your neck that prevents you from turning your head easily. (“nackspärr”)
In English, that’s called a ‘crick’ (in your neck), but it can be used more widely to describe the aches you have when you’ve been sleeping in odd position.
The idea is known as linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. You can find all sorts of discussion of it online.
Can only confirm on that, I have been working in a development lab for car varnishes during the time when heavy metal pigments were replaced. I have seen hues and shades between them the thousands, and the lady who taught me the ropes of it said that humans can differentiate around 10 to 20 million of them. That would be in the 24 bit range.
I can confirm on the smell of cabbage, it has that quality. Got me really down when driving to my parents in law in connection with vaning daylight hours, now there ist a freeway there avoiding the fields.
Comparing Raising Steam to the Star Trek rewatches, several instances of “because he’s just that awesome” swoop through the back of my head unbidden.
To me cabbage exists only for corned beef to seem somewhat healthy. OTOH, when my Basque grandmother visited she cooked squid it’s own ink. The house stank for days and the smell took up residence in my brain.
Omitted: the tiny bit where someone says something nasty about grags and finds out that the Low King’s advisor is one. Way to differentiate between the religion and the abuses people put it to for their own purposes, without making it so obvious readers will block on the point.
More little bits:
The scene very early in this section, where a dwarf is killed after her increasing doubts about the grags cause her to try to walk away: The terrible fact was that when dwarfs schism, they schism . . . every deviation from the norm was treated as an attack on all that was truly dwarfish. cf the scene in Life of Brian where a sect has subdivided into something like 3 people and 1, who the others denounce as a splitter. (A friend noted at the time that he’d seen a real-life example: a group of seven devotees of Albanian communism had split 4-3 because two were sleeping together but four others denounced this as bourgeois indulgence.)
We saw in a previous book (Thud?) that there was an additions to the Words of Tak; in this section we see that there’s a complete edition by a grag. Sometimes a religion accumulates commentary; sometimes the oldest texts get … overhauled, as in the version of the Bible, intended for enslaved people in the US South, from which all the bits about rebellion had been removed. I wonder whether Pratchett was familiar with Simak’s Time and Again, in which an explorer’s all-are-brothers ~memoir has been republished with he-didn’t-really-mean-everyone interpolations. (It’s old enough that he could have read it when young, but I don’t know how widely Simak was published in England.)
about languages: what I recall of the bits I’ve read in the half-century since taking a course in elementary linguistics for people not majoring in it suggests that Sapir-Whorf is no longer considered gospel. However, that’s different from seeing or hearing distinctions when two variations are next to each other(*), which is in turn different from recognizing that two instances seen or heard separately are different. cf the movie Tampopo, in which the main plot thread is building a successful Japanese noodle bar; to my ears different characters say anything on the spectrum between “ramen” and “lamen”; my understanding is that Japanese has only one liquid consonant, so people born to that language don’t hear the difference. (This is one example; Making Light had several others in a discussion some years ago.)
(*) Does everyone have the ability to distinguish millions of colors, or does that vary the way some people can hear that two notes in succession are different even if the frequencies are <1% different, where others can’t hear a 3% difference? (Hearing tests show both of these in my family.)
All humans can distinguish millions of shades. Some humans can distinguish more millions than others; apparently the norm is ~10 million, but partial colorblindness can reduce that some, and some people have an extra kind of receptor and can see ~100 million shades
Crackle and Dopey is a riff on Brief Encounter isn’t it?
A Pratchettism:
“Generally speaking, the anvil has always been on the ground, by and large, but it was a most powerful bang.” And we see rather than having to be told that arrogant idiots don’t get just themselves killed.
Another:
[in a footnote] …the juice pressed from a certain little yellow flower induces certainty in the patient for up to fifteen minutes. About what they are certain they cannot specify, but the patient is, in that short time, completely certain about everything. And further research has found that a certain water hyacinth yields in its juices total uncertainty about anything for half an hour. Philosophers are excited about the use of these potions, and the search continues for a plant that combines the qualities of both, thereby being of great use to theologians.
I’ve forgotten whether we find out later that Vetinari’s query about Charlie’s Punch and Judy business ties in to anything, but closing with “That’s the way to do it!” (a traditional P&J line) seems more … certain … than Vetinari usually is in instructions.
It is key to something. But it’s Charlie’s other occupation.
The ‘Effing Forest’ is a great gag, mixing Roundworld ‘Epping Forest’ with a bowdlerised swear