Just want to remind everyone today that they have worth. For no reason, of course.
Summary
The former Dean, now the Archchancellor of Brazeneck, meets up with Ridcully and the two of them snipe back and forth until Ridcully almost agrees to a match against Brazeneck that could result in his Archchancellor hat being wagered. Ponder talks him down on account of being an entire committee’s worth of important positions at the university. The two men head off to eat while Nutt brings up how the wizards might go about learning to actually play football effectively. Ponder is astounded at Nutt’s acumen, and wonders how he became a polymath, but remembers something vague about how he ended up at the school and instead asks for his help. Nutt agrees and tries to get Trev on the team, but Trev promised his mother that he wouldn’t, so Nutt simply asks for his expertise. Ponder puts Nutt in charge of the football, and the next day Ridcully finds the team practicing ballet to increase their agility and grace. The university’s Master of Music presents them with his first (overwrought) football chant. Glenda realizes that she’s been adhering to rules that don’t really exist, and decides that she will serve at the banquet that evening.
As the banquet begins, Nutt tells everyone what he’s been working on with the team and leaves to get them ready for a demonstration while Glenda inserts herself into the banquet server crew. She notes that the attendees are all being given food that is likely too much for their palates. Vetinari arrives and winds up suggesting that Unseen and Brazeneck should have a football match for the Archchancellor hat, feeling that it will be a healthy challenge between institutions. Nutt creates a very impressive display in the lighting of the chandelier, using dwarfish techniques that he essentially reverse engineered himself. Vetinari introduces the Unseen Academicals team and requests that another team of football enthusiasts play them, according to the ancient (but modified) rules they have discovered. By getting the city’s team captains drunk, this all goes off without a hitch—apart from the point where Swithin, captain of the Cockbill Boars, gets so drunk that he tries to slap Vetinari on the back and drunkenly rants to him. The next day, Glenda decides that she is very angry with how Vetinari manipulated things and bribes her way into the palace to complain about it.
Vetinari deduces a number of things about Glenda because her grandmother used to be the cook for the Assassin’s Guild. However, he is unrepentant about the changes he has made to football, and thanks her for being kind to Nutt. Glenda heads back to the university and runs into Pepe, who is still looking for Juliet because everyone is at the moment. Glenda brings him in through the back and finds that Juliet has been baking (half decent) pies. She realizes that she’s been holding the girl back and tells her that she can either leave and see the world and model, or stay and figure things out with Trev, but that she needs to make the choice now and get out. Juliet leaves with Pepe, and Concrete finds Glenda; he’s looking for Trev because Nutt is sick. Trev and Glenda find Nutt ill in the vat area and, at his request, they chain him down and help him to hypnotize himself so that he can figure out what has been wrong this whole time. There is a cupboard in his mind that he promised Ladyship he would not open, but when he does he finds out the secret of his heritage: He is not a goblin, he is an orc. The birdlike guards (Furies from Ephebe) assigned to Nutt come down to warn Glenda and Trev, but they shoo them away, insisting he is their friend.
Glenda tells Trev what Juliet isn’t saying, about her new job as a fashion model. Trev knows that the right thing is to let Juliet go, and he and Glenda go to Nutt’s room to try and convince him that he’s still capable of training the football team and generally being around people. Glenda then heads to the library. The Librarian shows her a terrible woodcutting from a book on orcs, which then leads her to the necromancy department where Professor Hix brings up the information he showed Ridcully on orcs when Nutt arrived at the school. The image from the past show orcs in battle, but Glenda notices they’re being driven by whip. Mister Ottomy tells her that he plans to complain to Ridcully about an orc being at the school, and Glenda threatens him for it. Trev and Juliet can’t find Nutt anywhere, and the group decide that he may have tried to run away, back to Uberwald, so they board a coach to Sto Lat to track him down. They find him on the side of the road being attacked by the Furies, and the passengers in the coach help Glenda chase them off. They all make it to Sto Lat, talking the whole way about what gives a person “worth,” as Ladyship directed. The coach stops behind the Lancre Flyer because its horse has thrown a shoe; Nutt offers to fix the problem.
Commentary
This whole section is philosophical musings end-to-end, starting with Glenda’s thoughts on the “invisible hammer.” Essentially, she’s made braver as the story progresses by the realization that most people are controlled by the belief that something bad will happen if they don’t follow rules—and the people enforcing the rules are counting on that. It’s amazing to realize the things people can be convinced of, just by the vague suggestions of a consequence around social orders and hierarchies. The more she pushes back, the more often she realizes that no one is willing to call her on infractions so long as she’s confident. (It’s very similar to the rules of the con, in fact.)
