Book review: Unseen Academicals

Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett

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Description: From the inside front cover flap:  The wizards at Ankh-Morpork’s Unseen University are renowned for many things—wisdom, magic, and their love of teatime—but athletics is most assuredly not on the list. And so when Lord Ventinari, the city’s benevolent tyrant, strongly suggests to Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully that the university revive an erstwhile tradition and once again put forth a football team composed of faculty, students, and staff, the wizards of UU find themselves in a quandary. To begin with, they have to figure out just what it is that makes this sport—soccer with a bit of rugby thrown in—so popular with Ankh-Morporkians of all ages and social strata. Then they have to learn how to play it. Oh, and on top of that, they must win a football match without using magic.

Meanwhile, Trev (a handsome street urchin and a right good kicker) falls hard for kitchen maid Juliet (beautiful, dim, and perhaps the greatest fashion model there ever was), and Juliet’s best pal, UU night cook Glenda (homely, sensible, and a baker of jolly good pies) befriends the mysterious Mr. Nutt (about whom no one knows very much, including Mr. Nutt, which is worrisome . . .). As the big match approaches, these four lives are entangled and changed forever. Because the thing about football—the most important thing about football­—is that it is never just about football.

This review is based on a copy I bought myself.

The Bibliomaniac’s Review:

Terry Pratchett is well known as a master at humorous commentary on serious subjects.  Women’s rights, religion, music, money, slavery, war, patriotism, the movies; all have been dissected and mocked by Pratchett’s pen.  His latest novel, Unseen Academicals, deals with a topic that is silly to some and deadly serious to others: sports.

Mr. Nutt is a goblin.  Goblins turn out to be not very well liked on the Discworld, and so he spends his days in a determined effort to make himself useful to the folks around him and so gain worth.  He learns extremely swiftly and turns out to be very good at almost everything he does.  One of the things he ends up doing is coaching football for the Unseen University, where he normally works as a candle dribbler.

While it is true that the main characters in this book—Nutt, Trev, Juliet, and Glenda—are new to the canon, a great many of the Discworld’s main characters have at least brief roles in this book. Death and Sam Vimes both have cameos, while the wizards of Unseen University (including Rincewind) and Vetinari have much meatier roles.  Even Adrian Turnipseed and Mrs. Whitlow, both seen in Soul Music, have small parts here.

This novel, while amusing and entertaining, isn’t Pratchett’s best; his best is generally regarded to be either Small Gods or Feet of Clay.  While Pratchett normally excels at weaving the threads of ongoing jokes throughout an entire book, many of the jokes in Unseen Academicals are mentioned once and then never used again.  Nonetheless, at no point does the book actually lack humor.

It’s worth noting that this is the first Discworld book Pratchett has done since his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  More than a few reviewers have noted that this book is not as good as some of his others, and suggested that this may be due to his illness (Pratchett admitted that he dictated this book to an assistant rather than typing it himself).  I don’t think that’s the case.  It can’t be said of any writer that every book they wrote was a masterpiece (save, perhaps, for writers like Emily Bronte, who only wrote one book, which later became a classic).  For writers like Pratchett (and King, and Koontz, and Lackey, and so on) who have a large number of books out, it is inevitable that some will be great and some will only be very good.  And Pratchett’s “very good” is inevitably better than most other writers’ “great”.