Guess it’s time to talk about our Peter Rabbit feelings this week…
Summary
Darktan is working on the latest trap, which Nourishing makes the mistake of saying is easy to disarm, so he has her give directions on how to do so, which she flubs. Darktan has figured out how to make maps, which is useful for keeping track of traps and poisons. He’s called because there’s a new trap that just went off, unlike anything the clan has ever seen. Keith and Maurice are waiting in the barn while Maurice hunts for food and insists to Keith that he’s not killing intelligent prey. Malicia says her father has called for the rat-catchers again because of the new sightings; this means they can break into their office to prove they’ve been cheating people. Maurice tells Keith to watch out for her because she’s not right in the head, thinking everything is a story (similar to Dangerous Beans in his mind). Fresh has died in a new trap and the rats are suddenly asking where you go when you die, which has them all very disturbed. Darktan is also informed of a new poison they’ve found, this one so awful that he tells his troops to find a live trap to put the rat out of their misery. He tells everyone that they should pull out because this town is trapped like a warzone.
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Witch King
Malicia shows up dressed in black to bring Maurice and Keith to the rat-catcher offices. They are meant to be sneaking, but Malicia is incapable of stealth. They break into the rat-catcher shed—Malicia uses a hairpin because it works in stories, and it winds up working in real life. The trap disposal squad has found a live trap and a keekee (non-talking rat) inside it. Dangerous Beans communes with her by reading her scent, and knows that something is very wrong here. She has memories of being somewhere very crowded with other rats, but the clan hasn’t found any in the town so far. Hamnpork thinks they should let her go, but Darktan says it’s too bad out there, and Dangerous Beans says they have minds to care for the innocent now. He technically challenges Hamnpork, but he doesn’t know he’s done it, so the leader can’t jump him for it. Darktan almost challenges Hamnpork too, but he winds up calming the situation down and manipulating Hamnpork into doing what he wants. In the rat-catcher shed, Malicia insists that everything is too normal, and there must be a secret passage somewhere… which Keith finds. The rats begin looking for the keekee’s people with some difficulty as Hamnpork doesn’t like how often Darktan counters his orders to keep them all safe.
The trap door at the rat-catcher shed leads to a cellar full of food—the rat-catchers are nothing more than thieves who blame the rats for what they take. But Maurice and Keith aren’t convinced it’s that simple. Maurice catches Sardines, who was sent to look for them and calls them deeper into the cellar to find out what’s really going on here. Peaches is waiting with Dangerous Beans, and rats from their clan begin to rush past them, back from the scouting party. They’re all so frightened, they’ve forgotten how to speak. Hamnpork’s party have found wire cages entirely full of rats, all of them terrified and eating each other. Hamnpork is furious and demands they be released, and when Keith pries him off of Malicia, he bites him. Malicia picks up a piece of wood to come back at Hamnpork, which makes Keith very angry. Maurice can tell someone is coming downstairs and rushes off, telling everyone to hurry and follow and squeezing out through a hole in the wall. The rat-catchers come down and tell Malicia that her father is bringing in the expensive rat-catches, knock out her out, and threaten Keith, breaking his pipe, and plan to use Hamnpork in some terrible games they use the rats for. Maurice notes a terrifying voice coming from a mysterious figure in the cellar, and once it sees he’s a cat, it wants him dead.
Maurice runs from the mystery voice into another room and realizes that it can’t read his thoughts, only see through his eyes, so he closes them. He escapes and finds the clan underground, who want to rescue Hamnpork as soon as possible, Maurice knows he’s about to be used for rat-coursing, where terriers destroy them. The group set out to find their leader and Keith, leaving Maurice to talk to Dangerous Beans and Peaches. Dangerous Beans is mortified because he’s realized that when they become terrified they’re all just… rats. Maurice admits that he Changed because he ate one of the talking rats before he learned how to think, but they think that’s all right. Peaches reads from Mr. Bunsy to Dangerous Beans and Maurice realizes that he wants to help look for Keith. They find them and cut their ropes to help them escape. Darktan, Sardines, and Nourishing make it to the coursing and Darktan is so enraged by what he sees that he draws the match. Hamnpork gets into the ring and shouts at the rats to work together to stop the dog and the crowd goes silent. Sardines grabs Hamnpork by rubber band rope and gets him to safety, while Darktan drops in to fight the dog. He bites it on the nether regions then escapes into the dark and a trap goes off.
