Soul Music by Terry Pratchett is a fantasy-filled book centered around the power of music and how it means to be human. Set in Terry Pratchett’s famous Discworld, a flat earth supported on the backs of four elephants supported on the back of a great turtle swimming through space, this novel follows the journeys of Death, Death’s granddaughter Susan, Imp y Celyn a.k.a. Buddy, and Music With Rocks In. Death has gone away, and Susan must fill in, with the help of the Death of Rats and a raven, of course. One of the souls she has to collect is Imp y Celyn’s, but just as she is about to save him from being killed, something else does too. It’s called Music With Rocks In. The people who listen to the music change. And, more importantly, the music has taken over Imp, who now calls himself Buddy. Susan must try to save Buddy before the Music With Rocks In kills him, while deciding what it means to be a mortal Death.
I loved this book for the unique way Pratchett intertwines two plot lines, the ironic humour, and the philosophical questions running through the book. Other Discworld series novels have this same style of plot, where two seemingly unrelated events eventually cross paths and collide at the climax. In Soul Music, the two inciting incidents are Susan inheriting her grandfather's profession and Imp gaining a magical guitar, both of which caught me off guard and is refreshingly different from the more linear plot lines of most books. While the book’s language was confusing at times, after rereading a passage two to three times I got the fun irony that usually criticizes people in real life, like when a menu is deliberately misspelled with the narrator explaining that it is so customers will be “lured into a false sense of superiority” (Pratchett 73).
While there are many themes, one of my favourites explored was humans’ ability to forget or ignore knowledge about the risks they take. Through Death’s side adventure, Terry Pratchett shows how humans forget as a way to let go, and how remembering things can sometimes hinder your decision making. It is not a common theme, and connected to my own forgetfulness, especially about things I feel bad about.
Terry Pratchett’s style of writing made Soul Music a fun read, although a bit confusing at first sometimes. It made me laugh and think, and I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an unusual story and challenges to common knowledge.
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