Going Postal

I forgot yesterday to write about finishing Going Postal, which was the first time since…well, about 1991 that I read one of the Discworld books out of order (not counting re-reading). And that’s only because I got in into my had that I’d already read it before I read Making Money, for some reason. Rather wish I’d read them in the proper order, too, for of the two rather samey Von Lipwig books, Going Postal is far better. Its final turn is a little weak, building itself up to be a devastatingly clever and unpredictable twist, only to be a rather simple and ineffective one…and the problem of the backlog of letters was dealt with in a rather unsatisfactory way. Otherwise, though, it was much more interesting, introducing clever new ideas, centring on more interesting characters and having an antagonist who actually seems a threat, which was rather the problem with Making Money.

Perhaps more so than other Pratchett books I’ve read recently, there seemed to be a bit more of the old acerbic venom of his older books, a little shade of anger, and not just always been a loveable old eccentric. I enjoy Pratchett when he’s cleverly distorting real-world, usually very English, institutions. And the Von Lipwig books seem to exist to focus on those – the postal service vs the Internet, the concept of currency, and the cult of celebrity. The man is very clever and has been the one novelist I’ve consistently followed since I was eight or nine years old, and I’ve either read or possess in order to read shortly, every novel he’s ever read. I can’t even say that for Nabokov or Tolkien.