Academy of Unchronology

Soul Music is like the ghost of a book, wafting over you and leaving nothing behind. I know this seems unkind, but getting to the end of a novel should leave you understanding what it was all about, and Soul Music is about… what?

About the music? Well, obviously to an extent. A foreign invader (it's heavily implied that the guitar carrying Music With Rocks In ended up on the pre-industrial Discworld by accident) which causes trouble by trying to culture-shift too early, too much? But obviously that was already done in Moving Pictures, and while the concept is better fitted into the setting here it doesn't have anything more to say.

About Susan? No doubt about it, she's a great protagonist, a moderate outsider who can comment on the stranger aspects of the supernatural in the Death books without being constantly wide-eyed and gormless. But I'm Soul Music her arc is largely a retread of Mort's in Mort - slightly more refined, but also more rushed and less consequential.

About Death? This is the plotline that appears to have the most traction: 'Death struggles to come to terms with grief and personal loss' as the elevator pitch. That's a great concept! But it's handled so lightly that it never really takes off. While Death's journey is started by the deaths of Mort and Ysabel, the narrative skirts around the issue and makes it more a nebulous issue of trying to forget in general. He goes from the Foreign Legion to a bar to being a beggar, then sees a rock concert and goes home. Occasionally his past self is harangued by Susan. His entire arc is viewed from the outside, which is a pity as his arc as Bill Door in Reaper Man was the strongest part of the book.

So what you have is a lukewarm repetition of Moving Pictures mixed with a lukewarm repetition of Mort. Neither story ever really takes off, and the headline act (Death) never properly takes the stage. The ending is jumbled and confusing, and doesn't have the melancholic power of Reaper Man or the energetic flourish of Men At Arms (both of which come together properly in the coda).

It's not a terrible book - it's fine, and has enough Moving parts to keep things going. But it's a classic example of the whole being lesser than the sum of its parts, and for each part there's a better place to begin.

There's a subtle little moment in one of the last scenes in Men at Arms. Carrot presents Vimes with Lord Vetinari's commission to become Commander of the City Watch, where Vimes notes that it comes with a knighthood, something which hasn't been done for many years.

Except... we saw in the previous scene that Vetinari didn't actually write the commission letter, just signed and approved it. The letter was written by Carrot. And we learn this in the same scene where he (obliquely) admits that he is, in fact, king. Carrot has power, is willing to leverage it, and though he is keen to have checks on that power, he places those checks himself.

Men at Arms is Carrot's book, and all the better for it. If Guards! Guards! was originally intended with Carrot as the lead character, and Vimes took over as it was written, then Men at Arms feels like it went the opposite way. The first part of the book is led by Vimes, with the nominal idea of investigating the Gonne murders, but mostly wandering about doing some solid world-building. More is done to solidify Ankh-Morpork as a setting in this book than any other, in particular the hegemony of the guilds (ironic, as the later events of this book spell the beginning of the end of guild control).

When Vimes retires, he spends a good solid chunk away from the narrative, and this is Carrot's time to shine. He puts down riots, restores civic order, recruits a militia, and emerges as a powerful - too powerful - leader at a time when leadership (from the guilds) is lacking. And all in the space of a single night.

The comparison with Granny Weatherwax in Lords and Ladies is, I think useful. Granny is not subtle. Her rise to power is in full view since her brand of witchcraft relies on everybody knowing who she is and what she can do. Carrot, in stark contrast, leads from behind. People know and respect him, but I think few outside of Vimes, Vetinari and Angua would be able to explain why they respect him. That meeting with Vetinari at the end of the book is very telling. Carrot, now at his most cunning, is just on the verge of threatening in his statement that the king could still return if he was needed.

This is a book about power, and how it is wielded. Guild rule in Ankh-Morpork fails utterly, and Vetinari fails to reign in their excesses (and also fails in his manipulations of Vimes). The Watch shows their worth as a state-run authority, and you could argue that the events of Men at Arms shape Vetinari's civic policy for the rest of the series, trusting more in civil servants like Vimes and Lipwig, and away from guild self-interest.

Perhaps one of the strangest things about Lords and Ladies is Pratchett's sudden concern about continuity. It's never been a major concern before this, other than in the general sense of one event following another, but here he begins the book with a quick rundown of important events in Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad, and litters the narrative with little references to previous events and ideas, even if it's not really warranted.

