The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 33: Going Postal

Confidence trickster Moist Von Lipwig is rescued from being hanged by Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. He has been saved because the Patrician has an offer for him. He wants Moist to restore the moribund Post Office to its former glory. Trouble is, the Post Office is facing some pretty stiff competition from the Clacks and the businessmen running it have no qualms about destroying any rivals that might crop up…

Making Money (2004) is a novel that has a lot to say about a lot of issues. It’s the fifth novel since The Truth (2000) to feature a completely new protagonist, and this protagonist – Moist – is (for me, at least) one of the most unlikeable characters to be the audience surrogate in a long time.

First things first, though: let’s start with the positives, because this is a particularly good novel and one that has been pretty accurate in the foretelling of Roundworld events that Terry Pratchett wasn’t even aware that he might have been telling.

Moist, like William De Worde in The Truth, is a relative newcomer to Ankh-Morpork. He, as a fellow criminal, is remarkably adept at spotting the little cons that other people in the city like to inflict upon each other. Unlike Messrs Pin and Tulip (two of the villains of The Truth) he does not find it intimidating or scary at all; in fact, he welcomes the opportunity to meet others like himself and possibly profit off them.

However, he has not reckoned on becoming personally involved in the doings of the Post Office, or becoming attached to the people he has to work with. The first of these is Mr Pump, the golem who has been assigned to watch Moist. As we saw in Feet Of Clay, golems take their work very seriously. Moist discovers that Pump is on to his every move and he begins to enjoy the little tricks and ploys that completely fail to distract his guard. There’s also Tolliver Groat and Stanley Howler, the last two postal workers still employed by the Post Office; one ancient and almost resigned to being forgotten about, the other young idealistic and obsessed with pins. Then there’s Adora Belle Dearheart, who wants to get to the bottom of just how her brother died and who – by a dread coincidence – happened to lose her job as a result of one of Moist’s cons… Finally, there are the disaffected clacks workers known as “The Smoking Gnu,” a trio of engineers who live on the underbelly of Ankh-Morpork’s burgeoning technological age and who are determined to expose The Truth and get it Out There (television fans may recognise these characters as being a parody of some of Mulder’s acquaintances from The X-Files, the show most famous now for allowing conspiracy theorists to become mainstream).

On the antagonistic side of the novel, we have Reacher Gilt, businessman/entrepreneur extraordinaire, who leads the association of businessman who have recently taken over control of the Clacks system.

(For readers who have come late to this series, the clacks is a communication system, similar to our own semaphore, but evolving rapidly to become something akin to a telegraph. It features heavily in a lot of novels as a symbol of Ankh-Morpork’s technological and social dominance on the Discworld.)

Gilt and Moist recognise each other as kindred spirits almost immediately. Their rivalry over the clacks and the post office threatens to overturn both men as they strive to expose the other as a cheating trickster without being exposed themselves.

This is one of Pratchett’s more prescient novels. And all he did was retell certain events from recent Roundworld history.

Going Postal was published just a few years after the Dot Com Bubble burst. The Dot Com Bubble, you may recall, occurred when low interest rates created a large reserve of capital in the hands of people who probably should have known better. They invested this money in the hottest property going at the time: the Internet. Many start-up companies were able to realise incredible profits without an actual product being marketed. A lot of people made a lot of money: some were even able to hang on to it without going to jail for corrupt business practices afterwards.

This is the mentality that Gilt represents: the desire to make money and damn the consequences.

Of course, more recent readers may be reminded of the Global Financial Crisis which occurred just a few years later in 2007. Other may be reminded of similar boom and bust movements that have occurred over similar fads in business, such as trains, television, movies, or even tulips.

Vetinari, of course, has the full measure of Gilt and Moist and is using them both for the benefit of Ankh-Morpork.

Moist, however, is also dealing with the intricacies of getting the Post Office started again, as well as some letters that have become sentient (this is Discworld, after all), and has to fight off a banshee assassin sent after him by Gilt.

This part of the novel is almost standard Pratchett: we’ve had inanimate objects achieving a measure of sentience before, as well as conflicts between the hero and the villain that have gotten lethal, but this conflict feels a lot more personal this time. But it’s handled almost supernaturally well by Pratchett, as he gives us a history of communication technology across what is literally days in the novel.

