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!
