Should I watch All the King’s Men again as a watchalong with this book? I’ll think about it…
Summary
There’s a rumor in Ankh-Morpork that dwarfs have figured out how to turn lead into gold. William de Worde makes a decent living writing down the happenings in the city and sending them to leaders on different parts of the Disc. This is ironic because he comes from a very rich family, but he is a youngest son and was not given the better education like his older brother (who unfortunately died in the last war between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch over the disappearing island of Leshp). Dwarfs enter the city with a large printing press and accidentally hit William with it; at the same time, two fellows named Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip also enter the city with a third figure by a tiny row boat. Once William awakens, he meets the dwarfs and they use their press to help him make copies of his monthly letter rather than him needing his usual trip to the engravers; he feels guilty accepting it, but does and decides to send the extra copies to prospective newsletter-receivers. William explains that the press will cause trouble to no avail. Elsewhere, a group are planning to depose Lord Vetinari with yet another cunning scheme (because he’s letting too many non-humans take up the city), and Mustrum Ridcully has asked the Bursar to go see the dwarfs about this printing thing because they spend an inordinate amount of the budget on engraving.
Buy the Book
The Crane Husband
William arrives at the printing press office to find the Bursar arguing with the dwarfs about letters, but he winds up deciding to use their services for printing and gives William a quote for his newsletter when asked. The Patrician is speaking to Hughnon Ridcully about this new printing business and explains that because it is coming from dwarfs—who now make up a sizable population in the city (and are responsible for very important imported goods like coal and tallow)—he’s inclined to relax his position against movable type and allow the world to change as it will. A man named Charlie, who looks just like Vetinari, is being held by Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, and asked to do something that will get him a great deal of money for very little effort. He is having a hard time with this idea at a base level, and has been kidnapped from his small clothing store in Pseudopolis. Vetinari arrives at the printing press offices and finds William there. He asks if Dibbler is involved, as well as any occult interference. When Gunilla Goodmountain protests at the questioning, William takes him aside. Vetinari then takes William aside and explains that he’s willing to let this enterprise continue, but making William entirely responsible should it implode in a magical sense. He also suggests that the young man get back in touch with his father. As he departs, Tulip marvels at Vetinari’s lack of guards and wonders why they haven’t been told to simply kill the Patrician.
William has been talking to more people and getting many more stories for his newsletter. With the help of the dwarfs, they reformat that thing, and Goodmountain suggests renaming it “Ankh-Morpork Times.” Foul Ole Ron stops by with Gaspode and the dwarfs suggest having him and his friends distribute the newsletter at twenty pence a piece, making it more accessible to the city and getting everyone a lot more money. The group of beggars agree to it after some wheedling from Gaspode. It turns out that Pin and Tulip were hired by Mr. Slant to do this job; he has a whole file on every terrible thing they’ve done as insurance. William gets slapped and told off by Sacharissa Cripslock, daughter of the engraver that they had been using until recently—the money he paid them was all they had coming in. He responds by asking her to work for him gathering news items, and she agrees. Pin and Tulip arrive at a meeting of the Committee to Unelect the Patrician to receive further instructions on their job, and many warnings: They need to avoid getting the attention of the Watch because of Vimes (and also the werewolf he’s got working for him); they cannot kill the Patrician; Charlie must be ready shortly. The group muses that they should have considered using Charlie for longer, but decides against it. They also think they might need to use assassins against their New Firm hires once the job is complete.
In the wee hours of the morning, Vetinari notices the beggars selling the paper. He asks Drumknott to bring him a copy, then lets him know that he will have meetings with the Guilds of the Towncriers and the Engravers, and also a meeting with William, who he wants to pass through the city safely. At the printing shop, William sees Sacharissa, who has brought him a few stories including one about a lady’s competition that got interrupted by a naked man being pursued by the Watch. William asks her to get more information on another story and asks Goodmountain if he thinks they should print the naked man one, which the dwarf thinks is a fine idea. A troll tells William that he has an appointment with the Patrician. Vetinari asks him why he decided to create the paper, and then recommends that William not tell people things they don’t already know, to avoid creating panic and discomfort. Dibbler gives two sausages away to Tulip and Pin in a panic. William comes across a man named Arthur Crank threatening to jump off a building and a crowd assembled below. He climbs up to ask him about himself, then winds up fainting and Arthur carries him down (he never jumps, only threatens to). Tulip and Pin get a Dis-organizer Mk II from a wizard because the imps inside are excellent recording devices.
