The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 140: Nation Pt. 2 (Trousers All The Way Down)

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 2 of our recap of “Nation”. Coconuts! Pineapples! Fish!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:An appropriately unhinged recap of Pretty Little Liars (Part 1) - YouTube THE Vampire Diaries Video - YouTube   Dimetrodon - WikipediaSave The Pacific Northwest Tree OctopusGospel of Mary - Wikipedia  And death shall have no dominion by Dylan Thomas - poets.org austentatious out of context - YouTube [You can also buy a couple of their shows to download here: https://www.austentatiousimpro.com/shop/]  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star - WikipediaGuns, Germs, and Steel - Wikipedia The Book of Household Management - Mrs. Isabella Beeton. Volume 1. - Ex-Classics (PDF)The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple - BBC News Society for Indecency to Naked Animals - Wikipedia  

I was just checking, I actually had a helicopter and my cloth watch. Okay. That's the most important part of the episode. So I watched three, I actually haven't finished the last one yet, but three very long videos, admittedly at 1.5 or 1.75 speed, explaining the intricacies of the plot of Pretty Little Liars, some of which I half watched with you when you were watching it for the, I think the first time. What an unhinged show. I'm so glad I didn't just go and watch it all, but I really enjoyed just hearing the story. I think I was built to hear stories around the campfire rather than watch television and films. I think that's

my problem. Sarah- I might have not been able to sleep last night and end up watching the whole first video also at like 1.5 speed, just like a two hour video. Unlike you, it made me really want to rewatch the show again. And I'm glad the first video got as far as the Halloween train episode because what a fucking episode of television that was. I think what it's made me want to do is pick out some of the ones he said like go and watch like the dollhouse ones. Oh, the dollhouse episode.

And the Halloween train ones. Yeah, and just watch those. But I never watched that long breakdown that inspired him like of the vampire diaries and I might as well because I've watched that some of that girls content before and that's pretty good. I really want to start making videos like that to be honest, but it's just I love you too. It's time I was gonna say like, it just reminded me of getting you to. I was going to say it just reminded me of getting you to explain the plot of the Game of Thrones last season to me in the pub. I was like, this is how I need to consume TV. I love reading. I love listening to stories. I'm just not very good at watching stuff unless it's very, very specifically my thing, like fucking good omens or something. Yeah. See, the knitting thing really helps with watching TV because it's exactly the

right amount of doing something else while watching. I cannot just sit and watch TV. I have a sickness. But I have found that I have to strike a balance between what I'm watching and the knitting project I'm doing. Like if I'm watching something very absorbing, the knitting project or something that needs you to pay a lot of attention, the knitting project needs to be something really simple. Emma P I'm this show is not interesting enough to make me pay attention. So I need the knitting to be slightly more complicated. So I don't completely zone out of this very dull show. Side note, I started supernatural. I'm only four episodes in I don't know when it gets good. I really hope it soon. Have you never watched it? I've never watched it before. I think I've made the pilot

part of the Holy Trinity of Tumblr. I know which is why I can't not have a chapter about it. And I therefore need to watch all 15 fucking seasons. It's's just not doing it for me yet. I don't think it's a bad show, it's just not clicking for me. I think partly because it gets less anthology as it goes on, but as it starts off it's very anthology and it's like the main characters are just a thing to get us into this mini horror movie every week and it's just like it's not a genre I'm into. Niamh The one that caught my interest most that I kind of watched over your shoulder is the Once Upon a Time. I thought that was quite fun looking.

Sarah Yeah, that's getting a chapter. Niamh I think the aesthetic got me. Sarah Yeah, Once Upon a Time is such a weird one because it was kind of low budget but very pretty for that. And then Disney were so heavily involved once they realised it was popular, there was like a weird season that was just promoting Frozen. Niamh – Gas leak season. Sarah – Yeah, it was a very gas leak season.

Niamh – Any news from the world of games or interesting nerdy whatsits? Sarah – Quite possibly, but I've been trying very hard to not be too online this week so… Niamh – Oh! Sarah – Personal news, no exciting public news because I've been trying very hard to not be too online this week. So, personal news, no exciting public news, because I've been trying to write and trying to wrestle one tree hill into some semblance of a chapter. Well, if they didn't manage it, I don't know how you're going to, but alright. I worked out why it's so long and so bad, and that's all I needed to bring the chapter together. Fantastic. That's amazing. And now supernatural.

And now 15 seasons of fucking supernatural. I reread the like, Sabriel books by Garth Nix over the last couple of weeks. That was fun. I don't think I'm familiar with them. No, tell me. Oh, they're great. Like fantasy, kind of young adulty, I would say. A young woman finds out she'd sort of... There's this wall and then on one side the world is very magical and on the other side the world is an amalgam of our world. And there's a girl raised on the one side of the wall, but she knows about the other side and discovers she's got to deal with necromancers and things. They're really good.

Cool. okay. I read them when I was younger and I decided to pick them up and reread them and they are great. I think Garth Nix has been on our sister podcast Pratchat. Oh, really? Our sister podcast? He is an Australian writer. Our upside down equivalent. Yes. Antipodean analog. Antithesis. I was about to say antithesis. They're not the antithesis. We're very similar podcasts.

Yeah, weirdly. They just spend the whole time going on about how bad the books are. Approaching Discworld podcasters. So which one of you is the Joanna and which one of you is the Frank? Terrible. All right. Do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to The True Shall Make You Fret, a podcast in which we're usually reading and

recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one a time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is part two of our discussion of Nation. Yay! Terry Pratchett book, but not one of the Discworld series. Note on spoilers before we crack on, we're a spoiler-like podcast. Heavy spoilers for the book Nation. However, we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series, past Unseen Academicals, which is the last Discworld book we did, and we will avoid any mention

of The Shepherd's Crown until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. Springing up a seemingly infinite corridor with the dust of our ancestors fast gaining on us. Beautiful. That was in this section, wasn't it? Yeah. Oh, thank God.

I'll tell us what happened in this section in a minute. Follow up. Follow up. Any of that? It was from listeners. Wonderful things from Discord. Locks Air pointed out that pelagic refers to the open ocean and is divided into various layers depending on depth and who's doing the dividing. Sondra Vogel pointed out there is a band called Grandfather Birds. I found that when I was trying to look up what a grandfather bird was. Yeah. From Newcastle upon Time, my family's stomping grounds.

Oh, there you go. We'll have to listen to them. We will. The synapsid you were thinking of with the sail, awesome pointed out, is the Demetrodon. Fuck yes. We'll link to a little thing about that. They're very cool. Don't windsurf on that either. Don't windsurf on a Demetrodon.

The archaeologists get very upset. And Melowen pointed out that tree octopi, octopods are a very well-known topic for... Who are you calling an octopus? A well-known topic for teaching media literacy and there's a whole website about saving the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. I fucking love that by the way. Oh my god. Can't believe we didn't know anything about that. Yeah, I'd never heard of this before.

Maybe discuss it more next week when I've had the time to look at it properly. Excellent find. Slash recognition. Sarah referring to Nation. It's a complicated book for fans of colour from colonised countries. It's a really, really white middle classclass book and it makes us deeply uncomfortable, particularly the ending which I won't say because we're not at the end yet. Funny, Jingo is relatable so was Small Gods. Even though we read it with one eye closed in case it was going to go sideways, but Nation is the one that makes us feel like biting. We all get along in admiration

of all of SCP's books until Nation and then it's like, oh no, the fans from the UK have no idea that we live in a different world and we've been fitting into theirs. Maybe they just assume since we assimilate we are the same. And thank you for that comment, Sarah, because that's just not a perspective we'd be able to bring to talking about a book like this. Please, please always feel welcome to send these in. And from that, let's continue talking about nation because we've got quite a lot of book left. What happened last week, Francine? Previously on Nation. Plague ravages England and a ship is turned around at port to fetch

the new king from far-flung lands. Many miles away, a cataclysmic wave wipes out the nation. One soul comes home without a shell and finds his island empty but for an aftermath we will not detail, and a pale girl whose peril on the sea suddenly turned to peril on the land. Mao and Daphne learn to communicate, eat some terrible scones, start a fire, eat some much better soup, welcome some other survivors from nearby islands and begin reckoning with their grief, belief and preconceptions. There's a thing with a pig, a heated conversation with a man of the gods and the background threat of raiders. And then our first section ends with a beginning, a woman is in labor. Yeah, it's again, we're not strictly tone policing as we talk about the book. No, I know, but I couldn't write about that in like the normal, a ragtag bunch of tsunami. Oh, fancy.

