The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 37: Unseen Academicals

Ponder Stibbons has taken over a large part of the running of Unseen University, the (for the moment, at least) premier college of magic on the Disc. This is largely because of two things: he can do it; and people don’t mind that he does it. During this time he has discovered that the Wizards of UU are running out of time to fulfill the stipulations of a bequest that pays for a large part of their catering bill.

Put simply, the Wizards have to partake in a game of “foot the ball” or they will find themselves enjoying a far less broad diet.

Being Wizards, they find ways of fudging the rules to make it easier for them to participate. This becomes more urgent when they realise that “football,” as it has become known now, is a violent mob-ruled game that is no longer the concern of “gentlemen.”

Meanwhile, in the kitchens and under-rooms of Unseen University, four of its employees are about to change the city of Ankh-Morpork in ways that nobody could ever have foreseen…

We’d waited two years for this novel. This isn’t as long as the three years between The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic, but it was the longest gap between novels in the Discworld series since then. The wait was somewhat leavened by the fact that this was also the longest novel in the series thus far.

The reason was also understandable as well: author Terry Pratchett had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2007 (specifically Posterior Cortical Atrophy, where certain sections of the brain begin to atrophy at a far greater rate than usual). Much of the intervening time had been taken up with interviews about his “embuggerance” (as he referred to it), as well as advocating for research into it.

Oh, and in the Queen’s New Years Honours List of 2009 he received a knighthood for Services to Literature. So that took up a little of his time, as well.

In addition to this, he was also experimenting with dictation software to aid him with his writing: amongst the many symptoms of his PCA was the fact that he found it difficult to read the letters on his keyboard.

Honestly, the fact that we got ANY novels at all after this diagnosis is just a massive bonus: the later books have faults, but I really wouldn’t have begrudged Sir Terry the chance to rest on his laurels and enjoy the time that was left to him.

So I will talk very briefly about the flaws of this novel and then go on to discuss what I love about it and why I love it.

The biggest flaw in this book is that it marks the point where the Discworld novels start to become a little less complicated in their plots and also begin to read a little more broad in their humour.

This is entirely a matter of opinion, of course, but it’s quite easy to tell that something has changed in the creation of them. The obvious marker is that the Patrician, ruler of Ankh-Morpork, is a little more verbose and less guarded in his speech than in previous novels. The characterisations of some of the cast also feel like they lack some of the subtlety that they had in previous novels as well.

Saying that, though, the meat and bones of the novel are still pretty sound and maintain the same shrewd insights that other books had had.

The more obvious themes of this book – the co-opting of working-class activities by the upper classes and the ways in which “lower class” members of a society are kept downtrodden is beautifully explored. Sir Terry (as I’m going to refer to him from hereon in) came from sturdy working class roots himself and hadn’t forgotten them despite his rise to fame, so the story of Juliet and Trev, two nobodies from the streets who make it huge in the new worlds of fashion and football, feel genuine and heartfelt.

However, I found their story to be secondary to the story of Glenda and Nutt. Glenda makes pies at Unseen University. She is famous for it within the narrow world she inhabits. Nutt is an odd looking fellow who is an expert candle dribbler (an any student of fantasy will tell you how important a properly dribbled candle is) but who also hides an ignominious past.

Nutt is an Orc.

Orcs and goblins are two traditional fantasy creatures that have been strangely absent from the Discworld novels until these last few novels. We’ve had elves and vampires, werewolves and dragons… but there has barely been a mention of the forces of darkness’s most common form of cannon fodder throughout the series. Even the first few books, which took inspiration from all across the genre, ignored them.

But Nutt is possibly the first orc since Mary Gentle’s Grunts or the novels of Stan Nicholls that you might feel some kind of sympathy for.

Pratchett takes all the cliches of goblinhood – the mass breeding and ubiquity of them in dungeons – and makes you care about them. Nutt has hazy memories of his early life being dragged from battlefield to battlefield, but then he was “rescued” from the traditional fate of wandering monsters by the Lady Margolotta, a reformed vampire and correspondent of Lord Vetinari (this is her first mention on this blog but she has been a semi-regular character in the series since The Fifth Elephant). She gave him his liberty and a sense of value but she also keeps close tabs on him because she knows what his ancestry is possibly likely to do: call up a raving monster of destruction.

Nutt, though, appears to be rising above his heritage, as do so many folk who come to Ankh-Morpork. His story is one of redemption and hope.

And it’s this that I believe is the central message of these last books of the Discworld.

Because despite Sir Terry openly admitting that there is no overriding “plan” to the Discworld – for years he even ignored the idea that it could be mapped – what we see emerging in these last few books is an idea that there is a design (largely engineered by Vetinari) that will improve the lot of many Discworld denizens, regardless of their origin or status.

It all comes to proper fruition in a couple more books, but wee have inklings of it in Vetinari’s speech to the assembled worthies of Ankh-Morpork at the launch of the new, “improved” football:

“And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

This is also a thinly-veiled summation of Sir Terry’s own thoughts about the nature of the universe as well. But it gets adapted – with just a nod to Maya Angelou later on in the book as:

“… all he’s saying is you’ve got to do your best… And the more best you’re capable of, the more you should do. That’s it, really.”

Even Rincewind, the most famous coward in the series, manages to get a couple of redemptive moments in this novel, showing that if he can be inspired to feel something for his fellow sentient beings, anyone can.

Look, there’s a huge amount that I wanted to discuss about this novel that I have barely touched on because I really felt that the theme of these last books is possibly what’s most important. And it’s here that they seem to become explicit. It was hard to pick up on it while the books were being produced, but now that we are at a reasonable distance from their publication, it becomes easier to spot these long-term ideas.

And this is what these last books seem to be doing: improving what has gone before so that life gets better for everyone. And we have all of Sir Terry’s major characters contributing to this over the next few books because he knew that he very possibly wouldn’t be able to.

Coming Up Next: Tiffany realises that what she thought may have been inevitable isn’t necessarily so. And the Feegles take Ankh-Morpork in I Shall Wear Midnight.