For many years the game of foot-the-ball has been played in the back alleys of Ankh-Morpork, with teams formed from street communities coming together in sporting comradeship (involving violence and pies, not necessarily in that order). But the game is starting to turn ugly, and in the spirit of maintaining civic order, the Patrician has decided to make the game legitimate, with professionally-organised teams and codified rules. The wizards of Unseen University are invited to form a team and Archchancellor Ridcully enthusiastically agrees, with new staffmember Mr. Nutt proving an invaluable asset. But the old street game isn't going to die peacefully...
Unseen Academicals, the thirty-seventh Discworld novel, was published in 2009 and bears a somewhat difficult legacy. It was the first novel in the series to be published after Sir Terry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, a mark that would also hang over the remaining four books in the series, with melancholic (and probably futile) analyses of what impact the illness had on Pratchett's writing. From a personal perspective, it was also the last Discworld novel that I read whilst Pratchett was still with us; the four subsequent books will be all-new to me as I wrap-up this long (long) gestating reread project.
It is also the longest novel in the Discworld series at over 530 pages in paperback, making for a surprisingly chunky volume for an author who was never keen on the shelf-destroying bricks taking up shelf-space in the fantasy sections of bookshops. The length is down to two things: Pratchett trying to do a lot more in this book than he normally attempts in a single novel, and a lessening of focus in the novel's second half. The length is even more notable than it might be otherwise because the core premise is decidedly slight. The book comes off very much as a throwback to the Discworld concept of "introduce real-life idea XXX to Ankh-Morpork and see what happens," previously achieved with the cinema, theatre, shopping centres, rock music, war, guns, post office, banks, newspapers, war (again) and tourism, and in particular to the earlier books in the series which embraced that idea without getting overwhelmed by it. Moving Pictures seems to be a particular touchstone, as that novel even gets a rare continuity mention in this one.
The book opens well with football fervour already sweeping the city and the Patrician - much chattier here than normal and, decidedly overused - decides to head off an inevitable problem by regulating it. Not willing to interfere with the game himself, he fobs the idea off on Unseen University, on the grounds they are already a sporting institution (especially the sport of eating) and have rules and a hierarchy already in place. So far so good, and the first 200 pages or so of the novel are very strong. We meet Mr. Nutt, a goblin who is trying to rehabilitate his species' unsavoury reputation single-handed and who is also a fine potential football player, as well as his friend Trevor who has promised never to play again. We also meet Glenda, our typical Hypercompetent Pratchett Protagonist Who Is The Only Sane Person In The Room, a trope which might be a bit more annoying if Pratchett wasn't so damned good at executing it.
However, the book then throws more ideas into the mix than it really has time to deal with. The former Dean of Unseen University has been poached by a rival institution in Pseudopolis and is continuing his long-standing rivalry with Ridcully from a position of (according to him, anyway) equals. The UU has also neutralised the very threat posed to reality by an evil wizard/Dark Lord by giving him the one thing greater than land or gold or magical immortality: tenure. We also touch base with Rincewind and the Luggage for the first time in a very long time, though alas they are limited here to some extended cameos. We also get hints of a romance between the Patrician and another morally-questionable ruler, Glenda's best friend becoming possibly Ankh-Morpork's first supermodel, the continued rise to criminal power by a former back-alley thug, the continued misadventures of the editor of the Ankh-Morpork Times, the City Watch getting involved...this is a book not so much stuffed to the gills, but the fins and backbone as well, and even the swollen page-count can't do them all justice.
The lack of focus can be seen with the fact we are given two reasons why UU has to form a football team. The institution is enjoying the fruits of a bequest from a deceased member, but his will stipulates they need to get on top of the situation or lose access to that cash. But then the Patrician just insists they need to form a team anyway. It feels like one of these ideas should have been jettisoned at least.
The book also feels like it can't work out what to do about Nutt. Rehabilitating a single goblin doesn't even register on the radar given Ankh-Morpork is home to the Vampire Temperance League and thousands of trolls who have agreed to abide by local laws, with werewolves serving in the City Watch and golems doing a lot of work in the city. There's nothing really noteworthy about Nutt also going against the grain of his species and being trusted, and a late-book revelation about his backstory doesn't really change that at all. As a result, a lot of the tension in Nutt's story fizzles out. If this had been a book much earlier in the timeline, that storyline would have had more legs to it.
Still, when the book works, it works well. Ankh-Morpork holds a strong claim to being the single greatest fantasy metropolis ever depicted in print, and Unseen Academical's greatest strength is fleshing that out in much greater detail. We get a strong sense of life on the Ankh-Morpork street for ordinary people that we haven't seen for a long while, and for the first time a reader can feel how the city has shifted from its medieval origins in The Colour of Magic to something more Victorian, even proto-steampunk and industrial. The atmosphere of the changing city is Pratchett's greatest triumph in the latter run of novels in the series.
But the lack of focus continues to hurt the book. For a book about football, there isn't very much football in it, and I don't get the sense Pratchett is that interested in the game. What he is interested in is the impact it has on people, and how people can wrap their hopes and fears for life itself into their support for their football team. It's an interesting theme which he does explore, but maybe in not as much depth as you'd normally expect.
Unseen Academicals (***) is well-written and amusing, with superb worldbuilding, but it is also a little flabby, somewhat overlong and unfocused, and is unfortunately towards the weaker end of the Discworld series in quality.
A previous version of this review was published in 2010.
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