I've done it now. In this section, which starts at chapter six and ends at the end of chapter 10, inclusive. In chapter six, Daphne needs to learn about childbirth quickly. She sings and delivers while men wait in pace and interpret, and the baby cries. Two weeks later, Amora arriving to the island. Daphne's brewing beer and the duty is being stripped down as the nation rebuilds. Mal finds Judy slash Chekhov's cannon. He gets trouser lessons and Daphne gets a new skirt. When the women visit the men, Mal and Daphne can't help but laugh at their new looks. In chapter 7, Mal promises to bring up the last anchor for the God of Water. When he

dives, there's at least one more anchor in the coral, and calipers feature. Ataba's furious, and while he's caught in the tide, Mal faces down a shark. Meanwhile, on the cutty wren, Mr Black and the captain have received news of a dramatical tile wave, but continue heading towards the king. Not sure why that says dramatical. I'm going to blame. That's fine. Great for that one. Carry on. In chapter eight, Daphne chews and hears voices asking for Mal, who's sleeping aggressively.

While Marlow brings up the new anchors, Daphne learns that Lokahar has taken Mal, who is trapped in the place between. Daphne remembers her mother and needs to learn to die, and Mrs. Gergel sends her into the shadow. A drop falls. Daphne takes Mal in the right direction and shouts a battle cry. In chapter 9, a drop lands. Daphne can't quite remember, and she holds Mal while he sleeps. In the morning, Daphne asks questions and the grandmother's answer. They want Mal to roll away the stone. Daphne finds the cave and tells off the Grandfathers, and Mal wards off pantaloon birds with beer. Milo moves the stone with a crowbar, and Ataba, Mal and Daphne take Trouserman Lamplight into the cave. In Chapter 10, Grandfather Husks line up, turned around halfway through. Mal

remembers the story of the last big wave, sent by the gods. Paper Vine crackles as the cave goes down to a golden door. Godstone steps and statues lay beyond in a cave of history and sour air. Grandfather Dominoes fall and the trio run from the bone dust, out of the cave in time to find a new trouser man. Daphne knows the pistol bearing mutineer and when a Tarber attacks in a fury, a shot goes off. Grandfather Dominoes sounds like a fun variant of the normal game. But it's not. But it sounds like it's not.

Not fun at all. It's the least fun I've ever had playing dominoes. And I very rarely had any fun playing dominoes. It's not a fun game for me. And if you've never watched a bunch of elderly Spanish men play dominoes in a cafe, you have never seen dominoes played. It is fast. It is aggressive. It is just hypnotizing stuff. Clara- Incredible. Love it. I haven't seen it. Emma- My one travel tip of the day. Clara- Go to Barcelona. See the old man playing dominoes.

Emma- All right. Clara- Anyway, helicopter and nine cloth watch. Emma- Oh yeah. Any of those? Clara- Little red crabs jumping on fallen figs for helicopters. Cute. Yes. Okay. Not very helicopterist, but I like the image.

No, no, yeah. And for loincloth, obviously, it's Daphne's grass skirt. Of course, not the trousers. Not the trousers, no. That's too obvious. Of course. For the small trousers to go under the trousers. Trousers always wear down front. We can't have enough trousers. We'll get to that. Quotes, do small trousers to go under the trousers. Trousers are the way down front. We'll get

to that. Quotes, do you want to go first? Yeah, sure. So I think we've both done a similar thing here and kind of, well, I've split a quote. Mine is, this is after Pilu has been telling the story of Mal and the shark. Yes. Okay. Daphne realized that her hands were sweating. She had felt the shark brush past her. She had seen its terrible eye. She could draw a picture of its teeth. She had been there. She had seen it. Pilu's voice had shown it to her. And then skimming forward a few paragraphs, but Pilu had unfolded the

story of the shark like Mr. Griffith had preached. He had unfolded a picture in the air and then made it move. Was it true? Had it really happened like that? But how could it not be true now? They had been there. They had seen it. They had shared it." Big Pratchett vibes all over here. A, just lovely way of putting it. Love like a talented storyteller and describing it like this was really cool. Also though, obviously power of stories, power of narrative. Then you look at something like Rob Wilkins book and Mark's book on Tory Pratchett and hearing how important stories were to his life all the way through. I just love it. I think Pilu is a really fun character and the shark story... I'll dive into that a lot more later as well.

I have so many thoughts and feelings. Thoughts, feelings, yells. I have definitely not just let myself have two quotes because they're close enough together that I can say I've split it so I'm not reading out a whole page of text. That's fine, please. These are from when Daphne is in the shadow place with Mal. Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea. God, that's a good line. I should read that line to myself over and over again until I'm

rocking back and forwards. I do that a lot. And then the hymn, the battle cry of a hymn that Daphne summons up from Captain Roberts' Gospel of Mary Magdalene, those that perish in the sea, the sea shall not hold them. Though they be broken and scattered, they will be made whole. They will rise again on that morning clad in new raiment in ships of the firmament they will climb among the stars." Firmament. Firmament. Love a bit of firmament. And just, oh, what a moment. Is that a thing? Is that from the gospel? No. The gospel of Mary Madeleine is a very complicated subject to do with Naikamadi, which is where they found the Gnostic Gospels and that's something

I know because of Gilmore Girls. It's a whole thing I'm not going to go into. Okay, cool, cool, cool. But this is Pratchett's, is it? But this is Pratchett's. As far as I can tell, I did a lot of searching and the only origin I could find was Pratchett's, although from not searching specifically enough, the opening line shares some syntax with, and Death shall have no dominion, which is a gorgeous poem. Anyway, yeah, let's talk about characters. Okay, who's first? We've got Mal. Let me start with Mal.

Unsurprising, yes. Kind of our main guy, isn't he? He is our protagonist. A lot of the stuff he's going through with belief and grief I will unsurprisingly talk about later in the episode. He has some nice smaller moments as well. I think putting him with Pilou is a really great pairing. Yeah, I feel like he was very ungenerate.

I'm enjoying his practice kind of realistic depiction of Mao as being a little bit judgy teenage boyish. Yes. Like his internal descriptions of people are very, yeah, very that very arrogant in a way a lot of the time. And he's kind of learning to not be a dick as he goes along. Yeah. So I mean, there's nice simple moments like wanting to learn Trouserman from P.u and try the trousers on and it's nothing to do with wanting to talk to the girl. It would be nice to talk to her without asking you for words, but a little bit of that. And then you have this moment where he slightly, not far after that, he's really pushing Pilu with these questions, why aren't you feeling like

this? Why aren't you more angry? Why don't you feel like I do? Pilu eventually breaks down and cries. Then there's this great line, without knowing why, but also absolutely knowing down to his bones that it was the right thing to do, he put his arms around him as enormous shuddering sobs escape from Pilu, mixed with broken words and tangled in snot and tears. And Mao held him until he stopped shaking and the forest was given back to birdsong." And it's one of those great things Pratchett does where he gives you like a micro version of something and then sees someone take that lesson and do it in a macro way. So then he kind of learns not to push people and not to try and convince them to feel the way he does about the gods.

