Elect this purveyor of jiggly things and leather goods as the new Patrician of Ankh-Morpork! That will definitely not go wrong in any way…
Summary
Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip head into Biers, hoping to get a werewolf who can find Vetinari’s dog, but they miscalculate on the type of customer there and beat a hasty retreat. On the street they run into Foul Ole Ron and Gaspode and get a paper from them, featuring the reward for Wuffles. The next edition of the Times is underway and William walks Sacharissa home, being sure to tell her she’s not his type. Mr. Slant’s clients meet to discuss who will be replacing Vetinari and Mr. Scrope is the designated fool for the job. William finally realizes that the amount Vetinari was supposed to have embezzled was far too heavy for him to easily carry out, suggesting a larger scheme that the Patrician interrupted. He wakes the dwarfs to go to press and also receives a clacks from King Verence that disproves an Inquirer story and writes that up, too. William and Goodmountain then talk about the future of the paper; the dwarf wants to know what’s in this for William since they’re all in it for money and William’s family has plenty of that. William explains that he doesn’t much get on with his family and that this matters to him on a very personal level. They talk about the familial differences between dwarfs and humans, with Goodmountain explaining that dwarfs needing gold is about how much it costs to get married and have a family.
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The Crane Husband
The next day Mrs. Arcanum forgives William for demanding use of her kitchen scale (to weigh money for the story), and William listens to the men at his boarding house discuss the news, generally disbelieving that Vetinari is innocent, with Mr. Windling in particular hoping that a new Patrician wouldn’t be quite so sympathetic to new groups coming into the city. William is walking through a back alley behind a horse parking garage when a mystery informant stops him. Said informant calls himself Deep Bone (it’s definitely just Gaspode) and says he knows where Vetinari’s dog is and could get the whole story from him for a much higher price than the paper offered. Given that William thinks there’s no way to trust him, he says they can’t do business. Deep Bone tells him to ask the Watch what Vetinari was doing before the incident. William comes upon a fire next (being tended to by golems, who have formed the impromptu fire brigade of the city these days), and winds up talking to Otto who shows up to take a picture of the brigade. The vampire offers him advice on how to talk to women, which he believes William desperately needs. When they get back to the offices, there’s an endless line of people with dogs (and various other animals) trying to collect the reward.
Tulip and Pin show up disguised as an Omnian priest and nun, and offer to assist them in finding the dog by scaring off people who are wasting time. As Tulip separates out all the possible terriers in the crowd, William divines that they’re killers, and Goodmountain goes to get Otto from the cellar. Otto arrives and takes a dark energy picture, causing chaos. William dives to tackle Sacharissa to the ground, and when he gets up, they find that Otto has been decapitated by Pin on his way out. (All the animals have gone.) They return Otto’s head to him as the dwarfs berate him for even thinking of using the dark eels as he has been. Then Vimes shows up at the door. He informs them that there’s a stampede of dogs and cats running through the streets causing havoc. He tells William they’re electing a new Patrician today. Vimes and William both threaten each other—one with a truncheon, the other with a notebook—before Vimes sets his down and asks William to sit with him in the corner and talk. William asks what Vetinari was doing right before the attack and Vimes tells him that he entered through the stables and dismissed the guards, and that the guard said he’d been drinking. He also tells William that the rumored successor, Mr. Scrope, is meant to pardon Vetinari as his first action in office.
Tulip and Pin ditch sacks of terriers they stole into the river because watchmen are pursuing them. The Times crew talk about Otto’s latest dark light photo and tell him to stop creating them. Sacharissa talks to William about how no one really cares about the truth because they need to make rent and live, how William got to choose this because he’s still rich even if he doesn’t take money from his family. William shoots back that the truth matters because the alternative to not caring about it is far worse. Sacharissa insists that they need ads and if William wants to save the paper, he should get to work finding those. Pin and Tulip decide that they’re going to demand their money from Slant and leave; Mr. Pin saw everyone he’d ever killed in the dark light and means to retire. William goes to the apothecary to create a scent bomb, drops it in front of the werewolf following him, and finds Deep Bone again, offering him a check for information. He’s told to meet on the Misbegot Bridge at night. The dwarfs at the Times realize that they could slow down the Inquirer by unearthing the tunnel that connects their offices via the cellar and sinking their press. They make it through and find Dibbler in their cellar. William questions him, but Sacharissa insists that he come work for them selling ad space. William leaves to meet Deep Bone.
Commentary
The mystery of this book is one of my favorites Pratchett pulls off, maybe for the fact that it’s a little obvious? Not in the sense of knowing exactly what happened when Tulip and Pin broke in on Vetinari, but for knowing who’s in charge of the conspiracy.
Look, there just isn’t really anything more telling than one of the conspiracy chairs being like “the guy who writes the Times just wants attention” which is basically exactly what he says, like you might as well put THE DISGRUNTLED SHITTY PARENT IS ME in neon lights. What an incredible asshole Lord de Worde manages to be the instant you can clock him.
