It’s a wonderful week to be talking about all our anatomical functions, yes?
Summary
Vimes plans to go visit the local police, but he arrives the next day: Chief Constable Feeney Upshot, who is green as they come, and tries to arrest Vimes on suspicion of murdering Jethro. Vimes heads with him to the jail, all the while giving him information on how real policing works; he’s horrified to learn that the boy swore his oath to the magistrates rather than the law. At the jail, he meets Stinky the goblin, who has a leg broken that was never set correctly; the goblin touches him on the arm that contains the mark left of him by the Summoning Dark. Vimes tells Upshot that he’ll help him with the investigation, and they follow Stinky. Colonel Makepeace is vaguely listening to his wife and her friends who are all the magistrates, as they hatch a plan to ruin Vimes’ career in order to appease Lord Rust’s son, Gravid, who is responsible for some form of smuggling that they’re all participating in (and something terrible with the goblins). The Colonel eventually tells them that they are wrong for doing this and heads down to the pub for a drink. Back in the city, Fred and Nobby go to a tobacco emporium to find the place doing a bit too well, and Fred discovers something in his complimentary cigar…
Vimes heads underground with Upshot, but as their goblin guards prod them, the Summoning Dark comes to the surface and frightens them away. It also gives Vimes the night vision he needs to see in the dark. They make their way down below until they come upon a hundred armed goblins and a goblin corpse—Vimes has found his crime. Back in the city, Fred and Nobby come into forensics with the cigar because Fred heard it cry. Igor and Cherry open the thing up and find a goblin unggue pot, the sort goblins usually use to store their sacred bodily secretions, but in this case it’s the kind they call the soul of tears. Fred now has the soul of a living goblin child in that vial. Vimes and Feeney examine the dead goblin body, a woman who was married to possibly-the-chief, a goblin named Rain on the Hard Ground. He is pleased that Vimes believes goblins have names, and tells Vimes that the body was tossed underground with no blood left in it. Vimes knows she was drained of blood to make it look like he murdered Jethro (who sometimes trades with the goblins for iron). The Summoning Dark allows Vimes to speak the goblin language. They search the premises and find goblins growing fungus and making pots and the place where Jethro gets his iron.
At that point, Vimes and Feeney encounter Miss Felicity Beedle, who comes down to teach goblins to read. Vimes meets one of her pupils, Tears of the Mushroom, and when he asks Miss Beedle if she’s teaching them to be better citizens, she slaps him and tells him that she’s helping them communicate with people who think they’re stupid and worthless. She then tells Vimes to ask Feeney what happened to the rest of the goblins three years ago and leaves. Feeney tells Vimes that when his father was the policeman three years back, the magistrates had a good portion of the goblins removed and put to work as slaves, insisting that they were just nuisances. As the goblins live on Ramkin land, Vimes elects to take this up with his wife immediately. He checks in with Sam and Willikins and thinks to take Young Sam to visit Miss Beedle as a pretense for getting more information. After a lively evening with Sybil, Vimes asks her about the Rust’s estate in the area and learns that the criminal son is the one who runs the place. The next day, he brings Young Sam to Miss Beedle’s house and learns why she’s so close to the goblins: Her mother was raised by another group of them as a child, then taken from them while they were slaughtered and beaten to learn how to be a good human girl again. Vimes tells Miss Beedle that he needs to know where her secret entrance to the goblin caves are so he can ask them more questions without being observed.
Back in the city, Cherry reports to Carrot that Fred Colon is now feverish and speaking like a goblin since coming into possession of the unggue. They try to think of who could tell them something about goblins and A. E. Pessimal suggests Harry King, since he employs a large number of them. Vimes and Young Sam and Miss Beedle and Tears of the Mushroom head back underground. Miss Beedle distributes vegetables amongst them to balance their diet so they don’t starve eating only rabbit. Vimes asks if the dead goblin is missing one of her unggue pots, and Miss Beedle is shocked to discover that one is missing. Vimes asks if he can take one of them to show people what he’s looking for, and Miss Beedle suggests that he asks Tears of the Mushroom to lend one of hers. She asks for something equally precious in return to hold its place; Vimes gives her a picture of Young Sam that he carries with him. He goes to the pub to give Jiminy a talking to, showing him that pot; the man finally gives up two names. Vimes goes to tell Miss Beedle that he’s got a lead, and hears gorgeous music inside: Tears of the Mushroom is playing the harp. He rushes home to tell Sybil to comes listen, interrupting the end of a tea party. Once Sybil learns how enamored Vimes is of the music, she agrees they must go hear it immediately.
Commentary
I’m thinking a lot about the choice to make Miss Beedle a part of this, not due to her personal connections to the goblins, but due to her role as a children’s book author. Because they are an unsung class of writer in many ways, aren’t they? When you think of all the basic concepts and core empathies children build off their first books, if those books happen to be quality, children’s books are invaluable. And in Miss Beedle’s case, the content of her books are pointedly pretty nasty—but that’s good! Kids are still in love with all the weird squishy icky things about being alive because they haven’t had the chance to grow ashamed of them yet.