Jess Yes. And also shows you that, you know, he's pushed it, but he's not a dick. He makes someone cry. He's not going to double down on it. And he learns he sometimes needs to be the one to help hold people. You have to be more generous towards him than you would most characters because what a fucking trauma. But then you do get the reminder that everyone that has been through this trauma, a very similar trauma. Yeah. Yeah.

And you get that later with the argument with the tabba. Yeah. And the tabba is just as suffering and just as grieving. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, again, it takes Mal a minute to learn that. Speaking of the shark thing, actually, as well as just P. Lou's retelling of it. But Mal does it and it's the payoff from the story we heard in the first section

with Nahui telling him and it's a trick. And they're sort of asking him how he did it and how he knew when he's pulled back into the canoe and he says without quite being able to put words in it, he felt being mysterious and a bit dangerous was not a bad thing right now. And we get this so much in Pratchett, someone kind of building into their own myth and playing with it and using it. But it's really interesting to look at why Maud needs this kind of myth and mystery and the power it gives him. Because yes, it supports him, his leadership of the island, but he's not power hungry. He doesn't want to be the leader. He feels responsible and like he should be the leader. He feels responsible and like he should be the leader. It's very different.

Yeah. He needs people to listen to him. He doesn't want people to listen to him as much. He needs people to listen to him enough to get stuff done. Yeah. It's a responsibility he's shouldered, not something he's actually trying to get. It's very different from like the way Moist does his myth making or even Vimes kind of plays into some of the rumours about him. It's a lot more, well as I'm burdened with this I might as well cement it. He's not having a power struggle apart from with like to a lesser extent kind of a Tarber but it's not a- Niamh I was going to say like it might have been easy

for some characters to let a Tarber take over. Becuase he's the priest and he's knowledgeable. Yeah. But like, and I think there's a certain amount of this is my nation. Yeah. Like, even though the people have gone, I am the last nation. I'm not listening to the grandfathers yelling at me, but in my own way I am. I am the left of the nation. I am the left of the nation and I'm not just going to roll over. Although of course

Ataba's not trying to make it anything different if anything. he wants it restored to how it was quicker than Maal does in the sense of the God anchors. Yeah, I think that's the thing. It's not so much that I was trying to become a leader himself but he wants to be a very different sort of leader. Yeah, yeah, who's organizing God anchors and sacrifices not fields and irrigation. It's interesting that there's not a lot of discussion about you're too young to be doing this. Sarah No, there's not. Even though Mao has this

debatable manhood because he didn't get the ceremony after his time on Boy's Island. Niamh Yeah, it's very much we talk about preconceptions a lot. It seems that the preconception of you have only lived so many years thus you are not as wise as, or thus you are not as capable as this other person is not necessarily true. He's just showing that he can do this and the others people are like, okay. Niamh And I think also people are going through this trauma they've come to this place. They want to be led. They want to be looked after. They want to be held.

Jess Yeah, this is true. Including Mal. Including Mal. Poor Mal. He needs a hug. He gets one. He does. And he gets one from Daphne. He does. So speaking of Daphne, just one of my favourite project lines ever, very early in this section after she kicks Mal out so she can deliver the baby. Good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren't. I love the line Daphne thought, I'm learning

things. I hope I find out soon what they are. Sarah I like that she's just got this boundless interest in science and research. She immediately suggests testing which of the God anchors are the holiest by putting a fish on each one. Testing the beer with block, let's all go down to the strand and have a banana. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And bar bar black sheep. Oh, she's fantastic. You do get, again, very teenager moments of especially the whole like, oh, let's experiment with the God anchors. And then the realization that that's not appropriate

right now. Sorry. Okay. That's not what we're looking for, is it? Piddy Yep, never mind. Don't worry about it. Gabbis The moment with the grass skirt and A, it's really beautiful from the perspective of the unknown woman slowly coming back together by doing things for Daphne, putting the flower in her hair and making her the skirt. Piddy That's like we were talking about last time, the little acts of service that help you feel more yourself. Yeah, when you have someone to look

after in a way it makes life easier. Yeah, and she starts doing it slowly, doing her hair and making her these things and helping her fit in. And she puts this skirt on. This is rebellion! Obviously she wasn't going to take off her bodice or pantaloons or her stockings. There's no time to go totally mad. Heavens no. Very weatherwaxian. You've had to maintain standards. And then she realized she thought that last thought in her grandmother's voice and that becomes a really great thing throughout it. She's sort of catching herself

being her grandmother. Yeah, it's that picking a part of your internal monologue again, very witchy. Second third thoughts. Yeah, yeah. And of course the insistence on many petticoats. Of course. I just wash bits. As and when they become available. Oh, yes. Very much is abroad. Oh, and the line, if my horizon was any broader, it would have to be faltered in half. Certainly back to the panorama discussions and the obsession with horizons at this time in history, actually.

Yeah. And she gets more of these kind of internal struggle and monologue moments. She's debating how holding Mao as he sleeps and then sort of thinks, oh, that wouldn't be seemly and then realizes there's too much thinking, how much of a Daphne you're going to be. There's always an ermine tru looking over your shoulder. She's very not in her usual society, but there's this weird parallel of it because the women are suggesting she finds herself a husband. She'll find a good husband because she's really good at brewing beer and nudging her towards Mal with her grass skirt and flower and all that. It was like being in a Jane Austen novel with far less clothing. Which maybe, why don't we get more Jane Austen? You know, like Shakespeare,

you get all these modern adaptations and adaptations done in all sorts of different places. Why aren't we getting more of that with Jane Austen? Sarah- You get a certain amount. Ange- Oh, there's some. There's like a plueless- Sarah- A lot of rom-coms for Jane Austen-y. Ange- Yeah. But I want like using the text and just changing the location and the outfits and tweaking the context. Sarah- That'd be cool. I don't know if you've ever watched any Austen-tacious

Ange- I really want to go see them live. Sarah- improv group of- yeah, yeah. If they're nearby, we should go and see that together. Yes. That'd be good. It's an improv group that does like Austin-style stuff, by the way. Yeah, they improvise a Jane Austen novel. Yeah, yeah. I'll link to it, Cliff or two. But yeah, no, agreed, actually. Yeah, there should be... I'm not sure where you'd set them, I think is the problem. I'd just say if we can do it with Shakespeare, we can do it with Pride and Prejudice.

Yeah. Okay. Get on it. Right, cool. I'm going to do that next week. Instead of an episode, we're just going to have me doing Pride and Prejudice set in a working class cafe. Me just nodding encouragingly. I don't know the story very well. Anyway, God, no, sorry. So Daphne. Yes. story very well. Anyway, God, no, sorry. So Daphne, we get the full context of her history with grieving, which is such a tough read from this really young perspective. Oh, yeah. We were talking before we started that, good grief, that's a full on Sobs moment

with the two coffins and the baby and the, that was really hard to read. It's beautifully written but very hard to read. Jessi And then the bit about the butler as well. Sam Oh yeah and the demon drink and it's sort of her fault she's fired. She doesn't really understand any of it. She was just curious. Jessi And of course it isn't. Sam It's not her fault. Her grandmother. Jessi Yeah, would have pointed at something else.

How dare you do that in front of that lamp? Oh, yeah, just the, it left him crying in the straw with the horses trying to lick the tears off his face for the salt made me just fucking, oh, it wasn't a good week to be reading all of this. Oh, and again, towards the end of this section, another very, really good line. To save time, should we pretend we've had the argument and I've won? And she wants to go into the cave. Jess Absolutely. I feel like being backed up by the grandmothers is an excellent way to be.