It occurs to me that William is the second character (after Susan) to be a commentary on the general ‘uselessness” of education, which reads very much as commentary on how much it sucks to know so much about things that other (most) people… don’t care about. It comes to a head in William’s argument with Sacharissa in this section, which I adore because they are both completely correct despite disagreeing; Sacharissa is right that for most people, the world is about getting from one day to the next and that means that truth and bigger picture thinking get put by the wayside while the humdrum moments that make their lives bearable matter utmost to them, even if William doesn’t find it important. William is also right that the truth should matter and that people should care more about the world around them. He’s also right that Vetinari is a lesser evil in the cycle of Ankh-Morpork leadership, and what they get in exchange is liable to be far worse toward all those people who don’t have time to care about said truth.
Pointedly, Vetinari also knows this. And there is something deeply fascinating (and of course, funny) about a person who wants to be in charge simply because he knows he can get it done with less fuss and more efficiency than anyone else. As the person who was frequently stuck doing all the work in dreaded “group projects” at school for this exact reason, his lordship has my sympathies. But it’s relevant that in a series where a potential Good King (Carrot) is standing by, but intentionally not assuming leadership, Pratchett has in fact created the exact same conundrum with Vetinari—we’re all at the mercy of our leaders, and when we get a halfway decent one, it’s in the interest of anyone without oodles of cash to try and keep them there.
But Sacharissa’s point that this is all a choice for William that he can continue or abandon at whim is not only true and awful—it’s a stab at how many real world news and media outlets are run. Most newspapers are only kept alive at the behest of a few very powerful people with deep pockets who believe they’re doing something that matters… or something that grants them more influence over the masses. Or both, which is the deadlier combination. Some of them are like William, and many of them are far more like the Engravers Guild. They could all decide at any time that they don’t care anymore and close up shop. That why our own tabloids changed from stories about women giving birth to bat children into celebrity gossip magazines and outright lies and conspiracy theories around the government and its actors.
It’s also so horrifically important that this book shows us a moment (of which we know there are many) where Vimes has the ability to cross a line from “hopefully fair keeper of the peace” to “well-connected bully with a big fucking stick” and we watch him make the choice for the former. He pulls out that truncheon and intimates that he could decide William was disturbing the peace, do something awful to him and his coworkers, and let the city government and his own officers cover it up for him. He has that ability. What stops him from exerting it here is Sam Vimes’ deeply stubborn and innate desire to treat all people as people.
So he sits down with William and walks through what they both know, then tells him to keep thinking through it and gives the Times offices added protection. Like Vetinari, he’s seen precisely where William has the ability to be an asset to the city, and pushes him in that direction. He could make a different choice, but he doesn’t. With him, like with Vetinari, the citizens of Ankh-Morpork are usually lucky.
Asides and little thoughts:
- The bit where William notes how he has an ear for certain wording that “told him when phrases like ‘the views of ordinary people,’ innocent and worthy in themselves, were being used to mean that someone should be whipped” is… yeah. That’s a thing.
- Also this moment: “Sacharissa had pulled herself together, perhaps because no one was trying to comfort her anymore.” Wow, look, the neglected only child vibes on that. They are so strong. I feel them in my bones.
- They want to replace Vetinari… with the sex toy shop guy. You know, sometimes I think I’ve lost the capacity to feel joy, and then I think about things like this and also the fact that Vimes insists that he’s never checked out said shop, but Nobby gets their catalogue, and I think, oh, there’s that feeling again.
- Okay, so last week we had Vimes preempting Benoit Blanc’s anger over stupid crimes committed by rich people, and this week we have William preempting Captain America’s backwards-sit-in-chair so-you-got-detention speech with that same move and “So, Mr. Dibbler… when did you start pissing in the fountain of Truth?” Which is a thing I could actually imagine Captain America saying, language aside.
Pratchettisms:
Once again the room was filled with the ferocious silence of calculation and the personal mathematics of profit and loss.
It’s one of those words that describes something that does not make a noise but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss. It’s like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.
The curry was particularly strange, since Mrs. Arcanum considered foreign parts only marginally less unspeakable than private parts and therefore added the curious yellow curry powder with a very small spoon, lest everyone should suddenly tear their clothes off and do foreign things.
It was a pretty good impression of an abject coward, he thought, because it was casting for type.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said. That was technically a white lie, the editor said. Like thanking your aunt for the lovely handkerchiefs.
“Are you… all right, Otto?” said William, realizing that this was a winning entrant in the Really Stupid Things to Say contest.
Mister Vimes liked to refer to himself as a simple copper, just as Harry King thought of himself as a rough diamond. William suspected that the world was littered with the remains of those people who had taken them at their word.
She’d been a respectable young woman for some time. In certain people, that means there’s a lot of dammed-up disreputability just waiting to burst out.
Next week we’ll finish the book!
