I don't think MM is as bad as many of its detractors say it is. There are some great things to it. The scenes with Harry King are great. Moist's verbal spars with Vetinari reveal a lot about both men. Moist's "confession" of his past during the hearing is a great moment of narrative relief. And Mr. Bent is one of Pterry's best "pseudo-adversaries," a truly tragic figure whose narrative resolution may be the most satisfying this in the book.
But there are a lot of weaknesses to it. For one thing, the plot really is in some ways a rehash of Going Postal. Moist gets assigned by Vetinari to shake up a moribund institution and introduced an innovative, paper-based solution that helps grease the wheels of commerce. He faces enemies who are out to destroy him, although Cosmo Lavish is nowhere near the kind of threat that Reacher Gilt was.
There's also a lot of padding here. Way too much time spent on Cribbins and Pucci and the whole Cosmo-becomes-Vetinari subplot is weak And the pages spent on Moist and Spike getting the golem arm from the magic machine is pure tedium. One thing you can usuall count on in Pterry's books is that there's very little narrative fat--nearly every scene that's in the story needs to be there. For me, this is the first DW books with completely unncessary scenes, such as those mentioned above.
I think the biggest problem is that Moist doesn't really solve his own dilemma. Were it not for the deus-ex-machina appearance of Mr. Bent in his clown getup, Moist would almost surely have been hanged for stealing the gold. There was no logical way he could have gotten out of this predicament.
But I don't see the main narrative being a Moist-vs. Vetinari battle where Moist wins. Vetinari knew the "golden secret," but as Patrician he himself couldn't "order" the golems to do anything because that would have been treated as an act of war by the other cities (and quite possibly by the guilds). Vetinari needed Moist to do the things that he himself could not do to move the city forward. And he did it by giving Moist the opportunity to once again face life or death situations--the very thing that Moist thrives on. He manipulated Moist every step of the way, and gave him latitude because he knew that Moist was not the kind of man who would take advantage of an opportunity to grab violent power (i.e., the control of thousands of golem) and in fact would do his best to use his skills to mediate that threat. Now, Vetinari might not have anticipated every step Moist would take to achieve his ends (bribing Professor Fleed to provide an Umnian phrasebook, for example), but he could anticipate the outcome of Moist's actions, which he knew generally aligned with his own means.
But there are a lot of weaknesses to it. For one thing, the plot really is in some ways a rehash of Going Postal. Moist gets assigned by Vetinari to shake up a moribund institution and introduced an innovative, paper-based solution that helps grease the wheels of commerce. He faces enemies who are out to destroy him, although Cosmo Lavish is nowhere near the kind of threat that Reacher Gilt was.
There's also a lot of padding here. Way too much time spent on Cribbins and Pucci and the whole Cosmo-becomes-Vetinari subplot is weak And the pages spent on Moist and Spike getting the golem arm from the magic machine is pure tedium. One thing you can usuall count on in Pterry's books is that there's very little narrative fat--nearly every scene that's in the story needs to be there. For me, this is the first DW books with completely unncessary scenes, such as those mentioned above.
I think the biggest problem is that Moist doesn't really solve his own dilemma. Were it not for the deus-ex-machina appearance of Mr. Bent in his clown getup, Moist would almost surely have been hanged for stealing the gold. There was no logical way he could have gotten out of this predicament.
But I don't see the main narrative being a Moist-vs. Vetinari battle where Moist wins. Vetinari knew the "golden secret," but as Patrician he himself couldn't "order" the golems to do anything because that would have been treated as an act of war by the other cities (and quite possibly by the guilds). Vetinari needed Moist to do the things that he himself could not do to move the city forward. And he did it by giving Moist the opportunity to once again face life or death situations--the very thing that Moist thrives on. He manipulated Moist every step of the way, and gave him latitude because he knew that Moist was not the kind of man who would take advantage of an opportunity to grab violent power (i.e., the control of thousands of golem) and in fact would do his best to use his skills to mediate that threat. Now, Vetinari might not have anticipated every step Moist would take to achieve his ends (bribing Professor Fleed to provide an Umnian phrasebook, for example), but he could anticipate the outcome of Moist's actions, which he knew generally aligned with his own means.