Sam I like the really specific bits of confidence she gets here. Realizing that her boundless curiosity is not a problem. The way she's been taught is not a positive aspect of hers in the past. Yeah. It's kind of getting back in touch with the inner younger child there when her mother was still alive and she got to go to all the lectures that never left her, obviously. Obviously, it didn't like we hear about how she does little experiments with the dumb waiter in there. And tries to learn things from the kitchen maids. Anyway, moving on from Daphne, Milo,

Milo to Dan. Yes. Sarah Milo and Peeloo. But Milo first. Big, the oldest, who was head and shoulders taller than anyone Mao had ever seen. Immediately into that. But also I really, really love this trope. The big quiet one, small chatty one, big one, everything he says is actually quite chill and wise. Niamh Yeah, just that it takes a little bit longer to, or not even takes a little bit longer to decide what to say, just like not as many things are needed to be said. And especially

if you've got your sidekick of your brother who just say all the things. And if you're a big man, kind of helps you just got the imposition naturally. Yeah, when Atab is furious and telling him not to bring up the other godstones and he's very calmly just doing it. Milo gave him a long slow look and then kept on coming, his muscles moving like oiled coconuts under his skin. That's the line in the project, right? And then you have Pulu, the small, always rushing, hardly ever not smiling. Yes, always talking, always talking. What I like is that you bring in someone like Peele who speaks a certain amount of Trouserman and a lazier writer could use him as like

a sort of Babel fish thing. Like great, okay, here's a communication bridge now, we don't need to worry about this idea of language anymore. He doesn't and instead we get more sort of defamiliarisation stuff with Peele having this very narrow perspective on what he has seen because it's absolutely not from a Trouserman perspective. So we see a lot of things through his eyes, like yes, it comes from animals called cattle. And you get to see the maps and the charts and the... You get to see their significance in a slightly detached way, which is more fun. And again, as I was saying with the Tarva, he's another really good foil to Mal. It gives

Mal something to play off in a very different way. But because Mal wants to think through everything, process everything and is still processing, whereas Pee-Loo floated through life like a coconut on the ocean, always bobbing up. Jessi Yes. This little bit of description is what I was referring to mainly when I was saying like, Mal's being a bit of a dick, like when he says he's got a dog's brain in a boy's body or something like that. Just to like, yeah, not quite. The coconut bobbing off I like. But yes, you've got to remember a lot of the description is from his perspective.

Niamh And that's why it's a little bit mean in places. Emma Yes. And then after all of this and you get to see him at his best, at his most talented when he tells the story. Gabbard Yes, when he's telling the story of the shark thing. Jess Suddenly everybody was there. Gabbard He swam through words like a fish through

water. He painted pictures in the air with them. Jess You get to see a decent bit of that in The Last Hero, don't you? The importance of having a storyteller, having a bard, having somebody who's good at it like that. Gabbard Yeah. I think the clearest version of what the Pratchett does does in The Last Hero with the bard. But it's something he's played with a lot. Like I was talking about with Mal, this idea of myth-making and knowing what your story is. And militia as well in Amazing

Morris. Yes. Yeah, very much. And of course, all the witches. All the witches. Of course, the witches. I think definitely falls into the witch category, Mrs. Goggle. Yeah, Mrs. Goggle. Yeah. That just way too similar not to be somehow connected, right? I love the sudden shift into terrifying competence. The others are very respectful around her,

but Daphne's sort of mentally written her off a bit is this old lady, who's obviously very nice, drinking the seawater so the boy with her can drink the fresh water she was carrying. But hasn't thought much more of her than that. And then she's given Mao and starts moving completely differently. While Daphne's sort of trying to argue with what she might be doing, she does things like lifting his legs up and tapping his feet a few more times, just to sort of show dominance and that she knows what she's doing. Emma P Yeah, a bit more leg lifting, bit more tapping, absolutely. Starting with the detail of her saving the boy and being so self-sacrificing with it, I think is a really good way of doing it as

well because it puts her very much in the wise woman but also caretaker, as witches always are in project books. You do not simply see a little boy and not save him and not give him all of your water. That would be unthinkable. So obviously. But then obviously you do not turn down somebody chewing your salted pork for you because that would be stupid. Clara So I wanted to talk about the chewing thing because before we see Daphne chewing the meat for Mrs. Gargall, the Atabah taking a hammer to the salt pickled beef because he didn't have enough teeth and couldn't often find anyone to chew it for him?

Yeah. And the line's never drawn between the two in the book, but it is obviously something that's happened. So do we think of it as a segregated gender thing, so the women are there with Ms. Gergel and of course they take care and chew the meat for her, whereas the men don't think to do it for Ataba? Or is it he just doesn't inspire that same level of care for him? I think maybe a bit of both. I think it is more the women are very much together in a small area and it is, you know, not to fall into stereotyping, but it is a nurturing area that this person, we're all looking after each other in these ways. And if this very elderly, and of course, there is the fact that this very elderly woman is a lot more physically, she's very ill.

And Ataba is still able to swim to the bottom and fuck about with the godstones. Like he doesn't have a lot of teeth left, but he's not as obviously a case for chewing the food for. And he's more like outwardly communicative, whereas I've seen Mrs. Gergel isn't unless she's farting. NK Yeah, yeah. But now, yeah, no, I think it's very much like a gendered thing as well. Yeah. CK Yeah, I think it's an interesting line to draw between them. So speaking of Ataba. NK Mmm, let us. CK He's fury and fear and desperate need for destruction,

especially when they find the caliper stone. NK Yeah, yeah, to the point of being willing to kill himself while doing it. Yeah. And his reaction, Mal saves his life and then kind of holds that life saving over him and his response of it's a ragged old life and not worth saving. Yes. But now I've got your soul so you have to help me out here. Yeah. That's how this works. He's the one to point out the potential problems with the trouser men coming to get Daphne and talking about the fact, are they going to try and turn us all into little trouser men because we don't want to do that.

Yes, he's clearly got some knowledge of the colonised world. Yes, and he says, there are different ways to eat people and you are clever enough to know it and sometimes the people don't realise it's happened until they hear the belch, which is a great line. Emma Watson Absolutely. Then Daphne realising that actually, yeah, fuck. What's Mal going to do if somebody puts a flag on this beach? I do like that moment actually with Daphne of her realising, at this point the dad's been a completely sympathetic character, but Daphne then has to draw this line between actually all of these people who we've fucking stuck a flag on. Yeah.

Where people like this. And there is really nothing stopping them doing it again. And if we do try to stop them, then well, something like what happens at the end of this section is going to happen. Yeah, it's a really good foreshadowing moment for Foxlip and Polgrave turning up at the end of the section. Yeah. I forgot they turned up on their own first.

Yeah, so skin-crawly. But it's out of his vindication, as hysterical almost as his rage. Not as hysterical, but as intense, it's like fire behind the eyes when they find the room. Yeah, and to him it's vindication, but there's a lot more to it than that and it's really nicely set up there. Jess Yeah. And again, he almost drowns. Just in a lack of air this time. Niamh Does a lot of almost drowning this dude. Jess

Daphne's like, come the fuck on guys. Niamh And that fire pushes him so then he sees Foxlip and Polgrave and it's been set up. He has this fear of what happens if the trouser man comes because one trouser girl is fine, but more than that and it's not going to be good for us very quickly. So he goes right for them and obviously F5 in the chat, he gets shot. Yeah. Yes, you're full of this holy fire and then it is suddenly snuffed out. It's very much the thump at the end of the description. It's a really well written impactful death. And partly because this isn't purely purely a sympathetic

character. This isn't like if if one of the women got shot, or if it was Milo or Pelou that got shot. He has been kind of there in this antagonistic antagonistic role to Mal, although he's not antagonistic to the audience. I think we have the sympathy. And then yeah, the death kind of comes out of nowhere. It's sudden and it's this big gut punch of a full stop. Yes. Yes, there's no lead up to it. There's no... Yeah, there's no tension rising. It's not a narrative hero's death that is a... And there's no impactful. Very awful. And fuck these guys. Fuck these guys. Foxlip and Polgare. Just mentioning briefly, we'll

obviously talk about them more next week. And they're just here for a second. But oh, one white girl all by yourself. Terrible shame that you can use a bit of civilized company. And it is awful. It's something that happens a lot in these books where a child or a teenager especially is taken out of their world and put somewhere else and they are impactful and they are important in some way. And then suddenly they are dragged back into reality by the intrusion of another person from their original world. And it is always this deflation, this letdown. And I always hated reading it. And obviously it's doubly awful here because it comes with a murder. Gabbard And Pratchett's really good at establishing

very quickly. They're mutineers. They're nasty, nasty, nasty men. Jess We've had a couple of hints about the mutineers before. Yeah, it does really, especially after the kind of epic narrative of finding this cavern and then running through the corridors and escaping towards the light and mal carrying a Tarber and all of this just this absolute adventure epic scenery and then it's just dragged back into the nasty low world of these two twats. Yeah. Anyway.

