To succeed, he’ll have to compete with the vile Reacher Gilt, chairman of the Grand Trunk, a company that runs a semaphore system (“the clacks”) that can carry messages across the continent in a matter of hours – if you can afford the extortionate fees, and if the clacks is actually operational when you want to send your message. If he fails, he’ll be hanged for the second time, and this time Vetinari will make sure it’s fatal. Our Hero is Moist von Lipwig, a conman who is hanged as the book opens for a long list of inventive and profitable crimes.Īnd then, as Pratchett puts it, an angel appears unto him.Įxcept the angel is Lord Vetinari, the despotic Patrician of London-adjacent fictional metropolis Ankh-Morpork, and the second chance he offers Moist is to reopen the city’s long-defunct Post Office, a job that’s already killed four of Vetinari’s most capable clerks. Pratchett’s books have always been about character, with plot taking a back seat, and Going Postal is no exception. Before this, the slow build-up from the light romp of The Colour of Magic through novels that become ever more serious in theme, ever angrier in their satire and ever more humane in their palpable love for their flawed-but-lovable protagonists after this, the rapid stagnation and decline into inflexible dogma (check out, or rather don’t, The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day). This, the 33 rd Discworld novel, is probably the peak of Pratchett’s technical powers as a novelist. Somehow I’ve never reviewed it here though. It’s my favourite of all Terry Pratchett’s books.
0 kommentar(er)
