They find many rat tunnels, empty except for rat traps and poison. They set off to the house where the rat-catchers live. She discovers that Maurice can talk, and he tells her that the rat-catchers in town have been passing off bootlaces as rat tails in order to get the reward money that comes with a catch. They meet Malicia, the mayor’s daughter and a storyteller descended from the Sisters Grim. They notice that the houses are lavish and expensive, but that the people seem hungry and particularly hateful toward rats. When they arrive, Maurice and Keith set out to inspect the town. The group agrees to do one last job in a town called Bad Blintz. They want to live in a new society where humans and rats can peacefully coexist, as is laid out in their sacred text, Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure (a parody of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series of books for children). Hamnpork does not like Maurice, while the other rats have misgivings about their scam. The rats are all named after words they would have seen on cans of food or road signs, such as Hamnpork, the leader Peaches, the scribe and Dangerous Beans (a play on “dangerous bends”), a blind rat who is a spiritual leader of sorts. After eating the rat, he realizes that he has eaten a sentient being and, feeling remorse, joins them. The rats got their intelligence from eating some waste near a university, and Maurice got his from eating one of the rats. Real pied pipers do exist, with flutes that can charm rats away, but Keith and the rats are simply pretending. The rats pretend to be a plague and the boy arrives, claiming he can lure them away with his music in exchange for money. He is the leader of a group of rats who go town to town, scamming villagers with the help of a boy piper called Keith. The titular character is a cat called Maurice.
Although all books in the series deal with fantastical elements, this is the first written specifically for a young audience.
It is the twenty-first installment of Pratchett’s popular Discworld series, which tells the stories of various magical characters on an imaginary disc-shaped planet called Discworld. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a 2001 novel by acclaimed British sci-fi and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett.
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