Anyway. I don't have anything to go with that. I completely agree with you. And again, great writing. So locations. The Sunrise Islands, which is what the nation and the islands around it is what they call themselves versus the Mothering Sundays, which is what they're called by the Trouserman, which is playing on the sort of weird English colonized tradition of places being named after the holiday they're found on. Yeah, exactly. So there's this whole series of islands. I think we had the joke in the last section

about there being islands with different names including Mrs Ethel J Bundy's birthday island. In real world, obviously you've got Easter Island, Christmas Island, all this stuff. But this idea of the nation is the whole world to Mao, the nation and the islands around it. They are the most important of all these islands. Then, Pilou very apologetically shows in the charts and says, it's not on there, it's too small. It's something that everyone has a hard time with if you think about the reaction of scientists and religious people finding out that Earth is not very important actually in the grand astronomical scheme of things.

Yeah, we are such a tiny, tiny little bit of grit in a huge and expanding universe. How amazing and unlikely is your birth? Sorry. Look, I can't think about how insignificant I am without singing the universe from Monty Python. It's the only thing that keeps us sane. But yes, and pointing immediately to this universe equivalent of Australia. I'd be like, is this us? No. Sarah and actually we don't even appear on the map. Yeah, that's an impossible thing to comprehend when this small space has been your whole world. Yeah. And for Milo and Pilu, who have obviously come to terms with this in their own time and have been on a boat and got to lots of different places. They're like, oh yeah, fuck,

we haven't really imparted this particular perspective shift yet. It's interesting because Daphne would have experienced particular perspective shift yet. So. Sarah It's interesting because Daphne would have experienced this perspective shift as such a young child, going to these Royal Society lectures and learning about how, starting to learn about how big the universe is and telescopes are standing on the shoulders of giants. She doesn't have a particular attachment to the world she's coming from. It's a wondrous discovery. Because Mao's entire identity is so tied to the nation, to his life and everything he's ever known in these gods, it's a completely

different kind of perspective shift. Yeah, definitely. Then within the nation? The cave. The grandfather's cave and then the cave at the end of the cave. Very exciting. Caves and caves. Yeah. Again, brief mention because we'll talk about the contents of the cave more next week. But I love how it's written that we don't really see it. We see different perspectives of it. You see Daphne finding things and exclaiming and you should see what this one's got in his mouth, which is a really great setup and payoff. Yeah. What she's focusing on is very different from what Mal is focusing on, which is the emo who must be the missing force one doesn't have a head. Would you dare to find the face

of him? And then Asuva is like, fucking vindication. Niamh. Gods must have made this. Sarah. Alright, fine. I guess I wasn't right about those three stones in particular, but look what we got instead. I had the vibe right? Turns out it's even better than I thought. Look at this shit. Yeah, I love it. I love it. And it's just really great. I really want to know more about what's in the cave. I want to know what's happening next, but the book shifts the action to something else. And not in a frustrating way. Oh, now this is happening. And by the

time you get back to it, you're like, oh yeah, the cave, this is great, the cave. Yeah, yeah. The way that it shows the old, oldness, the age of the island as well, through the vast, vast lines of grandfathers and how like impossible, actually that's a good point. Daphne maybe has more of a grip on how big the world is, but this is an illustration. She finds it quite hard to come to grips with, with how old the nation is. And to Mao that just takes it for granted is like, yeah, the nation has been here since the world began. We've been doing this since the world began. Obviously, there are infinite fucking grandfathers in here. What do you expect? Niamh She can trace her ancestry a lot further back than say, Fox the Populgrave could because she's descended from the royal line via cousins and what have you and can

talk about this battle, this uncle from the Battle of Bosworth Field. So she thinks like she has, yeah, a huge grasp on how far back a family can go, how far a history can go and then Mal's just like, yes, as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you think you have roots? You ain't seen roots. All right, let's take a break. Little bits we liked. Yes. I want to start with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Please do. I kind of didn't realise it had more lyrics. I just, I don't think I ever heard the full version. Or like I have no memory of the full version. When the blazing sun is gone, when the nothing shines upon, then you show your

little light, twinkle twinkle all the night, then the traveller in the dark thanks you for your tiny spark. That wasn't familiar to me. So I thought I'd have a look at the history of the song because I just, I thought it was much older. I thought it had some folky origins. The tune is older than the lyrics. It's an older French song. But the song itself was written by Jane Taylor and published in 1806 in a book of children's songs and stories she wrote with her sister. And fun fact, Jane Taylor and her sister grew up in Lavenham, just down the road from where we are. That is a fun fact. It's a local song. Look at that.

It is a local song for local people. And I really like the actual payoff to the song and this play of Daphne not knowing the customs and traditions that have built up around birth and putting a spear in the hand. And So the first thing the baby touches is the warmth of his mother and you sing him a song about stars. It was a good song for a child. It began with a question. I like that the grandmothers, when faced with a change to their old traditions, aren't like the grandfathers and just yelling about it. They're like, oh wait, no, I like that actually. I like that better than putting a spear in his hand. But that's what we should be doing.

Yeah, carry on with that. Good idea. What about you? What do you like? Mao's little existential crisis, mini crisis set about his spear. Yes. Although basically finding all of the junk from the sweet duty, which is extremely valuable as worn off items on the island. He says, Maul knew how to make a spear from picking a shaft to chipping a good sharp point. When he'd finished it, it was truly his, every part of it. The metal spear would be a lot better, but it would

just be a thing. If it broke, you wouldn't know how to make another one, which I think is a cool concept. I agree with him also. I often worry about what if apocalypse and what could we make again and how much could we scavenge this out in the other. I don't sleep a lot. There is something incredibly satisfying about making something from scratch. I know something that is Pratchett. Pratchett did a lot like he did his whole good life thing and making jumpers from the wool he found on fences. This does obviously tie in with the whole worry about what this random dump of technology would mean for the nation as well, which is quite interesting. And again, just from a perspective point of view, the whole reason he feels this way about things like the metal spheres and metal items is because that's just a resource that doesn't

exist there. They don't have mining and they don't have metal. Yes, exactly. And they use what they do have. It's mentioned a couple of times that the climate is meant to be a big thing when it comes to invention, necessity being the mother I mentioned of course, and it's cold half the year, which is why we have to make this and the other. There's a fairly controversial book called Guns, Jones and Steel, which I'm sure a lot of you have read. And if you haven't, that kind of goes into this idea that it's very much luck of the geographical draw as to who comes out on top in the historical walls of nations. And just things like which

countries have a large animal you can easily tame to ride upon or to use to drag your plows around. Heather Miedema Yeah, which is what Peely mentions. He says, oh, you wouldn't believe the horses. Emma Cunningham Yeah, well, kind of like pigs. Not very much like pigs at all. Same number of legs. Well, kind of like pigs. Not very much like pigs at all, no. Same number of legs. Guns, germs and steel. Very controversial for a few good reasons, but also well worth read if you can be asked to get through a massive fucking brick. I have not read it. There is a limit to my brick tolerance. What else do you like? Vegetables. Unwholesome. Unlike some people, this is according to

