Review of the Von Lipwig arc

Hello readers

So, last year I was participating in the Turtle Recall challenge organised by «A dance with books» (which I’ll do again this year as I mention here), and last year the idea was to go through the Moist von Lipwig trilogy. I really had every intention of doing this, but I’m usualy a disaster following calendars and I lagged behind, so I ended up finishing the last book at the beginning of this year instead of November of last year.

But anyway… I did finish, if a little late, and now I’ve come to talk about this amazing trilogy. In retrospect, I probably should’ve read a few other Discworld novels in between, because I was making huge jumps with each book, so I kept on getting spoilers for things that happened in other books that apparently are important, and I was a little lost sometimes. It’s no big deal, you can still read them and enjoy them, and I’ve been reading Discworld in disorder ever since I began, so I’m kinda used to it. I’ve promised myself that one day, I’ll eventually reread the whole thing in the proper order.

‘Going Postal‘ by Terry Pratchett: 4/5 stars

I’ll be honest with you guys, I have’t read a Pratchett book in at least a year, as much as I love him, sometimes I stray away for too long and it feels fantastic to go back to Discworld, this story was great. Even though these three books are considered a Moist von Lipwig trilogy, truth be told they are part of the whole Industrial Revolution saga, that spans all the way back from ‘Moving Pictures’, but for the sake of argument, we’ll just talk about those where Lipwig is a main character. Seeing the post reviving little by little in the hands of a con artist felt like the true spirit of Ankh-Morpork, because of course, who better to run a government establishment than a criminal? Gotta give it to Vetinari, he does know how to keep the city running and businesses working for the city.

And getting to know Moist was fantastic, he’s quite cynical and not a nice guy, but he’ll get the job done all right, with improvements and all, improvements that a good honest man probably wouldn’t have come up with so quickly. The fact that the post also seems to be alive was something, I know this is not the first time innanimate objects come alive in Discworld, but it’s funny to see the letters coming alive and wanting to be delivered. And I love that we have Golems here, they’re one of my favourite Discworld characters. Knowing there is also a movie about this kinda makes me want to see it, but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, so there’s a lot of researching to do.

‘Making Money‘ by Terry Pratchett: 4/5 stars

Who would’ve thought you could have a fantasy book about the banking system, right? I mean banking is such a serious subject… all those taxes, and percentages, and yet Pratchett manages to make it so much fun, and include assasins, golems, and dogs, because why not?

This is one of the Discworld books I had been putting off for a while because I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, there are a few that just feel odd, my brain kept thinking that a book about a bank would not be highly interesting, but I was totally wrong about this, and I did have lots of fun. Moist is one of those characters you just have to love, he’s so cynical and yet so efficient, and he’s so good with words that he could convince everyone to eat dirt if it came to that. He is given the task of make the bank of Ankh-Morpork work, since he did wonders with the Post Office, but this time he’ll have to deal with the Lavishes, a family that has run the bank at their will for years.

And mixed with the plot of the bank we have another golem plot, there’s been lots of golems in the novels ever since I got to Feet of Clay, and since Moist is with Adora Belle all the time, golems kinda follow him around whether he likes it or not. And I didn’t expect this plot to go where it went, but it worked, both of them fused together as the book was coming to the end and it was nicely done. I also enjoyed seeing more of Vetinari here, he’s usually much in the back, except in the Watch books, so this interaction with Moist and the bankers was interesting to watch.

‘Raising Steam‘ by Terry Pratchett: 3/5 stars

This is the last book of the trilogy, but it also happened to be my least favourite. There’s many great things in this book, and as a whole is a great way to finish the Moist von Lipwig arc, but there were also many problems, and it took me a long while to get invested in the story, which is not very normal for a Pratchett. However, this was also one of the last books he wrote, he was already rather ill, and I don’t know if it’s me, but I can tell. I’ve been reading Pratchett for many years now, so I’m very used to how he tells stories.
The beginning felt a little disjointed here and there, it’s tiny things, things that didn’t happen in the previous books. He sets up the whole story, but there are some breaks where things felt missing somehow. Like one minute we were just thinking of investing in trains, and then suddenly we were already on its first journey, the transitions were happening extremely fast. For me, it took me almost 200 hundres pages before I was finally falling into rhytm with it, and that’s long for a Pratchett, since I’m usually hooked by page 50.

But after that rocky beginning, it does get amazing, this is the last book on the Industrial Revolution series, so I know it’s not just a von Lipwig trilogy, he just happens to be a main character here, we’ve been watching industrial advances since Moving Pictures. Knowing they’re coming so quickly to trains, and cars, and all the technology from our current society was rather impressive. And gods, the goblins, I’ve been reading Discworld in disorder, so I’m very lost on some things, and I don’t know when they started appearing in the series, because I just went ahead with Moist books and skipped a lot, but man are they impressive little things.

The only thingI woul’ve loved to see in this book too was the chapters. The previous two Moist books were written in chapters, which doesn’t regularly happen with Discworld, I think only the Tiffany Aching series is written like that as well, so I would’ve liked to see that consistency here as well.

Carol GF(c)

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