Glenda’s learning a lot of things throughout, and while most of them are putting together truths about the world that she’s always half-known, some are helpful revelations about how she treats Juliet. Pratchett would talk about how he couldn’t manage to write “soppy” women as protagonists, but the real thing I give him credit for is never entirely blaming women who are a bit soppy by acknowledging that a person becomes that due to how they’re treated. When Glenda sees Juliet tried to bake pies and bemoans that Juliet’s never been any good at the task, she has a moment of pause—and notes that Juliet never got good at it because any time something was difficult for her, Glenda simply took over. And then she notices that Juliet’s pies aren’t even half bad.
It’s a microcosm of a very common problem with the hyper-competent female characters of the ’90s and early aughts that used to drive me batty; if you spend all your time doing for others because you can’t stand the idea of things not being done to your exacting standards, then who’s to blame for the fact that you have to do everything yourself? Glenda is the victim of her own competence, and more to the point, the way that she treats Juliet is no longer aiding her friend—it’s preventing her from growing up.
And then… we come to that banquet.
I can’t help but think there’s a very deliberate jibe at Harry Potter (again) when Ridcully admits that he doesn’t wear the Archchancellor hat too often because it nags him, and Vetinari’s response is that he cannot possibly own it because if the hat speaks and thinks, it is a sentient being and therefore cannot be owned because that would make it a slave. *gestures frantically* It’s hilariously pointed in a way that feels too on-the-nose not to be intentional.
We then come to the inevitable philosophical musings from Vetinari about… the nature of morality? These thoughts do feel as though they were appended to this story for lack of a better place to drop them, not that I mind in the slightest. It’s bemusing mostly for the fact that the Patrician tells us about his discovery of evil in childhood: Happening across a mother otter and her young, who eat a salmon filled with roe. In Havelock Vetinari’s mind, this is an example that proves evil is built into the fabric of the universe because mother and child ate mother and child in the “natural order.” It’s full Hobbesian state-of-nature discourse.
Of course, this is immediately complicated by proffering even a few messy additions to these observations; that we cannot be sure that the otters are aware (in the fully sentient sense) of what they’re eating, or that applying human morality to animals is a weird exercise in any scenario, just to start. Again, it suggests a tenderness to Havelock Vetinari’s person that I don’t think he’s aware he is revealing in that moment. (He’s drunk, too, which is certainly another factor in this entire discussion.) The fact that this observation emotionally affected him to such a degree is telling us far more about him than it is about the nature of evil. And even more important is his takeaway from this formative moment:
“If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
That feels incredibly thoughts-of-the-author to me. And, you know… I can get down with that.
And then we move to the question of Nutt’s ability to live among people. We’re supposed to stick with that phrase, the question he keeps asking: Do I have worth? Which sounds so innocent on its face, the thought that all people want to have some form of worth, to be sure of it. But as the story continues, we find that’s it’s not so simple, that the concept of worth has been instilled in Nutt by Lady Margolotta as a defense mechanism to keep him alive—if he’s personable, if he’s helpful, if he’s useful, that might be enough to save him, to keep him from harm.
When the trio track him down on the side of the road and the people in the Sto Lat stagecoach are good to Nutt after learning that he’s an orc, Glenda has a moment where she is shocked by the kindness of this crowd, who are not terribly educated (in the bookish sense), are not by and large very clever but, in a strange “democratic” way, choose to accept Nutt in that moment. But then we move on to this thought:
It was heartwarming, but Glenda’s heart was a little bit calloused on this score. It was the crab bucket at its best. Sentimental and forgiving; but get it wrong—one wrong word, one wrong liaison, one wrong thought—and those nurturing arms could so easily end in fists. Nutt was right: at best, being an orc was to live under threat.
Which is a perfect distillation of the plight of any “othered” person and, I think very intentionally, far more direct in its point than any of the Discworld books have ever been about identity and how it can shape people’s lives. And yet there’s hope, of course. The hope that we find in how the stagecoach driver interprets Nutt’s words:
“Of course, all he’s saying is you’ve got to do your best,” said the driver. “And the more best you’re capable of, the more you should do. That’s it, really.”
As always, being able to distill profound thoughts into shorter, more direct terms is a gift. It doesn’t get much more profound—or useful—than that.
Asides and little thoughts
- Admittedly, I’m not going to get most of the sport references throughout this book, but when the UU’s Master of Music started in on the chant using Bengo Macarona’s name as a placeholder, my brain went “oh, Diego Maradona,” and I felt just a little bit good about my brain ability to hold onto trivia for something that I know nothing about whatsoever.
- Ridcully “felt his grandfather kick him in the heredity” and that one is gonna stick with me for a while as a way of describing ancestral memory.
- Who bought Vetinari the “To the world’s Greatest Boss” mug? Who?? I accept three options for this mystery. 1) It was Drumknott, and Vetinari feels the need to display it out of respect for his hard work and the need for his best clerk’s psyche to remain intact; 2) it was Vimes, he did it as a mean joke, and Vetinari displays it happily to get back at him; 3) Vetinari bought it for himself to confuse and upset everyone.