Daphne's grandmother. and you should also avoid fruit because you don't know where it's been. That had always puzzled Daphne because after all, how many places could a pineapple go? A, call back to our dear friend, the Chair of Indefinite Studies is it? Who has a bit of a pineapple phobia. One of those lot. Could have been the Wrangler. Yeah, because I'm a guy with pineapples. a pineapple phobia, one of those lot. Could have been the Wrangler. Yeah. But B, always love an excuse to think about Mrs. Beaton and her absolutely batshit insane book, Mrs. Beaton's book of household management, which seems to be, well, first of all, is a few pages of household management and then the rest of it's a cookbook. And also has

contradictions throughout the text, completely different styles that basically heavily suggest most of it was plagiarized. My favorite bit of obvious, like what the fuck happened here was when she talks about tomatoes and there's a lot of generally slagging various vegetables off. She thinks that potatoes were suspicious, narcotic, deleterious, but tomatoes in particular. Tomatoes flavor stimulates the appetite and is almost universally approved. The tomato is a wholesome fruit and digests easily. It has been found to contain a particular acid, a volatile oil, a brown, very fragrant extractoresinous matter, a vegeto-mineral matter, mucosaccharin, some salts and in all probability an alkaloid. The whole plant has a disagreeable odor and its juice subjected to the action

of the fire amidst the vapor so powerful as to cause vertigo and vomiting. Just changed the mind about the tomato halfway through. Sarah- Personally, I've never had vertigo from a tomato. Emma- No! Yeah. Sarah- Much as I've never windsurfed on a crocodile. Emma- Yes. As Wikipedia notes, the conflict of opinions on the tomato occurring on the same page have been noted as seemingly careless editing. Just an absolutely batshit book. I highly recommend this more than Guns, Germs and Steel. To be honest, you can probably get the concept

of Guns, Germs and Steel just by reading an essay on it or a review. Whereas I would say Mrs. Beaton's book of household management, you should flip through one of the online versions I will link to. Sarah- It's excellent. It's so good. Sarah- It's just fucking insane. Sarah- I think the joke about how many places can a pineapple go, I think that there's hints of airspeed velocity of unladen swallows in there, although that's coconuts rather than pineapples, the Monty Python joke. But also just the idea of pineapples as that status symbol. You didn't eat them, you had them on display when you got a pineapple, which

is earlier than the period of history being paralleled in this book, but not much earlier. Niamh No, yeah, yeah. Sarah I'd say that was kind of Regency period, I think, with the pineapple craze. I could be wrong. Niamh Yeah, no, I think that's about right. Sarah The pineapple craze is just one of my favourite bits of Britain being weird about things. What can we be weird about this decade, chaps? Pineapples, yeah, sure, why not? They're quite odd. How many places could they be? What about legs?

Yeah, speaking of the British being weird, legs. Trouserman women get very upset if they see a man's leg. This is Peele's old theory of trouser men are scared of legs. One of the boys on the John Dee, I like the ships, the John Dee by the way, said a young trouser man fainted when he saw a woman's ankle. Pearl clutch of course. The boy said the trouser men and women even put trousers on table legs in case young men see them and think of ladies legs. Niamh Yes, is that like a myth? Ange It's an exaggeration. Niamh Right, okay. Ange I think tablecloths were floor length to be decent, but I don't think it was really

about someone having amorous intentions towards a piano. Niamh Yes, no, yeah. But it wasn't like a naked thing. Ange It was scandal to have a bare table leg. Niamh It's not like a naked leg thing. It It's just a yeah, it's like ugly to have the legs showing or something like that. Right? I believe so. Yeah. It's funnier if you think that it's the funnier if you think it's the Victorians being weird about shit. Yeah. When will they know about, you know, people having legs, people like the visible ankles, absolutely scandalous. What's the bloody? Oh, fuck me, the parody organization that tried to persuade everyone to make animals wear trousers? Hold on, bit of mid podcast Googling here.

I have no idea what you're talking about. The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or CINA, was a satirical hoax concocted by serial prankster Alan Abel. The group used the language and rhetoric of conservative moralists for the ostensible aim of clothing indecent naked animals, including domestic pets, barnyard animals, and large wildlife. This was in the late 50s through to early 60s. This was a thing. Amazing. Absolute delight. Yes, legs, terrifying thing. They published a newsletter, initially, which is this anthem.

Hi on the wings of SINAH, we fight for the future now. Let's clothe every pet and animal, whether dog, cat, horse or cow. I wonder if we put trousers on a cow. Ah, yes, as you should. How would they wear them? The eternal question. Well yeah, this is do you do one pair of trousers that goes up? Oh, what do you do? A pair of trousers at each end? Which leg is an indecent leg? All legs, surely. Are their all legs are indecent or none of them? So talking points that don't involve table legs.

I can shoehorn them in somewhere, Francie. I'm known for shoehorning a table leg or two at my time. Best of luck with that. My talking point was kind of around the in-between place that Daphne got to rescue Mal from. The place between. Which I've kind of, we've shuffled down your thoughts on location about it, so do you want to start us off with those?

Yeah, I love this. We know I love a bit of liminal. Not alive, not dead, a place with no place. You cannot walk there, cannot swim there, on sea, no, on land, no, like shadow. Shadow place. And yeah, liminal space, which is something we've talked about a lot, these spaces of transition, not just physical spaces, but these places and ideas of transition of grey areas of in between. And I love this parallel of having the place between as this physical liminal space that Mao is somewhat trapped in and his relationship to his soul because he is in his liminal transition space. He's not a boy but he can't be cemented

as a man with a man's soul so he's termite crabbing. Jess I've suddenly got Britney Spears, not a girl, not yet a woman in my head. Yeah, sorry. I was trying to not... And you like this idea of fiction. I do, I do. It's the Orphean rescue, of course. Yes. It is the... trying to grab Eurydice... Eurydice? Eurydice? Eurydice? I'm going to say Eurydice. Of course, Orpheus being the famous example of someone who fucked

that right up and definitely did it right. But we've seen it in a few places in Pratchett already even. So I think it was like fantastic where Two-Flower is taken to Death's Domain and Rincewind has to go and get him before he like fatally pisses off the four horsemen with the game of bridge. We also see it obviously in Wintersmith when Roland has to go down into the underworld. We see it when Granny Weatherwax goes and pulls Tiffany out of death's domain, is that right? Yeah, at the end of Hatful of Skye. Yes, that's it. And she's on the edge, she is not death's domain so much as it's the desert.

Yes, that's it. Yes. And you all, obviously, we talked about that then and then we said, and you know, this has happened before when she took Esk out of the Hawke. Yeah. And we've also had granny actually being through this in her mirrors room. And yeah, this one's me. We get a lot of this we get a lot of the purgatory, the nearly dead, not quite dead kind of thing. I think this goes even heavier on the myth than usual, because we're fully in the domain of a death God, we are in the underworld now, not quite dead, but we're going to be soon.

Love, by the way, who says you're running in the right direction thing? Sarah- Such a good moment. Emma- I've completely forgotten about that. Lovely twist. Loka Ha is a wonderful trickster death god. We love a trickster god. Sarah- We're fans. Emma- Even if he's trying to kill our protagonist because we know he'll get out of it. We're only halfway through the book. It's fine. He'll come out of this. We also love a girl going to rescue the male protagonist as we've

seen before in Roland being rescued from Ferry Land. Niamh Yes. Tiffany going into the land of the elves, which is a parasite universe, but it has that same feeling of being a kind of in between space. It's not quite real enough to be real. Tiffani Yes. I think all of these kind of stories are kind of at least sister tropes, if not stemming from the same place. They also tie into this thing of the kind of compression and stretching of time, which I really love. So when you're in a dream state and you fall asleep for five minutes, but you have at least two hours worth of narrative in your dream, I feel like if we

harness this, we've got some kind of key to immortality. Any neuroscientists who want to explore that further, please feel free. You know me, I'm always keen to live forever. But yeah, this idea of the water droplet falling, and they're going, no, there's not enough time. And then going into this, but it's a yeah. Oh, so cool. Love it. The book series I was talking to you about earlier that I recently reread the Sabriel books by Garth Nix has this similar sort of place of this domain of death with these gates that you pass through and it's all really beautifully described in different precincts you have to go through and it's all tied around a flowing river and it's very that this similar feeling.