Commentary
In honesty, this might be one of my favorite exchanges in any Discworld book:
“It’s all right for you, I mean, it’s not as though you have to speak to sandwiches,” said Maurice, as if he was still bothered about something.
“I wouldn’t know what to say to them,” said Keith.
Me neither, kid.
I also love the exchange between Keith and Malicia when they’re all tied up because… they’re both right? It’s true that the world doesn’t work like a story, but Malicia understands that intrinsically, I think—she knows that it’s not the world that’s a story, it’s how you choose to frame it. As she says “If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.” The fact is that the latter is always true: We’re all bit players in other narratives, but you kinda have to choose to be your own protagonist. It’s not always the right call, either—sometimes we all need to step back and not be the Main Character, but if we never are… that’s probably not good.
There’s actually a type of therapy that plays into this called Narrative Therapy, which uses the human propensity toward storytelling to help people work through stuff, and it jives with a lot of where this conversation is headed, kinda.
And then there’s the incredibly depressing part of this, being Dangerous Beans’ disillusion about rats being rats when faced with fear. Which is a pretty obvious commentary on humans, of course, because fear does absolutely wild things to our brains and psyches. The effect of the rat mound trying to flee the terrier put you in mind of stampedes and crowd crushes. When people panic, rationality often fails, but Dangerous Beans is in many ways the first rat of his kind—he’s observing this fresh, and horrified to know that thinking doesn’t prevail in every situation.
It is frightening, but what’s more, it strikes me that this is a great way of putting that realization to a younger reader because it’s free of the bitterness you often get from adults. Dangerous Beans is just… heartbroken. We can’t use our brains to overcome our basest instincts in any situation. We can read books and talk about shadows preparing us to fight true darkness, but it won’t work every time. Sometimes we’re just animals scrambling in the dark, and nothing can make that feeling go away. And that regression or reversion can feel a little bit like dying, can’t it? It robs us of something fundamental, and that’s an impossible state to parse.
Asides and little thoughts:
- There’s a bit in here where Malicia give Maurice a hard time for being sarcastic, and he insists that he isn’t being sarcastic, he’s being flippant, and then I remember that this book was the first Discworld book to be specifically marketed for young readers, and think about all the times I appreciated when books sort of inadvertently taught me words via context that way.
- It’s important for me to note that Maurice is a name (much like Bernard) that is pronounced completely differently in British English. So I keep having to remind myself that he’s supposed to be called “Morris” basically, not “Moreese.” I mean I don’t have to obviously, but it sounds wrong if I don’t because the characters are written to be so obviously British. (I know this is not a thing that all readers do, but I cannot stop my brain from doing it.) But what’s funny is that it only applies within the story—whenever I read the title, I think of the name with the French(ish) pronunciation.
Pratchettisms:
“Oh, prbllttrrrp,” said Maurice under his breath, and fortunately no human knows how bad a swearword that is in cat.
That girl could have been Malicia. She thought animals were just people who hadn’t been paying enough attention.
“Look, cat, there’s two types of people in the world. There are those who have got the plot, and those who haven’t.”
It was not a good voice for a memory to have. It was all hisses, and it slid into the mind like a knife.
He aimed for it, scrabbled on thin air as more bricks moved under him, and pushed himself into the unknown.
The silence was the silence of red faces drawing breath ready to start shouting at any moment.
Next week we finish the book!
