Who wouldn’t want to reincarnate into french fries, I ask you?
Summary
Vimes is furious that William scent bombed Angua, but she and Carrot insist that he leave it. In turn, he decides that William will be on his own for a while. William heads to the spot where all the beggars live, led there by Deep Bone disguised as a pink poodle. Wuffles is revealed, having been hidden under Foul Ole Ron’s coat this whole time, and Gaspode translates his side of the story; he saw two Gods (Vetinaris) but one smelled wrong, and there were two other men there, and he bit all of them. Tulip and Pin go and threaten Mr. Slant into giving them a lot more money for a job, presenting their Disorganizer and all the conversations it has recorded. Slant notes that Pin seems suddenly unhinged and gives them the money to get them to leave. Pin learns that Tulip’s people believe that everything is okay in the afterlife if you’ve got a potato on a string around your neck. He thinks they should take revenge on Otto, seeing as he’s the reason Mr. Pin is feeling all strange about his life’s work. Sacharissa and Rocky head to the de Worde manor so she can borrow that dress from his sister’s closet, and Rocky notices there are a lot of footprints about. Then they hear a voice, which turns out to be Charlie, who is very drunk and chained up.
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Sacharissa calls Rocky down to where Charlie is being kept, but Tulip and Pin arrive. Pin insists that they chain Rocky and Sacharissa up instead of killing them because he thinks he hasn’t got time. When Sacharissa explains whose house this is, however, he has a different idea. William takes the entire group of beggars and Wuffles back to the printing shed where the dwarfs, Sacharissa, and Tulip and Pin are waiting. Chaos erupts abruptly, leading to a fire. William gets Sacharissa out, then heads back in to warn everyone that the paint cans are about to explode. The news crew clear out, abandoning the press to Goodmountain’s dismay, and Wuffles runs out with them. Tulip and Pin are stuck inside with the fire in the cellar. They break Otto’s eel jar and Pin begins to lose his mind. The press has melted upstairs and is starting to rain liquid iron on them. Tulip dies after Pin convinces him to hand over his potato. The fire goes out and everyone heads back into the shed to find the press melted, though William and Sacharissa brainstorm the thought of a few new magazines while they process the loss. Mr. Pin emerges from the cellar, lunges at William as he’s pulling a metal spike from his jacket, and impales himself.
William comes upon Pin’s Disorganizer and also Tulip’s dead body with all the gems on it. Sacharissa explains what they came across in William’s family home, leading William to decide that the gems on Tulip are theirs and that they should use it to purchase another printing press. But William wants to go to press immediately with the story, and the only place with a currently running press is the Inquirer office. They invade and tell Carney that they want use of the printing press, Sacharissa pulling a crossbow on him and William dumping rubies on his desk. William gives the story to Goodmountain without writing it down, but can’t escape the fact that every bit of this points to his father. He tells Sacharissa as much, and also that he means to confront him. Otto doesn’t like that they’ve let William do this alone and wants to go after him. Tulip and Pin have their conversations with Death and go where they’re meant to go. William goes home and confronts his father, who tries to threaten him with goons and send him far away. Otto shows up and threatens the man’s life, allowing William to tell his father to pack up and leave the city. He insists that he won’t name any names for the sake of their family, even though he knows it’s wrong.
William winds up at the Watch House where Vimes threatens to hold him for obstruction, and William tells him to call his lawyer—Mr. Slant. Vimes calls the bluff and winds up having to let William go, but tells him to be in the Patrician’s office tomorrow morning. William leaves with Slant and makes it clear that he expects the lawyer will do everything in his power to prevent him from having to tell Vimes anything. Slant informs him that most of the Guilds have voted to instate Scrope as Patrician, despite his appointment being due to false information. William comes down for breakfast the next morning and finds that no one at the table much cares that Vetinari has been exonerated. He loses his temper with Mr. Windling and blurts out to everyone that he writes the paper because he wanted them to know things. He heads to work a week later and as they’re in the middle of new hires, Vetinari shows up. They have a chat and he agrees to make sure Harry King’s daughter’s wedding is well attended by top brass and in return asks William not to ruffle Vimes too much. William tries to takes Sacharissa out later for a meal, but a story unfolds as they’re walking. Pin and Tulip wind up reincarnated as a potato (about to be chips) and a woodworm, respectively.
