BOOK OF THE DAY: EDWARD JAMESreviews Unseen AcademicalsBy Terry Pratchett Doubleday 400pp, £18.99
IN THE past 26 years there have been 37 Discworld novels. Sir Terry Pratchett has recently eased up on his productivity, now aiming to publish just one a year. Like most Discworld novels in recent years, this one has gone straight into the bestseller lists in the UK and elsewhere; even in the US, where Pratchett's humour took a long time to catch on, Unseen Academicalsis already a bestseller. There were 15 Pratchetts in the top 200 novels in the 2003 BBC survey, the Big Read, a higher number than was achieved by any other author.
Hardcore Pratchett fans have organised Discworld conventions in the UK every two years since 1996; Australian fans are busy organising their third Discworld convention, Nullus Anxietas (shouldn’t that be Nullae Anxietates?); this summer the first US Discworld convention was held; the first Irish one is in November (see www.idwcon.org).
Those who have not read a Discworld book, presuming there are such, must be puzzled by Pratchett’s extreme popularity.
It is not easy to explain. There is the humour, of course – word play, parody, comic excess, satire – much of it arising from making his fantasy world a distorting mirror of our own. There is the serious moral core, common to all good satire. And there is the fascination in watching Pratchett’s slow world building, as we gradually get to know Discworld and its inhabitants.
The best-known corner of Discworld is the disreputable city of Ankh-Morpork. Under the benevolent despotism of the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, whose bedtime reading has clearly been the Discworld equivalent of Machiavelli's The Prince, the city has moved in one generation from something resembling the Florence of the Medicis to something more akin to the London of Dickens or Gissing.
Some recent novels set in Ankh-Morpork have described the introduction of the newspaper ( The Truth), the postage stamp ( Going Postal) and banking ( Making Money). Now, Lord Vetinari has decided that the best way to curb, or at least direct, the city's latent violence is to introduce rules to the ancient brutal game of football.
The familiar wizards of Unseen University are forced to form their own team, Unseen Academicals; to their annoyance the new rules include one banning the use of magic.
As so often in Pratchett’s work, the real interest comes not in the surface satire, nor in the comic set-piece description of the football match that ends the novel (you think it’s all over?).
Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch has become familiar with the problems of racial tension following Lord Vetinari’s decision that gave jobs to dwarves, trolls, werewolves, vampires and others. But now the Unseen University is employing someone who may be the last surviving member of a race notorious for savagery: orcs.
He is Mr Nutt, a candle-dribbler by trade, but a ferociously competent person in anything he undertakes – including coaching a football team. With the help of Glenda Sugarbean (one of the best of Pratchett’s female characters), he wins through, conquering his natural impulse to mayhem; and another thoroughly satisfying Discworld novel is indeed over.
Prof Edward James is head of the school of history and archives at UCD. His latest book, with Farah Mendlesohn, is A Short History of Fantasy(Middlesex University Press, 2009)