Strong Recommend: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

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Hello, welcome to Strong Message Here.

Strong Recommend, Cultural Recommendations for the Dying Summer and a Look at Their Impact on Language.

I am Amanda Nucci.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And for our final episode, what have you brought in?

You brought in a book?

I have, and I've gone back with an old favourite because over the summer I like to treat myself to doing some light rereading.

And I have reread Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

And Terry Pratchett is, along with Jane Austen, my favourite author.

Do you know so many people have told me you must read Terry Pratchett?

You must.

read.

I haven't.

Because you're a renegade.

You won't be dictated to.

He's on my list.

There's just so much I still haven't read that I must read.

But I think he's probably the finest comic novelist of the 20th century.

People are saying Prince because he's funny.

And I think

people underrate him because he's a fantasy author and they see the swords and the sandals.

And particularly the early covers, they had a cover artist called Josh Kirby, who did sort of big-breasted maidens in chainmail.

And I think a lot of people thought, yeah, this is not for me.

Yes, I hope that wasn't why people were recommending it to me as like, you'll enjoy this.

No, he's just the funniest writer.

And I think you'd like him because you love Dickens, because the characters are so funny and rounded.

In it,

the Yank Moorport series, which is about this sort of city that's industrialising, there's the Unseen University, which is a great parody of every slightly irritating bureaucratic organisation that you will ever been.

Not saying that in any way it resembles the BBC.

Oh, no.

Mr.

Dickens had circumlocution office in Little Dorrit.

Right.

But it's got that.

The legislation went to die.

And they have the Arch-Chancellor of it.

The Arch-Chancellors keep dying in magical accidents, except for Ridcully, who just sort of shouts at things to get things done.

He's a sort of

Jeremy Clarkson kind of vibe where he's just sort of bellows at stuff.

But that sort of means he's immune to sort of dying, like in ways that sort of smarter people would.

Anyway, going postal, lots of the middle section of Terry Pratchett's career is concerned with changing technology.

And so in this one, the background to it is that someone has invented the Clax, which is basically a semaphore transmission system.

And for the first time, you can now convey information across places.

A sort of web, as it were.

Exactly.

It's like an early internet.

And this has changed how fast information goes.

It's been taken over by Rongans, who have worked the Clax towers to the bone, essentially, and

a kind of exactly sort of like venture capitalist, who's asset stripping this.

Anyway, the patrician, who is the benevolent dictator, who's called Vetinari, because it's based on the Medici, it's one of those Terry Pratchett jokes, decides that he's going to get a condemned con man essentially to run the post office, which has fallen into disrepair many years before

on the basis that who better than a con man

to give people the idea that this kind of old, outdated thing can kind of work.

You see, the post office would have had a, I think, a more convincing case if they'd said under examination, you see, what we were doing was trying to echo Terry Pratchett's writing with the way we performed in how we oversaw.

I think more people would have...

It would have been more convincing than the explanation they actually offered.

So, Terry Pratchett is obsessed in lots of them with story, like the power of stories, how stories want to be told and how powerful words are.

And so, there's a whole bit where they go into the old post office building, which is beautiful, high-ceilinged kind of thing, and it's filled with unsent letters which start whispering to the main character because they want to be sent.

You know, they want to be heard and they kind of bend reality around themselves.

I just thought that's such a kind of.

Well, that's it.

I'm going to go out.

How many?

There's loads of them, aren't there?

Oh, yeah, I mean, two dozen or more.

I think you can start anywhere.

I started with Mort,

which is the fourth one, which is essentially the premise of which is that death gets an apprentice who's called Mort.

But

the two strands of them that I love the most is one, the Ankh Morpork City Watch ones, and then there's ones with Witches with Granny Weatherwax.

So either of those series, I would say, I think I would, knowing you, I would start with Guard's Guards, which is the first of the Ankh Morpor ones.

But you could, I think you could read this one.

And Glowing Postal is where in that kind of

mythology or chronology or later on.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, a bit later on.

Can I read you a couple of quotes that will give you an idea?

And then you can tell me whether or not you think this is funny.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government, apart from, say, the average voter?

I just thought that was very, like, that's sort of very trumpy.

It's a rights itself.

Very trumpy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's this really beautiful idea in it, which is that the bad people who take over the clacks, one of the things that they do is they murder one of the workers to cover up some of the bad stuff that's happening.

And the people who work on the clacks decide that someone never really dies until their name isn't spoken anymore.

So they're going to send his name up and down the clacks with this code in front of it, GNU.

And when Terry Pratchett died, people decided they would do the same thing, GNU, Terry Pratchett, and write it into the website code.

So that his name would always be lingering and this kind of ghost of it on the web, which I just think is really beautiful.

I think you're right about a world of fantasy and myth that's never really regarded in terms terms of people who assess what is proper literature or proper art.

It's the same with sci-fi.

It's the same with comedy.

You know, these things are seen as entertainments and therefore not as

serious.

Right, but I think if you love Uriah Heap and you love Mrs.

Jelleby, you will find characters like that in Pratchett.

I think it is an Ormando show.

No, you know, I've probably, probably for the last 30 or 40 years, I've had people tell me that I must return to the channel.

And you just

don't know.

And

I've not tried to avoid it.

I've just thought, yes, I should, I suppose.

But now you've gone and done it, so I will go out.

And what's the one I should start with?

You could start with Guards Guard.

You could start with going postal.

I think you

believe in you being able to get the backstory.

But I think the Bianch Morport ones, I think, would be very interesting to you because they are about technological information.

They're about a medieval city becoming industrialised.

That's the backdrop to them.

But they also, I just think, I love recommending these novels to people because they read themselves.

You will read them in a day.

And there's loads of them.

Imagine the joy of just being like, there's all these books that are amazing, and it's not there's three of them, there's like 20 of them.

I think it's amazing.

Fantastic.

Oh, great.

Well, I will.

I'll do that.

Okay, sold.

So, you may well have partially changed my life.

Yeah, I don't think I was going to get you into Elden Ring, but I think Terry Pratchett, I think I might have finally succeeded on.

That's our last recommendation for the summer, going posted by Terry Pratchett, and indeed all of Terry Pratchett.

We will be back next week with the full fat version of the show.

Strong message here

will be here.

Until then, it's goodbye for myself.

I'm Adinucci.

And it's goodbye from me, Helen Lewis.

And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Science.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

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Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

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