There’s a disappointing, cut and paste feel to Soul Music which for me makes it the weakest of the Discworld novels thus far (i.e. of the 16 published up to this point). And it is still wonderful! How come? I’ll come to the mitigation, but first this is the plot outline:

A young harpist, Imp Y Celyn, (bud of holly, get it?) from Llamedos seeks fame and fortune in Ankh-Morpork. He forms a band with Lias Bluestone (a troll percussionist) and Glod Glodsson (a dwarf hornblower) along the way acquiring a magical guitar with mysterious powers, more specifically an entity comprising the primordial music which brought the universe into existence. As one does.

Meanwhile, Death, upset at the death of his adopted daughter Ysabell and her husband, Mort, takes another impromptu break from his day job, leaving his granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit to fulfil his soul-gathering function. She fluffs her first job by failing to reap the soul of Buddy when he is scheduled to die while performing at the Mended Drum.

Thus the novel’s two primary threads are established – death takes a break and a family members steps in to cope as best they can, a plotline Pratchett had already used before (Mort and Reaper Man); and in a parallel storyline a new phenomenon/innovation (in this case rock music) takes the Discworld by storm, causing chaos and ultimately threatening the existence of the universe, a theme already explored in some detail in Moving Pictures.

That’s pretty much it – although there are a lot more events, they all fall within this basic template. And that was what I found disappointing by Soul Music, its writing by numbers feel. To be fair to Pratchett he was writing a phenomenal amount of Discworld novels at the time, feeding our voracious appetites for all things DW. (The Colour of Magic was published in 1986,  just 8 years and 15 DIscworld novels earlier. In addition to the eventual count of 41 novels there are also any number of books and other material including short stories, cookery books, maps, guides etc). So it is hardly surprising that to meet deadlines he had to dial it in from time to time.

Fans of dad jokes and clever popular culture references will be spoilt for choice here, beginning with the original cover illustration which echoes the Meat Loaf album Bat out of Hell, rapidly followed by a steady stream of allusions to groups and records, in particular cheesy examples from the seventies and eighties, such as “Pathway to Paradise” (“Stairway to Heaven”) and ”Sex and drugs and Music With Rocks In” (“Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll“). At first the game of spot the reference is fun, but after a while it palls – it is after all essentially the same joke time after time, however cleverly done. Having said that even I had to applaud the way the groanworthy reference to “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chipshop swears he’s Elvish” is worked in.

Pratchett was at this point over a third of the way into the Discworld saga, and he was still refining his craft. This novel would not have disappointed any DW fan, but neither can it be said to take the series to a new height or in a new direction in the way books such as The Night Watch did. It’s fun, and the jokes consistently work, but I am not sure we care that much about the characters (except Susan perhaps), and the eventual happy-ever-after ending is never in any doubt. The scenes of the band on the road felt like padding, an effort to reach a minimum word-length target. So perhaps I need a Pratchett holiday – but I really don’t want one, because I know what great novels are coming up.