eating cucumbers without permission...

I was surprised this week to find myself reading two books about con men.

I’d pegged Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Warrior’s Apprentice” as a kind of space-opera “Sword in the Stone”; and Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” promised to be a dull tract on mail delivery systems, or near enough¹. Thus my surprise — my happy surprise — when the books proved remarkably similar to each other, and remarkably different than what I’d expected.

1: The qualification “for a given value of ‘near’” would seem apt in context.

Lois McMaster Bujold was the author whom I discovered a few weeks ago has won more Hugo awards for best novel than anyone else in the last thirty years. It’s a bit sad that I’d never noticed her before, given that her first novel came out when I was two years old.

The title “The Warrior’s Apprentice” reminded me of my wasted youth reading books like “Magician”, where bright-eyed young men go off to war, inexplicably develop fantastic fighting skills, and turn the tide of battle all on their own. A short way in, and it seemed I was right: young Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, struggling with his stunted growth and brittle bones, was taking the exam to enter Imperial military service. Afterwards, it seemed obvious that he’d struggle with his less-intelligent classmates — I’m thinking “Ender’s Game”, here — before leading them to victory against something or other.

So it was delightful, simply delightful, when he broke both of his legs, failing the entrance exam.

After heading off, disheartened, to visit his grandmother, an ill-advised impulse to get a pilot out of trouble quickly pulls him into a few little white lies. And for the rest of the book, he moves from crisis to crisis, his lies becoming more and more ridiculous as his charade becomes more and more elaborate. It really is a little too unbelievable, no matter how much fun. Surely somebody would call his bluff?

The central characters have sufficient depth to be interesting, if not realistic. The constant chain of crises helps with this, strangely enough, as there’s simply no time for introspection. What little that is revealed is like a tantalizing hint: they’re deep, really, but let’s wait until after the battle to talk about it.

“Going Postal” follows a similar pattern: it starts with a little lie, just a little con, which quickly spirals out of control. Unlike Miles Vorkosigan, though, Moist von Lipwig really is a con man. He doesn’t get into it out of misguided altruism: when he’s appointed by Lord Vetinari as the new Postmaster, he’s stuck between a golem and a hard place.

Now he’s got to deal with big business and corporate pirates (complete with parrots: “Twelve and a half percent!”); the crackers, steampunk phreakers on the clacks; the strange brotherhood of the post-office; and, of course, the freakish world of obsessive philatelists. Like so many of the Discworld books, it’s the background that makes it really worth reading: the plot is just the string to tie it all together.

Both are highly recommended.