Frolicking wizards

kw: book reviews, fantasy, wizards

I very seldom reproduce the book jacket, but this time I felt I must, for I have a quibble with the artist, Scott McKowan. This clearly depicts a volleyball game (albeit with some rather strange players), and that orb is a volleyball. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett, however, is entirely about football (soccer in the U.S.). Just in case there is any question, the illustration below shows the difference. The magically-invented football in the book is described as having pentagons on its cover.

By my count, this is the thirty-second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (I've read six or seven of them, but only two since I began logging reviews). He also has a number of derived titles, and he has written more than a dozen other books. Clearly, Discworld is his "main squeeze".

Discworld is an imaginative invented world, based on the oldest myth of the world: a disk situated on four elephants riding on the back of a turtle. Contrary to the old joke (Inquirer: "What is the turtle standing on?" Sage: "It's turtles all the way down."), the turtle stands on nothing, but is "swimming" through the universe. In one of the early Discworld books, a spacecraft circles the assembly, zipping right under the turtle and back to the top. No mention is made of how gravity is made to work. It doesn't need to, as these books are about human nature.

Now, how can that be, one might wonder. Discworld and its chief city, Ankh-Morpork, are peopled not only by humans, but by trolls, dwarves (the mythical kind with pickaxes and battleaxes), werewolves, vampires, and in this book, at least one goblin…or is he something else? The real story of Unseen Academicals is the coming of age of the goblin and three friends of his, particularly Glenda the cook of the Night Kitchen at Unseen University. And the goblin and other non-humans? They represent facets of human nature that all of us strive to reconcile in our relationships and in ourselves.

This is the first of the books (that I have seen) that focuses on the goings-on in Unseen University, an academy run by and for wizards. Their ages range from late middle age to merely old to ancient, and at least a couple are dead, though they consider that a special sort of Emeritus status. These sleepy academics are induced/coerced into setting up a football team and challenging the best of the city to a match. With his customary combination of understatement and wild exaggeration, the author humorously drives the action to its conclusions; there are several, all wildly illogical. There are also three epilogues.

Any novel by Terry Pratchett is a romp. They are some of the best escape literature I've encountered. This one was a great relief after the long series of largely serious works I've read recently.