the elderly Junior Postman Tolliver Groat and his young assistant, Stanley Howler, an obsessive for pins (i.e., a pinhead) and.

Pump, the golem (i.e., a clay robot that isn’t technically alive but is) who is his parole officer “It just goes to show you never know until you try.” “Third Ning Of The Shaving Of The Goat”Īs it turns out, Moist discovers a flair for getting the mail delivered by adapting his con-man skills to government work and gathers around himself an odd crew of odd individuals including: Lipwig, this morning you had no experience at all of being dead, and yet but for my intervention you would nevertheless have turned out to be extremely good at it,” said Lord Vetinari sharply. “Look,” said Moist, “I don’t know what’s happening here, but I don’t know anything about delivering post!” As long as he’s willing to resume his dying. And is informed that he is more than free to turn it down.

Where he is offered the job of Postmaster of the long-moribund Anhk-Morpork Post Office. Moist is being hanged for a wide variety of financial scams - indeed, it appears to the execution-watchers of the general public that the con man is dead - when the Patrician’s people hurry his body away so that, still alive (barely), Moist can meet quietly with Vetinari in his office. It’s just that Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Anhk-Morpork, makes him an offer and gives him a choice. Not that Moist - a con man by trade, and a very successful one - thinks of himself as angelic in terms of being kind-hearted or civic-minded or, well, honest in any sense of the word. Gryle as an example of the latter and the central character of the 2004 novel, Moist Van Lipwig, as an example of the former. Good and bad angels, if you include the banshee assassin Mr. And it’s also about angels, which is to say, messengers. Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, the 33rd book in his Discworld series, is about hope. A text or an email seems more certain to reach its recipient - unless a glitch happens or it ends in a junk folder or it gets deleted before it’s seen. Postal Service is nowadays, your letter is likely to get where it’s going - unless it gets lost on an errant truck or in a snowbank or stuck in a catalogue for another address. You compose your message and then commit it to a process that, you believe and hope, will end with it being read by the person to whom you are sending it.Īs beleaguered as the U.S. It’s the same sending a text or an email. When you think of it, sending a letter in the mail is a small act of hope.

Going postal discworld