This in turn plays into the general theme this book has around bodily bits and excretions, the ways in which we encourage shame and disgust around those things, and the ways in which they are used to make others seem inferior. Being obsessed with farts and shit and snot is a childish activity, don’t you know? Thus the goblins are considered subhuman for collecting these discarded parts of themselves—and this then plays into the fact that most cultures across the world consider children to be subhuman as well when you pay attention. That sounds harsh, I grant you, but tell an adult to give a child complete bodily autonomy and see the reaction you get. Some parents care to offer it, but that concept is relatively new in the zeitgeist and still met with a great deal of hostility.
And it’s important because it is gross, but it’s also fascinating. Being interested in these messy parts of having a body opens the door to so much knowledge and curiosity, which is what we see in Young Sam. Those pieces of the story are intimately connected, though Vimes isn’t entirely putting that together.
The point has been made in the Watch books before, but again: It was a dangerous habit: Once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers. Put here to make the point that no police force should ever consider themselves soldiers. Which is important because there are many places where soldiers do think of this as a one-to-one. They depart the service and dive directly into police work as though the shift should be minimal—and the fact that this is not a terrifying thought to everyone is baffling. The narrative here is telling us in no uncertain terms that equating these things is (one of) the reason(s) we have problems.
A few other thoughts… When Cherry points out that she asked the wizards for help with information around goblin culture and she informs Carrot that they had nothing, we get this:
Captain Carrot raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure? I know for a fact that they have a Professor of Dust, Miscellaneous Particles, and Filaments, and you tell me that there’s no expert on an entire species of talking humanoids?”
Which is a scathing indictment of Western academia, if I’ve ever heard one.
I was also tickled by the detail that Miss Beedle’s plan to change goblin society to aid in human approval starts with teaching the women (as they’ll learn fast and pass things on to their kids), because this is a historical tactic that has been used elsewhere in cultural “conversion” plans—specifically with Christianity. The reason why Christianity took hold in Rome is partly because the first evangelists targeted young women who might marry Roman soldiers, expressly for the fact that they would be the ones to pass religion on to their kids.
And the rabbit diet thing is also true! Rabbit starvation is also known as protein poisoning. Basically, there’s not enough fat on rabbit to give you all the essential nutrients that you need, and without that fat, you die. A fun and horrifying thing to know. (Which was a thing that killed Roman soldiers in Appian’s Roman History, so it’s possible that Pratchett was pulling from a couple favored books that that point? I wonder…)
Asides and little thoughts
- Miss Pickings is a lesbian from Colonel Makepeace’s (rather unflattering) depiction of her partner, the horse trainer. Another rare glimpse of overt queerness in the Discworld books.
- I’ve mentioned before that Pratchett talked about the lack of sex scenes in anything he wrote, mostly to a “I suppose I should get around to that one day” tune. It seems fitting that one of the few times he did, we get this: Then Vimes floated again in the warm steamy atmosphere and was only just aware of the swish of cloth hitting the floor. Lady Sybil slid in beside him. The water rose, and so, in accordance with the psychics of this business, did the spirits of Sam Vimes. Which is just right, really. Evocative, glib, and somehow still very cute.
- Despite the fact that there is a lot of fatphobia in how many Discworld villains are portrayed, the description of Sybil as “a woman happily rich in gravitational attraction” is such a great way to paint her size as something beautiful and desirable.
- The joke here of Vimes hearing that writers spend all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne and the footnote being This is, of course, absolutely true. is devastating. Sir. Rude. Where’s my dressing gown?
- Completely agreed that the clocks with the animal eyes that swing back and forth while they tick could drive you to madness and should be destroyed with fireplace pokers.
- Young Sam tells his father he won’t be scared following him into the dark because “I’ll let Mr. Whistle do the being scared” for him, which is a legitimate child psychology thing. I know because a doctor did this to help me stop being terrified that Chucky might be in my closet waiting to kill me (thanks to a very irresponsible adult who showed me Child’s Play at the age of four), by telling me to put my worry into my favorite stuffed animals. It worked great, in all honesty.
Pratchettisms
There was a twang, and seventeen yards away a geranium was decapitated.
“That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we’ll never know.”
The goblin turned it this way and that, inspecting it like a man thinking of buying a horse from somebody called Honest Harry.
To Vimes’s surprise Willikins tapped him on the shoulder in a kindly way (you’d know it instantly if Willikins tapped you in an unfriendly way).
It was also, in all probability, the only bath that had taps mark hot, cold, brandy.
Instinctively he looked at Young Sam, and suddenly the biggest raisin in his cake of apprehension was: what will Young Sam do?
Next week we read up to:
“Okay, Mr. Feeney, let’s get them in, shall we? Find Stinky, he’s the brains of the outfit.”