Pratchettisms
Perhaps it was the look of someone permanently doing sums in his head, and not just proper sums either, but the sneaky sort with letters in them.
There followed the menacing silence of a clash of wills, but Ponder decided that as he was, technically, twelve important people at the university, he formed, all by himself, a committee, and since he was therefore, de facto, very wise, he should intervene.
“Oh, I take an interest,” said Vetinari. “I believe that football is a lot like life.”
“Only people who are very trustworthy would dare to look as untrustworthy and me and Madame.”
She’s be a little happier if, even, the lovers could be thrown into the mixing bowl of life. At least it would be some acknowledgment that people actually ate food.
Next week we’ll finish the book!
Of course the otters aren’t aware in a moral sense of what they’re doing; that’s the point Vetinari/Pratchett is going for. It’s a rather more poetic iteration of Charles Darwin being unable to conceive that any benevolent God would create Ichneumoid wasps (the ones that lay their eggs in live prey). The commentary isn’t on the moral character of otters or wasps, which clearly haven’t got any, but on the moral character of the being[s], if any, who set things up to work that way in the first place.
I agree. For me, an ex believer, it was Alzheimer’s that I couldn’t forgive god for. And it is relevant to this book because some consider orcs animals bred for killing while, as Glenda finds out, they were tortured slaves who were whipped by men into battle.
This is part of the same conceptual framework as the famous conversation betwee Susan and Death about lies: all the things that are good and important in the universe are things we made [up], and there’s no better world or better way unless we make one.
Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic has a robot explaining this to a human. Highly recommended.
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/history-5
Thoughts
It seems Bledlow Nobbs has acquired the “(no relation)” appellation. And, speaking of the actual Nobbs, Verity Pushpram, whom Glenda talks to, was Nobbs’ one time girlfriend.
From Glenda we see the next part of her arc. She has decided that she will not be intimidated. She runs over Smeems, Mrs. Whitlow, Stollop; all the way up to Ridcully, Lady Margoletta, and, with a shudder, and a pie, Vetinari. We’ve seen it before with Moist – if you act like you belong somewhere, people will believe that you do.
We have more more intimations of Nutt’s true nature with Mustrum’s thought “how many of them were alive before you murdered them” and Henry’s call for a military expedition to far Uberwald. Then, as he becomes an adult, it’s revealed that he’s an Orc.
His claws extend and, at his request, he is chained but Glenda goes to do research. She reads the book ORC and goes to the necromancer to see a recording of the orcs attacking – but they are being whipped into the attack by men on horseback.
Philosophy (and chases) ensue but whatever the resolution is it will have to wait for next week.
Pratchettisms
Ridcully worked on the principle that anything you couldn’t remember wasn’t important and had developed the floor-heap method of document storage to a fine art.
“If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.” (Vetinari)
“You’re giving them Avec. Nearly every dish has got Avec in it, but stuff with Avec in the name is an acquired taste. I mean, do these to you look like people who habitually eat in a foreign language?” (Glenda, with a shout back to Granny)
“My ladsh,” said Swithin, “are the besht there ish. It’sh not their fault they’re up againsht better people. They never getsh s chance to play shomeone they can beat.”
“The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord.” Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. “Well of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.”
“I’ll drink water when fish climb out of it to take a piss, but thank you all the same,” said Pepe.
“Okay, right, if you are an orc, right, then why are you not tearing my head off?” said Bledlow Nobbs (no relation). “Would you like me to?” said Nutt.
Juliet grabbed the driver’s face and there was, for what seemed slightly too long, by the internal clocks of both Glenda and Trev, the sound of a tennis ball being sucked through the strings of a tennis racket.
The Pepe quote is similar to one of W.C. Fields’s – “I never drink water. Fish f*ck in it.”
I would go for Door Number Three: Vetinari is messing with people’s heads. I don’t remember him and Weatherwax ever running into each other, but I wouldn’t bet he’d be worse at Headology than she is (although maybe they both do better with people they’re used to).
Research finds a strong argument (see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/02/23/thug/) that Twain never actually called God a malign thug — but he came close to it, and a number of relatively modern writers have made the connection; Pratchett is a hair more subtle here, but he could well have been aware of one or more of the attributions.
Pratchettisms:
“…he has apparently scored two fine ‘goals’, as I believe they are called,” he said, dealing carefully with the word as he might deal with a large spider in the bathtub. I don’t think Pratchett had much use for cultural snobbery.
Juliet’s version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding, and seldom seen.