Yeah. What do you think these soul fish are? I was wondering if they were like baby eels. Yeah, I was I don't know I was picturing this you know this tiny silver fish you see in the darting and you can never quite catch hold of them. Good for the soul. Yeah, Mrs. Gergel, very matter of factly, just checking it out. I love that. That's a rare vitamin, soulfish. And I like the lack of memory afterwards, they're not being able to put our fingers on what just happened, but I know it was important.

That's another lovely little trope that's kind of snatched away from us. Waking up from the dream that was definitely real because there's a souvenir from it. Mrs. Gogol snatched the fish from the hat. It reminded me a little bit of Lion and the Witch and the Wardrobe when at the end, after they've grown old, they go back through the wardrobe and they're young again. Yeah. And that feeling of, did all that really quite happen and they've just lived an entire lifetime and come back in seconds.

Yeah. Yes. That's always the fairy land trope in a less positive way as well, isn't it? Of course you get kidnapped by the fairies, you're let go three days later, but it's been 50 years. You come back and everyone you know is dead. Or you go and live a lifetime and you come back an old man and there's your youthful fiance sat there waiting for you. Yeah. Jesus, dude. What happened to you? Which really also is the weeping angels in Doctor Who also plays with that trope, which is why I like flimps so much. Yeah. Except you're kind of aware that you're living it.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a weird one. Anyway, yeah. I love all those folklore and mythology all tied up together and it's a fun little terrifying interlude. It is a terrifying interlude, but Mao's having a lot of a time of it again. Sarah He is. Do you want to talk about some more of the main theme of this book, do you reckon? Or what we could argue is the main theme? Niamh Belief and grief.

Sarah They rhyme, it must be right. Niamh Exactly. I can't have a book that goes into this this much and not talk about it, but specifically we have Mao here in his anger phase and the anger phase of grief. I can't remember what order they're meant to go in. N. No, I mean the whole point of the five stages of grief is a bit messed up, isn't it? Like the original point of it, people use it a bit oddly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's never meant to be in the certain order. J. No. You feel all five of them in one minute and then you often do something else. But

yeah, he's very much in his angry phase right now and he's splitting the anger. He doesn't know where to direct the anger. He just knows he's got a lot of it. So it's sort of directed at the gods and at the nation itself and at the trouser men and the tools. And you brought up his frustrations with the technology, this idea of the spear, the metal spear would be better but it would just be a thing. He's frustrated with the Trouserman and the nation with that. He's frustrated with the Trouserman who threw these tools in to rattle around as if it was nothing. They'd be hung on the wall if they belonged to someone in the nation. But he's frustrated with that we're not much better than

breadcrab just taking what falls for us. It keeps dwelling on it. One thing he he thinks, he's sort of arguing with Pilu, Pilu is sort of talking about these tools as these great things the nation doesn't have and that makes him out of defense if he tries to defend, we don't have them because we don't need them. It's fine. But at the same time, he's thinking. Actually, like I got this crowbell, it's really great. We could have done with a crowbell. We never thought of pliers because we didn't need them. Before you make something that's truly new, you first need to have a new thought. That's the important thing. We didn't need

new things, so we didn't think new thoughts. Some of the ideas here are very pyramids. I've talked before about how these different books that parallel each other. We talked last week about how there's a lot of small gods in this. I've mentioned when we talked about small gods that in itself is kind of like a rework of pyramids. Yes. My grand overarching Discworld Rhymes theory, which will eventually get a cork water string in a PowerPoint presentation. We can eat a lot of string at this point, Joanna.

Yeah, we do. It's fine. I knit. I've got a lot of strings. Oh, good. But yeah, the ideas here are very pyramids, this idea of stagnating and staying in history and not getting to keep pushing and advancing because they don't have these new thoughts. So they get stuck in this system of survival and circular ritual until you do the ritual without necessarily remembering why you do certain rituals or how this belief came about or why we do X thing in Zedwe. You combine this with him fighting the idea of gods, partly due to coming face to face with Lohaka. He has this evidence

that this god is real and there's some reality to the other gods and Nemo. He's frustrated with the waves, the idea that the birds knew that the wave was coming and the people didn't. Jessi Yes. Why would he make us this way? Sam Yeah. And he looked into himself and found questions and the only answer seemed to be because. That's no answer because the gods, the stars, the world, the wave, life, death, there's no reasons, no sense, only because. Because was a curse, a struck blow, it was putting your hand in the cold hand of Lahakaa. What a line. Yeah. And then of course you get the grandfather's immediately charming it at that point. Yeah. It was you to ask for reasons. And then you compare it to the way Daphne's grief

again adds to her curiosity. She prays, she asks questions, which leaves her open to listening to the grandmother. She realizes she was listening. She'd never stopped after all those days in church after her mother died, saying every prayer she knew, waiting for a whisper and reply. She hadn't been looking for an apology or for time to run backwards. She just wanted an explanation that was better than it's the will of God, which was grown up speak for because. So they both have this frustration with because and they look for what's beyond the because in very different ways. Daphne sort of keeps trying to have faith because that's what she's taught and Mal was moving beyond trying to have faith to say there's got to be a bit more to the because than that.

Yes. Yes, it can't just be because the gods said so. That doesn't work. Yeah. And then we get the moment we talked about earlier, he realizes his lack of belief isn't as important as what the others need. When it was just a Tarber there, he could push back, he could fight. But now it's about the needs of the many versus his individual crisis. So yeah, the structure of the belief might apply. Yeah, he has that small moment with Pilu and then he has the bigger moment where the others on the island are sort of arguing, well, maybe someone moved the god anchor and that's why the wave came. Maybe because the water anchor wasn't where it was supposed to be. And what Mal wants to say is the gods let you down to worship them now would be

to kneel before bullies and murderers, which oof, that's a lie. But there's this woman who's lost everyone looking at him and with her he'd rather bite off his tongue than say those words. They'd be true, but now that didn't mean anything. Which comes to this idea that Pratchett loves, which is how important is the truth? I promise not to get all, we've blown this whole thing wide open. But so you have this fight between, or this push and pull between Mao and Atabra over who carved the god anchors. And Atabra says to him, you want the truth to be the truth that you like, you want it to be a pretty truth to what you believe. This becomes this thing of men being the tools that carved the god anchors and that doesn't

mean the gods didn't make them. It's just they use men as their tools to make them the way men might use a hammer. Circular religious logic. JG Very much like is the Bible literal or fable, is it? When we're talking about the first seven days, do we mean this, that or the other? AC How much of it was firmament? JG How much of it was firmament? We'll find out in Mrs. Beaton's recipe book. AC And Pee-Loo telling the shark story and again, he's kind of blurring the line between truth and what people need to be believing at that moment and he creates a different flavour of truth with it. And Mao and Daphne sort of talk about it with the beer for the grandfathers versus, you know,

Daphne's experience, which is the bread and the wine. Which doesn't go into the cannibalism explanation. Yeah, let's not get into it right now. And she says, well, perhaps things can be true in special ways. And his response is no, people say that when they want to believe lies. Yeah. Like he's decided to believe in truth first. believe lies. He's decided to believe in truth first. Yeah. Little, not call back exactly, but moist bonlip figs, sausage and sizzle and the spirit of the sausage going to offler and...

