Making Money by Terry Pratchett Review: Satirical Discworld Fantasy That Skewers Banking

Making Money is the second Discworld novel to feature Moist von Lipwig, the former con artist whom Lord Vetinari rehabilitated into Postmaster General in Going Postal. At the opening, Moist is restless: the post office runs smoothly, there are no fires to put out, and boredom is setting in. Vetinari — Ankh-Morpork's calculating Patrician — spots this and pushes Moist toward an even more precarious assignment: taking over the ailing Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and its associated Royal Mint. Moist initially refuses, but the death of Topsy Lavish, the bank's chairwoman, changes everything. Her will leaves 50 percent of the bank's shares to her dog, Mr. Fusspot — who already holds one share, making him the majority shareholder and official chairman — and leaves Mr. Fusspot himself to Moist. An Assassins' Guild contract guarantees that if anything unnatural happens to the dog, or if Moist fails to honour the will's commands, he dies. Pratchett builds the central conflict from this elegant trap: Moist must reform a distrusted institution, convince Ankh-Morpork's citizens to accept paper money not backed by gold but by the city itself, and fend off the scheming Lavish family, all while keeping a small dog alive.

What distinguishes Making Money from a straightforward comic caper is its intellectual core. As Pratchett noted, the novel occupies a curious dual space — fantasy and non-fantasy simultaneously — because money itself is a collective fantasy: a shared agreement that abstract numbers carry real value. This idea drives the plot mechanically and thematically. Moist's plan to back currency with the city rather than gold is not mere eccentricity; it is Pratchett dramatising the actual foundations of modern monetary theory in Discworld terms. The plot also complicates the Lavish family subplot through Cosmo Lavish's increasingly deranged attempt to impersonate Vetinari himself, and through the parallel storyline of Moist's fiancée, Adora Belle Dearheart, whose work with the Golem Trust to excavate the ancient civilisation of Um produces the novel's most spectacular surprise: what was believed to be four golden golems turns out to be four thousand. The book's scope, then, runs from intimate institutional satire to civilisation-scale revelation.

The novel won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2008 and received a Nebula Award nomination the same year — formal recognition that placed it among that year's most significant fantasy releases. Critical reaction from press outlets was mixed in illuminating ways. As Wikipedia's reception summary records, Critics praised the book's humanity and its sharp questions about why we trust banks and about the nature of money, though he noted it is not quite as successful as Going Postal due to the lack of some of that novel's forward drive. The Observer's Rowland Manthrope was more pointed, arguing that Pratchett has wit in the novel but has lost his normal cutting edge. Against those reservations, the Barnes & Noble summary quotes a critic calling it "outlandish fun" that "balances satire, knockabout farce and close observation of human — and non-human — foibles with impressive dexterity and deceptive ease," crediting Pratchett as "the preeminent comic fantasist of our time." Kirkus Reviews, covering the audiobook edition, described the novel as "fast-moving," mixing "satire and fantasy with increasingly frantic farce" as it races toward a conclusion involving golems, necromancers, and a royal hearing. The range of that reception — from "lost his cutting edge" to "impressive dexterity" — accurately reflects a book that provokes genuine debate.

The mechanics of Pratchett's plotting are specifically praised across sources. The escalating absurdity — a dog as bank chairman, stamps as currency, an assassination contract as employment incentive — is structured with the logic of farce, where each complication follows from the last. Kirkus identifies the pacing as a particular strength, noting the novel's fast-moving quality and frantic comedic acceleration. The cast rewards returning readers: Mr. Bent, the chief cashier rumoured to be a vampire but revealed to be something Pratchett treats as worse — a clown — is one of the novel's most celebrated character reveals. Adora Belle Dearheart, carrying her own plotline about the golems of Um, is given substantial narrative weight rather than serving merely as a supporting figure. For series readers, the Barnes & Noble summary notes that returning characters feel like familiar old friends in new contexts, while new additions are drawn with enough depth to generate genuine investment.

Readers approaching Making Money directly from Going Postal may find the pacing slightly less propulsive — a critique Critics made on record. The novel's satirical targets (institutional inertia, public distrust of banks, the arbitrariness of currency) are handled through comedy rather than urgency, and those seeking the compressed momentum of its predecessor may register the difference. The novel is the second book in the Moist von Lipwig sequence, though the Discworld novels are designed to be read in any order. Readers who have not met Moist before will still find the premise self-contained, but the emotional payoff of his character development — a con artist who has genuinely changed, now forced to apply his skills legitimately — carries more weight with prior context. For committed Discworld readers, and for anyone interested in fantasy that takes economic systems seriously as comedic and philosophical material, Making Money delivers exactly what Pratchett's most devoted audience returns for.