Commentary
And right on the heels of a section where Vimes pointedly does not use his power for bullying, we get this sequence of events…
I adore Vimes for how protective he is of his people, but he’s in the wrong here; he knows William is in danger and decides not to keep tabs on him because he’s angry that the guy messed with Angua. (Genuinely more upset than either Carrot or Angua, which is another thing that I love about the Watch dynamic—the fact that his emotions are always at an eleven, and the two of them tend to keep a lid on it in ways that he’s incapable of managing.) In some ways, I almost wish that we’d later found out that Carrot was keeping an eye on William despite orders? Because the idea that the Watch hold each other accountable falls through here. You’re not supposed to look out for the people of your city right up until they piss you off enough. It’s realistic, of course, but the Watch are often framed in their own books as a fictional ideal of policing. Not so much in this instance.
It occurs to me on this read that there’s an avenue in this story that’s basically an instruction on how you might use overwhelming power and privilege for good. People keep noting that William has plenty of attributes that resemble his father, no matter how much he wants to deny it. And while that’s the sort of thing a person can and should work on (as Otto graciously puts it), there are also ways that people can take the power they’ve been brought up to wield, and do something better with it. As we might put it now: Use your “Karen” abilities for the benefit of others.
But it’s awful to know that without Otto, Lord de Worde would have won this fight, and shipped William off to be less troublesome to him far away. He probably would have tried this gambit again, too, and maybe the next time, he would have won. William’s anger is this heavy, layered thing because he’s feeling his own fury at never truly having had a father, but he’s also feeling angry on behalf of an entire city that will never know what this man and his friends tried to do to all of them. In light of that, Otto is again right—it’s incredible that William is as decent of a person as he manages to be. He was raised, albeit neglectfully, by a monster.
And, of course, using Watergate as an inspiration for this story can’t help but feel pointed less in the direction of the Patrician’s office than in the political goals of the Watergate scandal; a specific motive for the Watergate break-in never being universally agreed upon aside, the overall purpose in the scandal was for one political party to destroy the other in the eyes of the public via means of deceit, and to keep their sort of people in power. The specifics are jumbled about in this story, but the core desires are precisely aligned. Interestingly, Pratchett is using the city’s rich elites as a stand-in for Republican leadership… for no reason at all, I’m sure, but obviously you can make of that what you will.
Vetinari, for all that he’s a very softcore kind of despot, is wildly (I’m being facetious here, but it applies ironically all the same) progressive on the political front. The fact that the guilds vote to elect Scrope with the exception of all four guilds that are headed up by women—beggars, seamstresses, launderers, and exotic dancers—couldn’t make that clearer if it was sent via the clacks itself. Nevermind the fact they’re headed by women, all you need to note is who they represent; the destitute, the people who clean your clothes, and the sex workers. Those are the people who would rather keep Havelock Vetinari right where he is.
Having said that, who wants to take bets on his head wound not being anywhere near as bad as it appeared? William doesn’t note seeing the Patrician again when he’s in the cells, which makes me think he didn’t stay there during the whole fiasco. Maybe Vimes took him home for a week.
What? Do you have a better explanation for Vetinari’s only request of William being to please not upset his terrier any more than strictly necessary? I can’t.
Asides and little thoughts:
- “Privilege just means ‘private law’.” I mean… yeah, that’s actually a super succinct way of putting it. Damn.
- I do have a question, though, being exactly how did the rumor of Vetinari and Lady Margolotta’s, uh, relationship get around to the general population of the city, like how could Mr. Windling have heard that. Who spilled that information to whom, and when, and have they been bumped off yet.
- Mrs. Tilly who “likes cats and very nasty murders” coming in there like the base description for most true crime fans.
- Sacharissa assuming that Vetinari is going to Man in the Iron Mask poor Charlie is pretty great.
Pratchettisms:
It glittered altogether too much; sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.
All in all, the effect was not of a poodle but of malformed poodleosity. That is to say, everything about it suggested “poodle” except for the whole thing itself, which suggested walking away.
Spit or swallow, he thought, the eternal conundrum.
He’d always admired the way Mr. Pin wasn’t frightened of difficult things, like long sentences.
Some areas of Sacharissa’s mind that dealt with things like death and terror were signaling to be heard at this point, but, being part of Sacharissa, they were trying to do it in a ladylike way, and so she ignored them.
Mr. Tulip let go of Sacharissa to help his colleague, and in the slow dance of rushing events Sacharissa spun round and planted her knee hard and firmly in the place that made a parsnip a very funny thing indeed.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaux of sanity.
His brain hadn’t touched the ground the whole time.
“So… we have what the people are interested in, and human interest stories, which is what humans are interested in, and the public interest, which no one is interested in.”
He gave William a look which said “I can read your mind, even the small print,” and then gazed around the press room again.
Wizards doing odd things wasn’t news. Wizards doing odd things was wizards.
Okay, next week we start The Thief of Time! We’ll read up to:
He was on the right lines. He knew it.
