In the first half of the first chapter of Going Postal<\/i>, our hero dies. I think. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Book #33, Discworld<\/i> friends! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.<\/p>\n
The Nine-Thousand-Year Prologue<\/b><\/p>\n
Hi, what<\/i>? Who the hell is Anghammarad??? I am certain I have never come across this character or the dead ships. Is this like\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a god on the Discworld associated with shipwrecks? So, I am wondering how this first prologue relates to the second one. An anchor dropped? From what<\/i>?\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The One-Month Prologue<\/b><\/p>\n I guess I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really notice this in the greater sense, but wow, the Discworld has progressed a lot<\/i> since the beginning of the series, hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? Like, the introduction of the clacks was a big deal, but now the clacks are being updated themselves<\/i>? We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve also seen the introduction of journalism as well, and the Night Watch books are full of evidence of how this culture has progressed from what it used to be. I know that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a huge revelation or unique take on this (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clearly supposed to be intentional), but this second prologue had me reflecting on this. (It also made me laugh because my agent HATES prologues and the idea of a book starting with TWO of them is just exceptionally funny to me.)\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 what actually happened here? The anchor imagery was clearly intentional, but what does this have to do with a clacks tower? Did that young man die? What the FUCK is going on?<\/p>\n Our Hero Dies<\/b><\/p>\n I am not used to Discworld <\/i>books with prologues, with chapters, and with those weird summaries like the one we get at the start. (Do they have a name<\/i>? I recognize them as a staple of a lot of fantasy books and classic literature.) It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also an odd thing to experience specifically in this context: I knew a bunch of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spoilers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for this chapter before I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d even read a word of it. But I can also recognize how much this is used to toy with the reader. Once I read, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our hero dies,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sure if this was truth. What I expected<\/i> was for Pratchett to make fun of this or to use it as a red herring. But Going Postal<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first chapter opens with the promise of death: Moist von Lipwig is going to hang for theft. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stated multiple times, and yet, half the tension here is seeing whether that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to happen.<\/p>\n The rest of it is achieved through the unknown. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really know what it was that Moist stole or its value; we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how he got caught and put in prison; we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know all that much about him period<\/i>. I figured that he was a con man of sorts, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the reasons why he assumed he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d find a way out of all of this. He was Alfred Spangler in this version of himself; he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d figure out a method of sliding into a new identity, right?\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Except this is Ankh-Morpork, and it sounds like he may have escaped other<\/i> cities, but not this one. The Patrician\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presence is distant, but it still impacts what happens here. In Vetinari\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s city, no one gets past him unless he wants<\/i> them to. Thus, everything in this chapter feels like Moist got every<\/i> expectation of his thwarted. He thought he was going to escape from his cell, only to learn it provided entertainment for the guards. (Vetinari\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s influence.) Then, he expected to be saved at the last minute by<\/i> Vetinari, only to learn that Vetinari was impatient because Moist hadn’t<\/i> been executed yet.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so very surreal, and it makes for a bold opening to Going Postal<\/i>. We meet a character who desperately does not<\/i> want to die, who has managed to get out of every predicament he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been in so far, and before the first chapter is over, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s executed. Now, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if Pratchett is toying with me, if there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some clever technicality within the text that means it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually<\/i> happen, but y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I think he did it. I think he executed one of his protagonists IN THE FIRST FIFTEEN PAGES OF THE BOOK. What the fuck<\/i>, you know? What a bold opening! I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t expect that this is the last we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see of Moist, but I also don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand how the story can continue from here. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dead<\/i>. I think??? I mean, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look past that the text says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Alfred Spangler died,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Moist von Lipwig died.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Those are two very<\/i> different statements.<\/p>\n STILL DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T KNOW WHAT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S GOING ON.<\/p>\n https:\/\/youtu.be\/eL2uHTnM8xk<\/p>\n Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n – My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now out in the world!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the first half of the first chapter of Going Postal, our hero dies. I think. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[553,463,248],"class_list":["post-4697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-going-postal","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}