Making Money — Discworld #36 / Moist von Lipwig

The con man gets a new job

Moist von Lipwig has a problem most people would envy: he has succeeded. Having been hauled back from the gallows in Going Postal and set to work reviving Ankh-Morpork’s derelict Post Office, he has turned it into a roaring success — and now he is bored. The thrill is gone. He has taken to picking the locks on his own building at night just to feel alive. Lord Vetinari, the city’s coolly omniscient Patrician, notices, as Vetinari notices everything, and decides Moist needs a fresh challenge. He offers him the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and its attached Mint.

Making Money, the thirty-sixth Discworld novel and the second to star Moist von Lipwig, is Pratchett’s banking book, the natural sequel to his postal one. Where Going Postal satirised communications and monopolies, Making Money turns its attention to the strange, faith-based machinery of finance: what money actually is, why a coin or a piece of paper has value, and how the whole edifice rests on nothing more solid than confidence — which happens to be exactly Moist’s area of expertise.

A dog in charge of the bank

The setup is pure Pratchett farce. The bank’s majority shareholder, the formidable old Mrs Lavish, dies and leaves her controlling stake to her small, ill-tempered dog, Mr Fusspot — and leaves Mr Fusspot to Moist. This makes a dog the legal chairman of the bank and Moist its reluctant guardian, with the added incentive that the murderous Lavish family would very much like the dog to have an accident. Moist, a man who has never knowingly told the truth when a better lie was available, finds himself the most honest person in the building.

His big idea is paper money. The city runs on gold it does not have enough of; Moist proposes notes backed not by metal but by the city itself — by the simple shared agreement that the paper is worth something. It is a con, in a sense, the grandest he has ever pulled, except that this con is also exactly how real economies work. Pratchett has enormous fun with the revelation that modern finance is essentially a confidence trick that everyone has agreed to believe in, and that Moist, the reformed swindler, understands money’s true nature better than any banker.

Smart comedy about value

The satire is sharp and surprisingly educational. Through Moist’s scheming, Pratchett explains credit, currency, the gold standard, and the psychology of value more clearly and entertainingly than many a textbook. The running joke is that the only difference between a banker and a con artist is paperwork and respectability, and that the economy floats on collective belief. It is the same theme — that reality bends to the stories we agree to tell — that runs through so much of Discworld, here applied to the contents of your wallet.

Beneath the caper sits a subplot involving the golems, the tireless clay people of Ankh-Morpork, and a buried army of them that ties into the question of what truly underwrites a city’s wealth. There is a villain, the loathsome Cosmo Lavish, who covets Vetinari’s power and slowly, hilariously destroys himself trying to become him. The plotting is a touch looser than Going Postal, and Cosmo is more cartoon than menace, but the momentum rarely flags.

Where it sits in Discworld

Making Money is the second Moist von Lipwig novel, and it is best read after Going Postal, which introduces Moist, his fraught romance with the chain-smoking golem-rights activist Adora Belle Dearheart, and the late-period Ankh-Morpork that is rapidly modernising. The third Moist book, Raising Steam, follows. The novel sits within Pratchett’s “Ankh-Morpork industrial revolution” thread, alongside the later Watch books, charting a fantasy city dragging itself into something like modernity.

As an entry point it is decent but not ideal — Going Postal is the better starting place for Moist, and a stronger book overall. Making Money is the encore: slightly more familiar, still very enjoyable.

The craft and the heart

Moist von Lipwig is one of Pratchett’s most likeable late creations precisely because his redemption is never complete. He is good now, mostly, but he is good in the way a reformed thief is good — by choosing, daily, to point his considerable talents at something worthwhile while never quite losing the itch. Vetinari, meanwhile, gets some of his finest scenes, steering the whole affair with the serene patience of a man playing a game everyone else has only just realised they are in.

The Ankh-Morpork backdrop is, as ever, a star in its own right. The staff of the bank and Mint — the put-upon clerks, the eccentric Mr Bent who treats double-entry bookkeeping as a sacred calling, the city’s chancers and aristocrats — give Pratchett room for his trademark crowd of vivid minor figures. Mr Bent in particular, with his hidden past and his almost religious devotion to the ledger, becomes a small, surprisingly touching study in obsession and shame. As always, Pratchett’s affection for the clerks and functionaries who actually keep a city running shines through the satire of the powerful who take the credit.

It is a clever, breezy, warm-hearted comedy about confidence in every sense, and about the surprising truth that value is something we choose to believe in together. Not top-tier Discworld, but smart, funny, and genuinely illuminating about the money in your pocket.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A witty, clever caper that turns a reformed con man loose on banking, with Pratchett making the birth of paper money both hilarious and quietly profound.