So. Moist von Lipwig, formerly Albert Spangler/various other aliases, never kills people so he can’t really be all that bad, lovable rogue, right?
In a surface kind of way, yes, but an essential part of the Lovable Rogue is in never having to face consequences, and Going Postal starts with Lipwig being hanged for his crimes of embezzling, forgery, theft, confidence trickstery and various others. And that’s only the beginning.
Let me preface this with the fact that I love Moist as a character, and boy am I aware that he goes through character development, but he is by no means a good person at the start of the book, or even necessarily by the end. He’s definitely still a criminal in both cases, by the end it just happens that Vetinari is holding onto his leash and that Moist has made a moral decision.
He feels completely justified in committing the crimes he does, because everyone is dishonest, right? Anyway they’re all trying to trick him! And he never faces any consequences, because he’s always on the run to escape them, whether he’s aware of it or not, and so he believe that there aren’t any consequences - because he’s not there when they occur. After all, he’s mostly fooling other crooks, so it’s not like good and/or honest people ever feel the repercussions.
Except then he meets an angel. Or, as it turns out, several angels. While being possessed by the Letters/Spirit of the Post, he apparently says that ‘angel is just an old word for messenger,’ and I think I know Pratchett well enough by now so I can say that isn’t in there by coincidence. After all, the book is full of messengers and the delivery of messages (in the form of the old postmen, golems, various others) and many characters are referred to as being angels numerous times (notably Stanley, Vetinari and Adora Belle Dearheart) and enough parallels are drawn between Adora and the golems, particularly Anghammarad and Mr. Pump) that the two words should be taken to mean pretty much the same in thing the context.
Vetinari remarks that you only ever get one angel, but maybe it arrives in a dozen or more people. Except these are far from being particularly nice ones - what they all do, in their own way, is to force Moist to recognize that all his actions have consequences. They very nearly march up in a line and say, ‘Look, son, you’ve messed up really bad, okay? I mean, just look at what you’ve caused, LOOK at it! What, you didn’t know it was there? Buddy, do you think that means it don’t exist?’
“Do you understand what I’m saying?“
shouted Moist. “You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why Not? You Do.” The golem lowered his arm.
“What?” snapped Moist. “I do not! Who told you that?”
“I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People,” said the golem calmly.
“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”
“No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
…Holy shit, Pratchett is not messing around. Because yeah, the Lovable Rogue is a fun character to read about. But does that mean he isn’t immoral as hell? Nope.
All throughout the first half or so of the book, Moist is convinced that he’s gonna turn around and trick everyone, up to and including Vetinari himself. He thinks pretty nasty and derogatory thoughts about the people around him such as Stanley, or Mr. Groat, or Mr. Pump, clearly blaming them for being stuck working for Vetinari when he thought his troubles would be over once he was hanged, even as he puts on his conman face and charms all of them (except Pump and probably Adora), because it benefits him and because he thinks he’s smarter than them and because it’s fun. But he never quite gets away with anything any more. He thinks he’ll win against the Brotherhood of Postmen, but he gets pretty banged up doing it. He makes plans to have Mr. Pump killed smashed up* or use his day off to escape, but when he has the chance he’s busy with Adora, along with the small matter of the Post Office being in cinders. It’s a clear contrast with how he later thinks about how he actually likes the printers working at Teemer & Spools, or the Smoking Gnu, simply because they’re decent people good at their jobs.
*Because even though he’s never killed anyone, he doesn’t think of golems as people.
Then along comes Adora, and it turns out he, personally, messed up her life by defrauding the bank she worked at, further adding to her family’s struggle when the Grand Trunk gets stolen and her brother is murdered. And when he challenges Reacher Gilt and the clacks companies, the Post Office gets burned down, the piles of letters destroyed, Mr. Groat is left seriously injured and the golem Anghammarad dead - it’s other people who suffer, not him.
Hello, Moist. Meet Consequences. They’ve been trying to catch up with you for a while.
I like to think Moist’s internal narration gets less condescending* at that point, because there is definitely a difference between the Moist who went out to eat with Adora and the Moist who still tries to keep the Post Office running in a blackened, burnt shell of a building. When he meets Reacher Gilt for the first time at Le Foie Heureux, he realizes how much better Gilt is compared to him and wishes they weren’t pitted against each other, just so he could learn how to be an even better** conman from him, even while knowing Adora hates him enough to want to kill him and that Gilt pirated the Grand Trunk and is out to destroy the Post Office. But later he thinks to himself:
“I’ll kill you, Mr. Gilt. I’ll kill you in our special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. I’ll take away everything but your life. I’ll take away your money, your reputation and your friends. I’ll spin words around you until you’re cocooned in them. I’ll leave you nothing, not even hope.”
Talk about a sharp turnaround. And here Moist acknowledges the similarities between them, even though an easy-to-reach disclaimer could be included such as ‘but I never kill people.’ There has been an ongoing contrast between Havelock Vetinari, Moist von Lipwig, and Reacher Gilt throughout the book, particularly in Vetinari’s and Gilt’s definition of ‘freedom’. Gilt claims that property is the foundation of freedom, and Adora points out that ‘when [he] talks about freedom, he means his, not anyone else’s.’ Meanwhile, Vetinari:
“And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”
And what Vetinari largely does is force consequences upon Moist, and later Gilt - forces them to live with freedom in its entirety, not just the bits they like. The easy answer may be to kill them, but that is not consequences as such, as much as a permanent end to them. And in doing this he forces Moist to face up to everything he has done and how it has hurt people. And being stuck between these two masterful conmen, Moist realizes how short the slippery slope may have been for him to turn into just yet another Gilt: A conman with style, but a bully and a murderer all the same. Which is why he essentially uses all his genius in that field to defeat Gilt, because that’s the only way he can be defeated, not because it’s noble or heroic, but because he’s stuck: He’s been forced to look at all the people he’s defrauded and swindled, and now that he can’t look away he doesn’t want to see it happen to them again. He may be a bastard of a trickster, but he can chose to not be that bastard.
But Vetinari! You may ask. He manipulates and controls and has people killed all the time. It’s practically his job! Well, yeah. He’s incredibly good at it, he’s LEAGUES ahead of both Moist and Gilt, but the funny thing is that he does it entirely for the benefit of the city. He could be a one-man reign of terror over the entire continent, but as he confides in Unseen Academicals:
“[…] And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
And just in case you think he’s nothing but talk, remember that when his arrest was ordered in Jingo, he let himself be arrested. Sure, in the end he got away with it, but he took the consequences. Just letting himself be arrested probably changed the poltical landscape of the Circle Sea and Uberwald permanently. Because without consequences, freedom is meaningless.
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