This is part of the Pratchett Project.
The blurb:
Other children get given xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off.
Yes. There's a Death in the family.
It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe – especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy.
And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld.
It's lawless. It changes people.
It's called Music With Rocks In.
It's got a beat and you can dance to it, but...
It's alive.
And it won't fade away.
Reaper Man was a great book especially in terms of Death's arc and characterisation, but Soul Music is a big step away from focusing on Death per se; instead Susan is Death for much of this story. We see a little of what Death does to try and forget his grief — joining the Klatchian Foreign Legion, drinking in the Mended Drum and so on. But that's the least of the story. For most of it, Susan (Mort and Ysabell's daughter) is drawn into the role of Death and, as she comes to understand what Death actually is, we get a little more of an idea too. He tries very, very hard to understand the world but never quite gets it; as Susan observes, he's been in plenty of bedrooms for the Duty, but the beds and such in the guest rooms at Death's home are all solid and hard as rock — he's seen beds, but never slept, or even tried to be comfortable.
But he built her a swing, even if she didn't understand the thought processes at the time.
So,a Death novel only by courtesy, but still pretty good because Music With Rocks In has made it to Discworld. A nice young druid from Llamedos arrives in Ankh-Morpork and, through various machinations, ends up at a mysterious little store where he buys a guitar. It doesn't matter that he can't really play guitar, the guitar will handle it. The guitar also has a mysterious number 1 chalked on it— every instrument in the store has a number. This guitar was the first. From there, the Band With Rocks In becomes a meteoric success...even as it's costing Imp/Buddy his life.
I'm obviously very early in this project of reading all the Discworld books but I firmly believe Soul Music has the highest pun per square inch count of any I've read so far. I'll leave it to sites like The Annotated Pratchet File to go through them in depth but...is there a page without at least three jokes, puns or Blues Brothers references on it in this book? I got a lot of them (Surreptitious Fabric eluded me — I kept trying to think of bands with something like 'secret' or 'covert' in the name, didn't think of 'underground'), they were genuinely funny, and if future Pratchett books are even more crammed, I'm amazed he has room for story.
And that's the skill here — Pratchett keeps the story moving, keeps characters developing, keeps the world moving, and crams puns into every page without derailing any of that. The story and the characters are the most important thing and could stand perfectly on their own — you don't need the joke about the real meaning of Imp y Celyn or the Dean being a rebel without a pause to keep the story moving — but the giggles keep coming and don't stop.
Just gotta end with this in tribute...
Started: 7 February 2025
Finished: 13 February 2025
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