I Read Books: Going Postal

 

Going Postal

Moist Von Lipvig is a conman who has been caught in Ankh-Morpork. Then an angel appears, in the person of the Patrician. It seems he needs a candidate for Postmaster General. What he doesn’t reveal is that four previous Postmasters have died in suspicious circumstances, nor does he explain that Lipvig will have a golem – unstoppable and incorruptible – as parole officer.

The clacks – a semaphore telegraph – is running into problems. The current board are not the engineers who built it. They cut down on maintenance, fired a lot of staff. Some of the relay towers were not built for the traffic and time they have been in action. Reacher Gilt is in charge and the money still flows, and somehow any rival companies fail. The Patrician wants the clacks to work better, but it’s private property.

Forced into the taking on the role of Postmaster, Lipvig uses his skills as a showman to promote the post office. When the clacks goes down he does a high-profile high-speed ride twenty miles to the next city. He also invents stamps, which go through several decades of development in about a week, the classic Discworld rate of progress when roundworld ideas appear. Going head to head with the clacks in a competition brings out his competitive spirit, and also brings him to meet Miss Dearheart, with whom he begins to start to feel romance… and also guilt.

There’s some good jokes, a bit about a weird machine that gets dropped and a strong theme of second chances and coming back from the dead.

Read This: Pratchett circles back to a new/old institution of Ankh-Morpork, taking the chance to examine communication and fraud
Don’t Read This: The only thing worse than reading about the mail is doing so in a “comic” “fantasy” setting.