MAKING MONEY by Terry Pratchett

SOMETHING BORROWED by Paul Magrs

As the recent Northern Rock saga proved, the banking system can be a creation of smoke and mirrors, an illusory edifice built on the confidence of investors and threatened by destruction if that confidence disappears. Unsurprisingly, in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, banking is even weirder than it is in reality. In the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, the chairman is a dog named Mr Fusspot, the chief cashier is a lugubrious bean-counter suspected of vampirism and the basement is occupied by a mad scientist and his lisping, hunchbacked assistant, both of them busily engaged in building the Glooper, a water-driven contraption of Heath Robinson-like complexity that mirrors exactly the ups and downs of the city’s financial system.

In such a context, it seems only sensible that Lord Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork’s farsighted despot, should appoint a former thief and con man as overseer of the bank’s future. Moist von Lipwig, introduced in the earlier novel Going Postal, seems just the man to set it on the road to a new prosperity. Next year, Pratchett (and his hordes of fans) will celebrate 25 years of Discworld. By now, he is so comfortably at home in his alternative universe that he seems capable of using it for whatever narrative purpose he chooses, even a satirical examination of the way money does and does not work. Making Money is not vintage Discworld – Going Postal was itself a better constructed story – but it still offers more comic inventiveness and originality than most other novels of the year. And more fun.

The fun in Paul Magrs’s Something Borrowed is supposed to be found in the collision between the everyday ordinariness of an English seaside resort and the evermore elaborate supernatural goings-on that threaten it. Brenda and Effie are two ladies of a certain age living in Whitby. Effie is the latest in a long line of Yorkshire witches, amd Brenda is a spinster with a past that stretches back centuries. Together they face up to the dangers presented by everything from vampires (a Whitby speciality) to zombie apewomen. The fun is sometimes hard to locate.

In the first half of the novel, there is a forced archness to the prose and the narration that is more irritating than amusing. Only when Brenda, recovering memories of her earlier life, recalls Cambridge and London’s East End in the 1940s does Magrs’s story begin to escape it. The younger Brenda encounters the Smudgelings, Cambridge equivalents to Oxford’s Inklings. She and one of the Smudgelings are obliged to visit a pastiche Limehouse of villainous orientals and Fu Manchu lookalikes, lovingly drawn from pulp fiction of the past and the setting for the novel’s most enjoyable passages. Her return to the present and the Yorkshire coast is a disappointment.

Magrs throws everything he can salvage from a trawl through supernatural fiction and films into the mix (the story reaches a climax with a Wicker Man-style sacrifice to an alien deity) but, try as he might, his Whitby offers a much less enjoyable fictional excursion than Discworld.

MAKING MONEY by Terry Pratchett
Doubleday £18.99 pp352

SOMETHING BORROWED by Paul Magrs
Headline £19.99 pp314

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist