★★★☆☆ Music with rocks in

Soul Music

Terry Pratchett

Soul Music is the 16th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and also the third novel in the DEATH subseries. Discworld is a long series -- 41 novels, not to mention the inevitable short stories. Any series so long is bound to be a little repetitive at times.

Soul Music seemed to me a kind of rehash of Moving Pictures, on the one hand, and Mort on the other.

Death (the Discworld character) is always slacking off. He gets tired of being Death and tries to take a vacation. The problem with Death taking a vacation is that he is what, these days, we call an essential worker. If Death takes time off, someone needs to fill in for him. In Mort that was Death's new apprentice Mort -- in Soul Music it is Susan, the daughter of Mort and Death's adopted daughter Ysabell. Susan is thus Death's granddaughter. The problem with putting a human in Death's job, even temporarily, is that humans lack the emotional detachment that Death has developed over the course of eternity. Instead, they allow their personal feelings to influence their performance. This seldom ends well.

The plot of Moving Pictures is that Hollywood movies invade the Discworld and become dangerously powerful. The plot of Soul Music is that Rock and Roll Music invades the Discworld and becomes dangerously powerful. In Soul Music, Music with Rocks in, as the Discworld calls it, arrives in the form of a guitar that really doesn't belong there. In both cases the foreign intrusion is brief -- within a year or a few weeks it is expelled from the Discworld.

My biggest problem with Soul Music was also my biggest problem with Moving Pictures. Both novels seek in some degree to mock the thing they're about. Moving Pictures mocks the film industry, and Soul Music mocks Rock music. Now, God knows, both of these deserve to be parodied.

The problem is, neither novel is what I think top-notch parody ought to be. I explained why I felt that way in the last two paragraphs of my review of Moving Pictures. I will not repeat myself here -- those two paragraphs stand equally well as criticism of Soul Music.

Soul Music is, I think, a lower-tier Discworld novel. Still, it is a Discworld novel. It's funny.

Soul Music on Amazon

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