In my gradual re-reading of Terry Pratchett’s lengthy ‘Discworld’ series, I had reached the sixteenth in the series, ‘Soul Music’. I recalled it as being one of my favourites, although it’s a long time since I read it. I acquired it in 1996, and am pretty sure I read it aloud to my teenage sons around six or seven years later, but I have not read it since then.
By this stage in the series, Pratchett had developed the technique of running several different threads alongside each other, introducing them apparently at random, and then skillfully weaving them together as the book progressed. In ‘Soul Music’ he does that very cleverly. There are two main storylines: one involves Death’s granddaughter Susan, and the other which involves a young man - a musician from the Discworld equivalent of Wales, seeking his fortune in Ankh-Morpork.
I always liked Susan. We meet her as a somewhat awkward teenager at an expensive boarding school where she mostly manages to be almost invisible. Suddenly she spots a rat with a scythe, who is invisible to anyone else. And, being pragmatic and independent, she follows him… and finds herself taking over from Death, who has gone missing.
Death went missing in the book ‘Reaper Man’, but in that one life went haywire as nobody was able to die. This time, his assistants enlist Susan’s help, although - being human - she finds it quite difficult to do some of the duties. And she’s particularly unhappy when she learns that the young musician is due to die…
The young man, whose name is Imp, gets chatting to a troll called Lias, and a dwarf called Glod. Glod plays wind instruments, and Lias is a percussionist, although his instrument is a set of rocks. The three decide to join forces; they can’t afford to be in the musicians’ guild, but they want to play… and when Imp’s harp is smashed, accidentally, they find him a guitar. Evidently a guitar that wasn’t meant to find its way into the Disc, as it appears in a small shop that appears - and nobody knew anything about it.
In playing this guitar, Imp and his friends discover a new kind of music. It’s not in fact ‘soul’ music, but what they call ‘Music with Rocks in’. This is one of the many references to musicians on Earth, including names that are adopted by both Imp and Lias, although it would be something of a spoiler to reveal them. The first time I read about Lias’s choice, and what was said about it, I actually laughed out loud - and remember doing so twenty-four years later.
There are a LOT of allusions to musicians and songs in this book, possibly more so than in previous ones, and I’m sure the author had fun thinking them up and incorporating them. I had forgotten most of them and found them mildly amusing and quite clever at times. In that respect it reminded me strongly of ‘Moving Pictures’, which does something similar for the film industry.
Of course there’s more to the book than puns and clever allusions to well-known songs. There are some philosophical thoughts about music, and about the problems inherent in going back in time to change the course of events.
It also gently probes the question of whether an excellent memory is a good thing or not. Death does all he can to forget both the past and the future, which he is also aware of, living in a kind of eternity. Some of it’s quite amusing but also very poignant, particularly knowing now that Terry Pratchett developed a form of Alzheimer’s Disease some years after this book was published.
It took me over a week to finish this book - possibly because there’s not a great deal of characterisation in the story, nor indeed a real ‘plot’ - I enjoyed it while I was reading, but had no compulsion to pick it up at odd moments through the day, or to read for more than a few minutes at bedtime.
Recommended. While ‘Soul Music’ stands alone, it’s probably best to have read at least two or three of the earlier Discworld books first - in particular ‘Mort’ and ‘Reaper Man’.
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