Commentary
I truly cannot stand that Pratchett has made the mechanics and characters in Ankh-Morpork so interesting that I genuinely do want to read a book that’s entirely Havelock Vetinari having meetings with annoying elites, giving lengthy explanations about why he’s inclined to change his mind about a guideline that he never bothered to make into a law, and visiting ordinary citizens to get personal assurance that they’re not about to attempt an enterprise that blows his very functional city up. Again. I hate it. How dare he make me want that and enjoy it, this is plainly ridiculous and unfair.
Go on, my lord. Say astonishing again.
Obviously, the book is about the development of journalism and the changes wrought by the advent of printing and also about Nixon-era political intrigue, but I would happily read a book that’s entirely bound up in Vetinari’s internal monologues about uncooperative weather. I don’t remember feeling this way before when I read Discworld books, so something about my brain has shifted with age, it seems. This stuff makes me giddy now. That and Vetinari readily supplying that Wuffles is over a hundred in dog years. I know that there’s a suggestion that the man only keeps his furry buddy to give people the impression that he has a normal human weakness, but… he loves that dog.
I’m sure he doesn’t think he loves the dog. But he does. Why do you think he keeps Vimes around? Same impulse.
And you do have to love how the development of these ideas work: There was a comment made in an earlier book (I think it was Jingo) that you couldn’t do printing in Ankh-Morpork for a set of very specific reasons. Now these reasons are being tackled within the constructs of a story, and people are having to change their minds about things. That’s the good shit, right there. Show me people changing and thinking about things differently. Show me how things move at their true-to-life snail’s pace. Give me their arguments against change in detail instead of vagaries. It’s only fun if you get to see it unravel.
William de Worde is one of those blank slate (lol) protagonists who work because he’s primarily a set of convictions without much personality attached. He likes words. He likes the truth. He has a vague idea about how both of those things should be distributed once he’s given the ability to put them out with ease. It’s not that he’s totally vacant, but his background is more a point of plot convenience, as we will later see when things play out.
Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of how the newspaper gets built is how true it feels to genuine creative enterprises; you have a group with several disparate areas of expertise all working together and ultimately trusting each other’s opinions. You don’t let much ego get in the way—you just put the thing together. You make it accessible to as many people as possible. You build it out accordingly. You experiment with format, content, style. It makes the whole thing feel natural without treating it like divine inspiration, which far too many narratives about creative process lean on.
Also, Pin and Tulip are odious, but I want far more asides about various types of Discworld artwork and the makeups of their varnishes.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Having felt the deep desire to take a pile of paperwork and toss it into oblivion without sorting it, I find it hilarious that it keeps popping up in these books, but most explicitly with characters who are an affront to all attempts at basic competence. (Vimes wants to but takes the more realistic route of letting it pile indefinitely, while Colon and Ridcully just trash anything that upsets them.)
- I have the most visceral reaction to the description of Mr. Tulip eating powdered mothballs because it’s one of the few scents that makes life completely unbearable to me. Just pure torture.
- The reference to Gutenberg (Goodmountain) works especially well here because we know that the dwarf didn’t invent the press—which is great because Gutenberg wasn’t first in that either despite often getting credit for it.
- The fact that the committee who hired the New Firm keep having to reiterate “Do NOT get the Watch’s attention! They have a werewolf! And a Vimes! It is very important that you follow this one rule!” is hilarious for a number of reasons, but particularly because I know that Pratchett made comments about it being difficult to set stories in Ankh-Morpork without them turning into Watch books because of Vimes being the way he is. The result is moments like this reading entirely like an author begging characters not to bother each other: Please do not engage my figment, he is awful and cannot be stopped once something fizzles across his brain. My terrible fictional son.
Pratchettisms:
That advice has cost him two dollars, along with an injunction to keep the lid down on the privy so that the Dragon of Unhappiness wouldn’t fly up his bottom.
The universe requires everything to be observed, lest it cease to exist.
He simply could not understand why William did not want to embrace this fine tradition and he dealt with it, in the manner of his kind, by not dealing with it.
It was a puzzle why things were always dragged kicking and screaming. No one ever seemed to want to, for example, lead them gently by the hand.
Vetinari sighed. Sometimes the weather had no sense of narrative convenience.
William stepped forward at a healthy fraction of the speed of terror.
Smoking was his one vice. At least, it was his only vice that he thought of as a vice. All the others were just job skills.
Somewhere under that self-inflicted scar tissue and at the heart of that shuddering anger was the soul of a true connoisseur with an unerring instinct for beauty. It was a strange thing to find in the body of a man who would mainline bath salts.
When the man and his hilarious vegetable had been dealt with, William wandered out into the printing shop.
Next week we’ll read up to:
“I wouldn’t mention this to anyone else,” said Sacharissa, heading for the ladder. “We’ve got enough to deal with. That’s creepy.”