Are you a theologian, sir? You get the same thing with the birds, of course, the grandfather birds. Drink the beer, get the spirit of the beer. Yeah, you drink the beer and the spirit of the beer. Yeah, drinking the spirit of the beer. And you get these moments that seem, obviously, you get lots of very supernatural moments like the in-between part, which is interesting. This is something definitely not scientific that just happened and we're still going to sit here arguing about whether the gods are real. Then obviously you've got the grandfather birds attacking Daphne, which seems very supernatural in the

moment, very tippy-hedron probably in reality. Mal knows exactly what to do. CHARLEYY He does. When they find the other stones, the stone's trapped in the coral that have obviously been there for a long time, and at this point Isis before the shadow lands bit, so he's suffering from extreme exhaustion, he starts kind of wandering towards introspection and away from anger a little bit. So you have, Ataba calls him out and says, you know, you yell that there are no gods, you shake your fist at the sky and revile them for not existing. You need them to exist so that you can be self-righteous about denying them. Yes.

Is a great point. And Mao actually starts thinking about what he believes. He believes emo exists because the world exists, he knows the Ka'ha exists because he's interacted with them. But why do we want gods? And he decides we need people. And I think that ties into why he accepts the myth building around himself and this role of leadership, because he needs people to believe in. And continues this truth theme. Mataba points out, you know, fine, who brings rocks here and leaves them? And this is this amazing payoff of the idea of the stone that the God Anchors were carved from being ballast from other ships, from other people that have come.

Yeah. You're reminded again that Atahabed knows a little bit more about the outside world than is immediately apparent. Immediately after that reveal, you get the stuff where Mal collapses and the whole shadow thing bit, which is what I brought up earlier, Pratchett doing this really good pacing thing of this incredible kind of realization is coming and then something else. And we're going to come back around to that, but we're going to have this other brilliant moment first. Jessi Yes, we're going to pull you out the moment, but you're not going to be annoyed because look how interesting this one is.

Sam Yeah, it's really well put together. It's beautiful. And just before going into the cave and Mal starts thinking about the stoners ballast again, and he starts being quite patronising about it. He starts thinking of the islanders as like passive children having things brought to them. And I think that there's an underlying superiority to that. Again, very teenage boy. Very teenage boy. Just discovering apism. Yeah.

But his questioning and his denial and his anger, it starts becoming about more than just grief. It starts becoming curiosity. He starts looking for the truth that might be uncomfortable, not the little pretty truth that would suit what he wants and not the truth that suits the rest of the island. He's not looking to the gods to provide comfort, the way that people do look for ritual as a way to deal with grief. He's looking for truth that isn't comfortable. He is not looking for comfort for it. Whereas others are kind of hoping that going into the grandfather's cave might reinforce what they believe in a way that could be comforting to them.

JG It's very scary to go, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what we're looking for. Let's go see. AC So they go into the cave and they start arguing about the last big wave and the story is that it was a punishment. It's the Noah's Ark story definitely brings up the similar thing. So Mal's like, well, is this a punishment? And this is where we have Atarber admitting to grief too. Mao's asking, you know, I had a sister, give me a reason, why did the gods let these people die? And Atarber eventually says, you know, I wish I could have you rage, but the rest of us want certainty and there's nothing there. But in our heads, we know there must be. So we call upon the

gods because they're better than darkness. And so they go into the darkness, they go into the cave, and Mao is looking for an answer and he starts getting an answer there, kind of. Obviously, we don't know enough about the cave yet. But the question he's really been asking underneath it all is, how does everyone else still manage to believe and have faith and why can't I have that? And Atop it gives him the answer because they're scared, because they need it, because the safe truths they've always known are better than the darkness of uncertainty or the jagged rocks of harsh new truths. And then in the cave you get this line, even our fears make us feel important because we fear we might not be. Right, fuck Terry Pratchett, no one should be this good at writing. Not fair. Good conclusion. I had a better one, but I got really annoyed at how good that line was. This is how the

true show make you for I guess cancelled. After all these years. Have you got obscure reference? Yeah. Oh yeah, no, sorry. Sorry, no, no, you're fine. No, you're fine. No, I really like your point about rebuilding myths around people, rather than gods. And you know, Pilu does that, doesn't he? He says, and then I knew that the boy was not a demon. He was a man. He pissed himself. But still,

how many of you would stand there waiting for a shark to come at you after you pissed yourself? This is a good man. And yeah, it's the myth building around a person, which can be very problematic in itself, but it has to be better in the moment, the myth building. You get a lot of that in Discworld, obviously, you get the myth building around vimes, for example, which is in the moment, so far, a good thing, but it's always put forward with a bit of caution. Yeah, let's be careful. How legendary.

Yeah. And yeah, building the belief around the, you know, the laughing over the beach soup and the birds. Yeah, these moments of humanity of caring for each other, making a tiny woman's place. Yeah. Yeah. Grandmothers. I loved their introduction. I did. I did. Have you got an obscure reference for me, Francie? I have and I can even tie it in kind of when the grandfathers are yelling at Mao about pulling the world apart to find answers. And one thing they say are, will you smash the mountains like shy coconuts to find their secrets? Which, what the fuck? Love that.

As taking like a silly little dialogue from a bit earlier and made it like, ooh, that sounds very mythological. Love that. And sets up this implication that the grandfathers never stop listening even when they're acquiescent. Yeah, yeah. At one point, Pilu and Mao are talking about this, that and the other. And Pilu says, the Trowelsmen take coconuts back to their country and stand them on sticks and throw things at them. Why? For fun, I think it's called a coconut shy. What does that mean? It is meaning coconuts want to hide from people. But he looked a bit uncertain at this. Now I was like, actually, I have no fucking idea what coconut shy means. So I went and looked at that. Shy in this context means to toss or throw. So when you think

of like a horse shying, it's that kind of shy. Yeah. Or like to shy away from something. But yeah, and then also I was just reading a little bit about the origins of the coconut shy probably derives from a game of Aunt Sally, where you throw sticks or buttons at like a ball, which is on top of the stick. But coconuts at the time where this became like popular late 1800s maybe a little bit earlier were obviously again like the pineapples but not quite as revered as the pineapples because we're throwing stuff at them like an exotic prize. Yes. And I always thought they were anyway when I was a kid, what a fun thing to win a coconut. But yeah, I thought it was very cool. I feel like an overwhelming need to just further explain for our non-British listeners that yeah,

this is a thing. You go to a fair and you throw a ball at coconuts and try and knock them off and you win the coconut. Yeah. Oh yeah, is that not a thing also? No, I think this is, we were talking about the Brits being weird about things. This is definitely one of the things Brits are weird about. It's exactly as described. The most British thing I have ever done, and I was very young at the time, during the Queen's Golden Jubilee, I went to a village fete and I won a coconut and a souvenir mug, a Golden Jubilee mug, at a coconut shy. Yes, yes. And it's just, a song about a coconut shy is how we get the inimical, I've got a lovely

bunch of coconuts. Diddley diddley. There they are standing in a row. Bum de bum de bum. I'm not going to keep going. Anyway. Right. Before we go totally coconuts.

Sorry. I'm so sorry. That's everything that we're going gonna say about part two of Nation. We'll be back next week for part three, which starts in chapter 11 and goes to the end of the book. The conclusion. The thrilling conclusion. The thrilling conclusion. Until next week, dear listener, you can join our Discord, link down below. Follow us on Instagram at The True Share Mickey Fret, on Twitter and Blue

Sky at Mickey Fret, pod on Facebook at The True Share Make You Fret, on Twitter and Blue Sky at Make You Fret Pod, on Facebook at The True Share Make You Fret, join us on Reddit r slash ttsmyf, email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks and laden African swallows carrying coconuts, the true share make you fret pod at gmail.com and if you want to support us financially you can go to patreon.com forward slash the true share make you fret and exchange your hard earned pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. Huzzah! I'm going to throw an extra special thank you to our patrons this week, so they're funding us being able to go to the Discworld convention in August. Jessi Yes, that's right. Yes, we use them for podcast-related

things a lot of the time. Well done us. Jessi And until next time, dear listeners, don't let us detain you.