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Moist von Lipwig is a con artist...
... and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet.
It's a tough decision.
But he's got to see that the mail gets through, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers' Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer.
Getting a date with Adora Bell Dearheart would be nice, too...
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This book follows the story of a con artist as he tries, with the flair of a natural showman, to get the Ankh-Morpork post office up and running against the competition: the clacks, semaphore towers which can send a message across country and next to no time, but are run by a bunch of money grabbers who don't care about the clacks themselves, only what the towers can do for them.
Old favourite discworld characters make small appearances. Vimes is seen, but not heard. Carrot and Angua pop in briefly for a chat, Colon loiters outside a building, the librarian is seen in the background. But the patrician....ahh...gotta love that man. Many of Ankh-Morpork's inhabitants seem to forget that he is actually a tyrant, and therefore doesn't have to justify himself to anyone. And there are the golems, and they always make me smile.
You've got the fantastic clash between the bad guy and the bad guy. The bad guy who really is a good guy, just not interested in honest work, and the bad guy who appears to do honest work, but really is a bad guy.
For long time fans of the series it's good to see a few old favourites back - it's been too long since we set foot inside the Unseen University, and even the Mended Drum gets a look in!
In addition, when I first picked it up and found that Pratchett was writing in chapters I was a little shocked, but they work really well, and it's amazing how well the brief summary at the start of each chapter tells you everything that happens, but really tells you nothing at all!
Highly recommended, can't wait for the next as always...
Just as the setting is familiar, the broad sweep of the story is one of the classic plots - likeable young hero takes on moribund organisation (the Post Office) and revives it while saving young heroine in distress. But within this classic framework, Pratchett follows his usual plan of introducing classic cliches only in order to parody and subvert them. The eventual success of the hero is better portrayed than usual - he does not have to use unusual ability or virtue, not win the loyalty of followers by improbable charisma; he does so by using his professional skills - which happen to be those of a con-man and cheat.
The quick-fire gags of the earlier books make very few appearances, but the more subtle humour which has grown up in the more recent books pervades it. One of the best books so far - though Night Watch must remain my favourite.
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