Moist basically invents stamps. Prior to the invention of postage stamps – here as well as in Ankh-Morpork – sending letters could be quite expensive as you relied upon the goodwill of strangers or couriers to deliver a letter. Government employees had access to a courier’s network, but it wasn’t until Henry VIII introduced the Royal Mail in 1516 that there was a dedicated service for civilians to access and use. But until 1840 or so, the recipient would have to pay for the letter: prepaying for a letter only became possible with the advent of postage stamps by Rowland Hill during the Great Post Office Reforms of 1839 and 1840.

The clacks – sorry, semaphore – had been invented about 50 years prior to the postage stamp. I talked about the invention of semaphore and its relation to the clacks here, so I shan’t go off on another tangent. At any rate, Going Postal’s plot posits that the clacks and the Post Office are in direct competition with each other. The difference, Moist maintains, is that letters are far more personal and intimate than a message delivered through hundreds of clacks stations and read by who knows how many people on the way. However, the clacks is fast, and businessmen like Gilt understand just how important speed is in matters of finance.

Unfortunately, in their greed, they have also reduced budgets for maintenance and employment. This has led to accidents, like the one that killed Adora Belle’s brother.

What this leads to is a climax that has some real stakes for the characters and for the wider world. Not, like in some earlier novels, because of an eldritch horror creeping out from some other dimension, but because of people losing their quality of life because of other people’s greed. It is a thoroughly realistic situation in an otherwise mostly fantastic (in the classical sense, of course) novel.  

Part of it is because there is a real measure of Pratchett’s own anger in the story; another part is that we have seen characters like Gilt and Moist before, but in our world. And it almost never ends well.

Pratchett’s anger comes from how he has had to barely create the characters of Gilt and his cabal at all: we’ve all met people like Gilt before… some places even elected them as Mayors, Prime Ministers and Presidents despite knowing what they’re like. They’re charming, affable, surprisingly knowledgeable about how to make more money using other people’s cash and they almost always manage to evade any kind of consequence or harm from the entanglements they create. We think they’re charming… until they aren’t; we think they’re adventurous… until they aren’t; we think that they have some sort of boldness and audacity about them… until we realise that they merely have no conscience or values. Gilt even has a trained parrot that he has taught to say, “Twelve and a half per cent” ( a Treasure Island reference) and people still don’t get that he’s just a better dressed pirate, even though he is telling them exactly what he is like.

And that’s part of why I dislike Moist.

Look, we all love a redemption story, don’t we? Where the ne’er-do-well finally sees what life is all about and, to use a Discworld aphorism, manages to “change his shorts.” Where he is welcomed back into the fold of respectability and general society despite their chequered past.

It’s pretty much always “he,” by the way; women in a lot of fiction are left to their own devices and largely forgotten about unless they conveniently die, leaving a son who can “redeem” them.

What I dislike about Moist is that I’ve met people like him before and they don’t change.

Simple as that. I’ve been fortunate in that all I’ve lost from them is some dignity, and that my own financial prospects have never been enough to make me a target. But I’ve seen the way they treat people and how they interact with others as though they don’t matter, and they are not worth worrying about.

So there’s that. But he does make an intriguing protagonist, and Pratchett was wise enough to show us in the sequel to this that Moist isn’t satisfied by his new life and still seeks illicit thrills and excitement, but has channeled them into activities that are less harmful to others.

I’m also sensible enough to know that a morally ambiguous protagonist might be a little more interesting to read about than a character who has fewer shades of grey to them.

Finally, the thing that this book is most famous for is the introduction of GNU. Early in the book (in Chapter 4 – yes, this is another book with chapters!) a clacks linesman utters the phrase,

“A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

To facilitate this, John Dearheart – Adora Belle’s brother – has been granted a memorial by his colleagues. His name is sent through as a message using codes to signify that it is passed on (shown by the letter G), not recorded (N) and sent back the way it came when it reaches the end of the line (U).

Since the death of Sir Terry this GNU has been taken up by many in lots of different ways. Many fans will use the hashtag #TerryPratchettGNU on social media while others have incorporated the code into the pages of websites so that Pratchett’s name continues to be spoken, even when we aren’t aware of it.

Most of us, though, are also happy to keep his name alive through talking about him and his books. Even if we don’t like the main character all that much.

Coming Up Next: Commander Vimes has to stop another war between the Dwarves and the Trolls. He’s also got to get home by 6… unless everything goes Thud!