Description:
Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork – not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go gloing when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they’re in the mood for trying everything else.
The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too). As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever.
Because the thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!
BookieMonster says:
I said you weren’t going to have to endure another slavish Terry Pratchett review and boy, was I slightly premature with that promise.
Well, maybe not entirely. I have to admit to two minor niggles with Unseen Academicals.
Firstly, one thing I’ve always loved about Pterry is his very clever wordplay. And it just wasn’t present in this book. It may be because he now has to dictate books, rather than type, and I would fear that this makes wordplay difficult, when you can’t go over and over and over a sentence, and don’t have that amazing little firing-snapses interaction between hands and brain. But I missed the little puns, the big puns, the stupid puns and the clever puns. It’s not all puns, but you get the idea.
Secondly, for the first half and slightly beyond I didn’t really feel that I had a complete handle on this book. You know that strangely detached sensation where you feel like you’re just not entirely there with the book and the story? Anyway, I felt that, with the story and with the main character (well I think she’s the main character), Glenda. I wasn’t quite grasping her character, her motivations. A bit more back-story exposition on the nature of her history with Juliet would have been helpful, I think.
Well, that is right up until page 308. Then it hit me like something of a brick and the book turned into a very sweet, very personal (for me) love story. And I realised that’s what it had been all along, but Terry doesn’t write so many love stories and so I’d missed it. Maybe that says something about my reading, also. I don’t like romantic, so I forget to look for love. Even though they are two very different things. 
Then the rest of the book went by in this rush and because my heart was feeling so big and open and happy about it I loved it all.
Like all Pratchett books, there is so much going on here than just the plot. Unseen Academicals is full of philosophy and ideas – about the capacity of people (and people-like beings) to change, what the nature of “worth” is in people, the actions of the crowd, the mass – or, as it is characterised here, the Shove, and, if you knew a heck of a lot more than me about soccer/football, then there is probably a whole additional heap of allusions and references in this book that just passed me by.
And I did end up really enjoying the characters – Mr Nutt in particular and his backstory are an excellent addition to the Discworld assemblage of characters, as well as being a clever and funny nod to Discworld’s fantasy heritage.
This may be the last Discworld novel. I hope not. Thanks Sir Terry, for giving me so much joy, again.
4 furry little BookieMonster kitteh paws up, of course!
Just a normal fawning one.
