Review: Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

[Russ Allbery]

Soul Music
by Terry Pratchett

Series:    Discworld #16
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: January 1995
Printing:  November 2013
ISBN:      0-06-223741-1
Format:    Mass market
Pages:     420

Susan is a student in the Quirm College for Young Ladies with an
uncanny habit of turning invisible. Well, not invisible exactly;
rather, people tend to forget that she's there, even when they're in
the middle of talking to her. It's disconcerting for the teachers, but
convenient when one is uninterested in Literature and would rather read
a book.

  She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was
  doing.

  It was a poem about daffodils.

  Apparently the poet had liked them very much.

  Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People
  could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in
  Susan's very definite opinion, be allowed to take up more than a
  page to say so.

  She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying
  to interfere with it.

  Around her, the poet's vision was being taken apart with inexpert
  tools.

Susan's determinedly practical education is interrupted by the Death of
Rats, with the help of a talking raven and Binky the horse, and without
a lot of help from Susan, who is decidedly uninterested in being the
sort of girl who goes on adventures. Adventures have a different
opinion, since Susan's grandfather is Death. And Death has wandered off
again.

Meanwhile, the bard Imp y Celyn, after an enormous row with his father,
has gone to Ankh-Morpork. This is not going well; among other things,
the Guild of Musicians and their monopoly and membership dues came as a
surprise. But he does meet a dwarf and a troll in the waiting room of
the Guild, and then buys an unusual music instrument in the sort of
mysterious shop that everyone knows has been in that location forever,
but which no one has seen before.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a bad Discworld novel, but there
is such a thing as an average Discworld novel. At least for me, Soul
Music is one of those. There are some humorous bits, a few good jokes,
one great character, and some nice bits of philosophy, but I found the
plot forgettable and occasionally annoying. Susan is great. Imp is...
not, which is made worse by the fact the reader is eventually expected
to believe Susan cares enough about Imp to drive the plot.

Discworld has always been a mix of parody and Pratchett's own original
creation, and I have always liked the original creation substantially
more than the parody. Soul Music is a parody of rock music, complete
with Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler as an unethical music promoter. The
troll Imp meets makes music by beating rocks together, so they decide
to call their genre "music with rocks in it." The magical instrument
Imp buys has twelve strings and a solid body. Imp y Celyn means "bud of
the holly." You know, like Buddy Holly. Get it?

Pratchett's reference density is often on the edge of overwhelming the
book, but for some reason the parody references in this one felt
unusually forced and obvious to me. I did laugh occasionally, but by
the end of the story the rock music plot had worn out its welcome. This
is not helped by the ending being a mostly incoherent muddle of another
parody (admittedly featuring an excellent motorcycle scene). Unlike
Moving Pictures, which is a similar parody of Hollywood, Pratchett
didn't seem to have much insightful to say about music. Maybe this will
be more your thing if you like constant Blues Brothers references.

Susan, on the other hand, is wonderful, and for me is the reason to
read this book. She is a delightfully atypical protagonist, and her
interactions with the teachers and other students at the girl's school
are thoroughly enjoyable. I would have happily read a whole book about
her, and more broadly about Death and his family and new-found
curiosity about the world. The Death of Rats was also fun, although
more so in combination with the raven to translate. I wish this part of
her story had a more coherent ending, but I'm looking forward to seeing
her in future books.

Despite my complaints, the parody part of this book wasn't bad. It just
wasn't as good as the rest of the book. I wanted a better platform for
Susan's introduction than a lot of music and band references. If you
really like Pratchett's parodies, your mileage may vary. For me, this
book was fun but forgettable.

Followed, in publication order, by Interesting Times. The next Death
book is Hogfather.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-11-27

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-223741-1.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>