I’ve never yet had to personally defend my right to exist (though as a disabled, queer, Jewish-born woman, I’m aware that various groups want my ilk to not exist), and wasn’t explicitly trained to “accumulate worth.” But I share Nutt’s drive to do so, fighting the feeling that I can’t improve the world enough to compensate for taking up space in it and that any good I do would be better done by someone else. I could really benefit from internalizing Glenda’s command to Juliet: “Never apologize for something that doesn’t need apologizing for.”
I have a mental block about breaking explicit rules and laws, a sort of ++Does not compute.++ People doing so for reasons other than survival is incomprehensible to me — I don’t always think it’s morally wrong; I just can’t imagine not having that block, knowing a thing is forbidden and doing it anyway. So Glenda is ahead of me there, though she’s doing more facing-down of the unwritten rules known as “custom and tradition.”
For nearly 10 years, I thought Pratchett had invented the “crab bucket” concept, as I had only encountered it in this book.
Actually, some crabs are quite willing and able to escape from captivity. When we tried to keep green crabs in the sea-creature touch tank at a museum where I worked, they would always climb out of the tank somehow, then go off and die in a corner of the museum. I suppose that kind of thing is metaphorically part of the crab bucket mentality — fear that someone who escapes their natal social place will end up stranded in an environment they weren’t designed to survive in.
I always found romance novels intolerably envy-inducing. But romance novels involving food became even more intolerably envy-inducing after my relationship with food became dysfunctional. I understand Glenda not feeling that way, as she has devoted her life to making good food.
Saying orcs had been “deployed” to battle implied to me that someone was using and commanding them; they weren’t attacking on their own initiative. So I was surprised that the people here were surprised by that revelation. But I guess the whips are what made the difference, if they indicate that orcs weren’t necessarily propelled by their own desire to fight and kill. But even Always Chaotic Evil monsters in other stories (e.g. Wheel of Time) have been afraid to fight against a formidable opposing force and gotten whipped by their equally evil commanders.
The wizards’ first attempt at a football chant sounds like it was written by Aeslin mice. #incryptid
Pratchettisms:
‘Glenda, lurking among the serving girls, was taken back and affronted at the same time, which was a bit of a squeeze.’
“It’s called an omnibus, see. And omni means everything, and damn near everything happens on this bus.”
Looking back:
‘Most of [the older faculty] were old enough to remember at least two pitched battles between factions of wizards, the worse of which had only been brought to a conclusion by Rincewind wielding a half-brick in a sock. Ponder looked across at Rincewind now, and he was hopping awkwardly on one leg, trying to put his sock back on.’ I’m guessing the first referenced battle was in The Light Fantastic, though I don’t remember that book well. The second was of course in Sourcery, as Rincewind probably remembers better than anyone.
There’s a mention of Archchancellor Bill Rincewind at Buggarup University, who appeared in The Last Continent.
Vetinari tells Glenda that he’s keeping people waiting in order to talk with her — including the Postmaster General. I wonder why Moist had a meeting with Vetinari that day.
Vetinari says that when people of Glenda’s sort think someone has been wronged, they go to war like Queen Ynci of Lancre.
“Will this be like the moving pictures?”
Glenda & Juliet started out seeming like Agnes Nitt and Christine. But their dynamic has taken on vastly more nuance in a way I’ve seldom if ever encountered elsewhere, starting with genuine friendship between the ‘lazy, brainless beauty’ and the ‘competent, overlooked dreamer’ and progressing as Juliet becomes more assertive and Glenda more introspective, in a narrative that shows how both of them became as they are and respects the very different lives in which they can shine when given the chance and taking it.
Looking ahead:
“The ball shall be called the ball. The ball is the ball that is played is the ball by any three consecutive players, at which point it is the ball.” This old rule in the new game will be critically important.
Is Moist still the Postmaster, in addition to running the bank? (Really running it, not just chairing it — that’s the dog’s job.) If not, his replacement may have needed a bit more monitoring; if so, this might be a lookahead to Moist’s next role, in Raising Steam.
The L-Space Wiki says Moist is the current Postmaster General. I’m sure that’s shown in Raising Steam, but I don’t remember how, as I’ve forgotten much of that book.
Goddess forbid that Vetinari’s rats ever meet the Aeslin mice. Although their hymns to his Lordship would be fascinating.
I now have a mental image of Dangerous Beans meeting the Aeslin mice.
“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”
Who bought Vetinari the “To the world’s Greatest Boss” mug? Who??
This is a sports satire, so I’m assuming he .ight be riffing on coaches and that like. But that’s just a guess. YMMV
Thinking on the fact that’s this book is the first mention of it, I wonder if her Ladyship didn’t gift it to his Lordship to signify his guiding Ankh-Morpork into the future?
That’s a nice 4th possibility, although I still think more likely that he’s messing with people’s heads — giving them something unexpected from the start, to make them question what they assume.