At one point, for example, characters take the time to explain that yes, some elves and humans did breed and have descendants in the past, and these people also refer to themselves as elves. Considering these half-elves were only mentioned as a bit of background texture in Moving Pictures, it seems a lot of effort to take to explain them. Pratchett has unceremoniously dropped much bigger concepts without a word.

Still, on the back of Witches Abroad this is a good return to form for the Witches books. It works almost as a triple-sequel: to Equal Rites, revisiting the culture class between wizardry and witchcraft, now in a much more fleshed-out setting; to Wyrd Sisters, returning to Lancre to see the impact of the coven's political meddling with Verence II on the throne; to Witches Abroad, to show what happens when the witches haven't been around a while.

To do all this, and to comment on the fractious nature of parallel (and parasite) universes, to have a wistful romantic subplot for Granny, to parody fairy folklore and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream... and still have time satirise the bog-standard depiction of elves in fantasy...

It's a busy book, that's all. And having so many moving parts means a few wobble on their axles occasionally.

Case in point: some of the things Granny Weatherwax does get overlooked, especially when they make the situation actively worse. While Magrat does eventually get around to confronting Nanny about Granny arranging the wedding without her consent, the rather more pressing issue of Magrat being purposely overlooked regarding the elves gets entirely skipped over.

Let's be clear, by not trusting Magrat with knowing about the elves she takes away the iron protecting Diamanda, and helping the elves find a way into the world. For that people are killed and tortured, which nearly includes Diamanda herself (in fact the injuries are implied to be pretty extreme and Diamanda's survival is almost written as an afterthought). This seems somewhat harsh, as an awkward conversation with Magrat to try and convince her that elves are, in fact, bad would be considerably better than allowing Diamanda to be hypnotised and stabbed almost to death.

This isn't the problem exactly - Granny is allowed to have flaws and make mistakes, and being riled up by Diamanda in the first part of the book is shown up as exactly that - but crucially, these should be at least acknowledged.

Similarly (and I've mentioned this before) there's an overlooked moment in everyone looking to Granny for approval before Magrat is crowned queen - exactly the thing that both Duke Felmet and Granny herself had warned about back in Wyrd Sisters if they had used magic to put someone else (Verence) on the throne.

I've been putting off writing about this one for a while. Hell, I'm three quarters of the way through Lords and Ladies already, wondering what, if anything, I can say about Small Gods that hasn't already been said a hundred times, if it's even worth saying anything.

There's barely a single wasted line in the whole thing. Every word, every door of punctuation serves to build up the story, the characters, the setting. Everything feels laser sharp, focussed to the point of white heat. The message was the medium when Pratchett wrote this, and no idle thoughts were going to work their way through the cracks.

I have a long history of this book, but much of that was from the very-abridged audiobook version with Tony Robinson. Every time I come back to the full text there's still revelations to be had, new details to discover. The repeated motif of the tortoise and the eagle may be an obvious one, being as it is the opening narration and the climax of the story, but something that I noticed this time around was that the eagle is always present throughout all the scenes in Omnia, even where it might not have a direct impact on the plot. Just constant reminders that up there, in the sky, is a circling eagle.

It would be overly simplistic to say that the eagle represents just Vorbis, despite the occasions where Vorbis is compared to an eagle in looks and attitude. I think the eagle is more of a cipher for the corrupted Omnian church itself, the hollowed-out religion devoid of real faith while the tortoise (Om) is faith without the structures of religion.

Or another detail, the way dishonest and corrupt figures use physical touch, usually a pat on the shoulder, to display their desire for control over Brutha. Again, this is mostly Vorbis, but it's chilling when Simony does the same thing, entirely unbidden.

Both of these details were lost in the abridged version.

And yes, this is Pratchett's masterpiece. Not just in the detail, but the beautiful shape of the story as a whole, in the perfect realisation of the characters, in the absolutely impeccable pacing, and the way that the events of the story (particularly the desert sequence) could be imagined as chapters from a real holy book, only we get to see it at ground level where Brutha and Om are bickering the whole time.

A man walks the wilderness with his god. The god nourishes and protects the man the man carries and protects the god. They learn to appreciate how they depend upon each other for survival, and on their return home they create the first constitutional religion. It's so beautiful.