When Susan turns up to claim Imp at one of his band's concerts, she is stunned to discover that, through no fault of her own, he remains alive when the sand from his hourglass runs out. And coming up next on her list: none other than Imp y Celyn, Ankh-Morpork's newest musical sensation. Try as she might to deny who and what she really is, doing so eventually becomes impossible, and soon Susan is out riding the winds astride Binky (Death's horse, remember), cutting those precious silver cords and sending the departed on to their final reward.

The guitar seems almost to play itself, and, eerily, it also seems to be taking control of Imp, who changes his name to Buddy as the band (now named the Band With Rocks In, with none other than the orangutan Librarian playing keyboards) begins booking gigs that attract even the attention of the wizards of Unseen University.Įlswhere on the Discworld, a young woman named Susan is discovering her own true calling.namely, that she is the granddaughter of Death. Once there, he hooks up with an unlikely pair, Glod the dwarf and Lias the troll, and the three of them become, quite unwittingly, a band when Imp discovers a strange magical guitar in a magical shop. Imp y Celyn is a young musician who arrives in Ankh-Morpork where he hopes to find some work. The story follows two plot threads that, naturally, come together later on in the book. If you don't mind that the humor is more sitcommy than usual, you'll have a good time. Thus, this novel could be considered something of a disappointment, though it does contain many funny passages that will doubtless please those fans so devoted they'll gobble up anything with Pratchett's byline.

Pratchett never gets into rock music, never really explores from a satirical perspective what rock music has meant as a cultural force, beyond its obvious role as upsetter of the establishment's applecart. The chuckles are there, but they are, in many cases, as superficial as a lame pop song itself. Jokey song titles like 'Anarchy in Ankh-Morpork' and 'Born to Rune' pop up, effortless puns that any lesser humorist could have come up with just as easily. And when it gets there, its targets are, for the most part, fairly obvious ones.

It's a reasonably good book, and funny in all the right places, but it takes a while to get to all of those right places. Considering that its topic of satire is rock and roll, Soul Music could have been the most outrageous, blistering satire of Terry Pratchett's entire Discworld series.but it isn't.

Soul music discworld