'Going Postal' by Terry Pratchett

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 Belle Dearhart would be nice, too.

As a heatwave sweeps the world (or at least the UK), I thought it would be a great idea to read one of Terry Pratchett's novels, it being far too hot to read anything heavy. Pratchett's Discworld is brilliant; his imagination is a gift to readers in that it is to be marvelled at. His ability to create such a vast and perplexing universe is astounding; his Discworld is vibrant, busy, and densely populated with everything from detective werewolves to brawling drunks who are actually organised.

I can't believe it's taken me this long to read Going Postal. I have read The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Mort, Wyrd Sisters, and Maskerade; don't worry, I'm not a complete neophyte, though neither am I yet a fully-fledged Pratchettan (?). 

Departing slightly from his focus on several groups of characters, Going Postal gives Moist von Lipwig (pronounced "v", not "w") exactly what he needs most - a stage. Moist is saved from hanging, while his aliases regrettably all die, by the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork Lord Havelock Vetinari, a man as cool as a block of ice and just as capable of ensuring a man's death. Not your typical guardian angel, yet that is what Vetinari is to Moist, offering him the task of reviving the city's post office in the face of the new (and apparently faulty) clacks system. The Post Office is crumbling to dust, literally: the letters lie heaped in piles, so much so that Moist cannot locate his office, while the letters on the front of the building declare that "NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLO M OF NI  T CAN STAY THESE MES ENGERS ABO T THEIR DUTY". Yet, this seemingly abandoned building is not actually abandoned. Junior Postman Groat is the hypochondriac elder in charge of reading the post office regulations to the letters, while Stanley inclines (probably in a phototropic way) towards a mania about pins. Moist is deterred from running away at every point by his parole officer, a Vetinari-appointed golem who goes by the name of Mr Pump. Pump has a fondness for capitalisation, a work ethic like no other, and possesses that which Moist seems to have misplaced - a moral compass. The other characters to watch out for are Reacher Guilt, the horrifying image of what Moist could become and as evil as his long hair, eyepatch, and cockatoo might suggest, and Adora Belle Dearhart; she can see right through you, once she's got past all her cigarette smoke.

Pratchett has taken a contemporary situation - how the post office competes with emails (although the fact that 'clacks' rhymes with 'fax' had me confused for a second). Yet, despite the fact that the letters want to be delivered, so badly that they send Moist into a hallucinatory state, this is not a book about how to build a fully-functional post office (although the reader does witness the invention of stamps). This book is about power, corruption within the government, and hope, 'the curse of humanity'.Going Postal is a social commentary like no other: fast-paced, witty, and gripping.

The genius and humour of this novel is bound up, sealed and stamped in this idea: people who work for Ankh-Morpork's postal service are thought to be mad, whereas successful people who work for Ankh-Morpork's government are not thought to be con artists.